Future of Technology in Education conference #fote13

Last Friday I attended the FoTE conference which was enjoyable and interesting. I attended in 2011 but didn't make it last year so was pleased to be able to shuffle work and travel and life to get there this time.
It is hosted by ULCC at Senate House, Uni of London. It's a beautiful building and has great memories for me as I used to spend hours in the library there in the 80s when I did my first degree at Kings College.




I like the event because it is for Learning Technologists and academics / teachers / educationalists who are involved and knowledgeable about learning technologies - it's not for the general overviewers but at the same time not cliquey. Also there is always a good back channel discussion via twitter.
The first speaker was Nicola Millard who is a futurologist. She was brilliant and engaging and talking about customers which is what I'm interested in. I do like an inspirational key note speaker to kick off an event, someone with an interesting take on the situation and with an appealing delivery. She talked about making things easy and effortless for customers and different sorts of effort such as cognitive effort. She mentioned email and that it would die out due to other channels being easier - not sure that I agree with that sweeping statement.....
A great point that she made was that you need 4 things in order to work - coffee, cake, connectivity and company. I agree entirely although would substitute tea for coffee. I think this idea is something library people should think about embracing - what sort of space is needed for you and for library users?
The next speaker was Alicia Wise from Elsevier who talked about Open Access. It was an interesting talk and quite difficult as the audience, I expect, are predominantly in favour of OA and see publishers as a barrier to it. But it was good to see them as part of the discussion.
The third speaker was Gwen Noteborn from Maastricht Uni talking about Webcasts in education: Mythbusters! It was ok and interesting but maybe covering old ground to some extent.
After the coffee break was the Fireside Chat with a real virtual fire in the background.
FOTE13 Fireside Speakers:
Yousuf Khan (Chair), Chief Information Officer, Hult International Business School
Adrian Ellison, Director of Information Technology, University of West London
Cathy Walsh, Principal and CEO, Barking & Dagenham College
Heidi Fraser-Krauss, Head of IT Services, University of York
Richard Maccabee, Head of ICT, University of London
There was some discussion around the idea that technology changes but working practices don't often change in order to develop along side. Again 'easiness' of using technology was mentioned - I agree in part, it has to accessible and available but I'm not sure it has to be simple - some of the appeal of technology is that it is challenging and complex - it can change the world, that is why it is enthralling.




After lunch Lindsay Jordan delivered a great presentation including a blue outfit and a piano. She talked about why people drop out of courses. Sustained learning needs motivation, organisation, self discipline - can we get these in an online environment? Possibly? She advocated face to face communication rather than email....again I would say it depends on the situation and the interaction.




Next presentation was by Martin King and was about diversity and connectivity - lots of interesting stuff.
Next presentation was from Kevin
Ashley from the Digital Curation Centre. He talked about the data deluge and the problem that we have is that the amount of data is outstripping the technology we have to store it.
After the coffee break, the final two presentations were about Moocs. Matt Yee-King and Marco Gillies talked about the Mooc that they created and delivered at Goldsmiths. It was a great insight into the practicalities of scaling up an online course and some of the issues and solutions they had encountered. This included changing deadlines which is easy for small cohorts but not for large numbers. Also the problems of negative comments on discussion forums - even if 1% make one comment, this can be large number of complaints.
The last presentation was by Diana Laurillard entitled The pedagogies for large-scale student guidance. The data from Moocs suggest that the majority of participants already have a degree or higher degree. This suggests that it is not for undergraduate study but for CPD. The drop out rates are high but registration is not the same as signing up. When scaling up the numbers involved in courses for Moocs, other factors have to be considered such as admin and support. Support costs are not going to go down but technology can innovate pedagogy. There needs to be investment in teacher innovation to make best use of resources and improve student outcomes.
All in all, it was a great day with lots of ideas to take away and reflect on. It's good to spend a day immersed in learning technology, listening and talking to people.








On the way back to the station I managed a very brief (10min) visit to the British Library - just time to stand and stare.

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.

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......

#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.

Week 1 #ocTEL - it's all very well but.....

Week 1 (2nd week) of ocTEL is focused on TEL Concepts and Approaches.
Using my usual filtering system, read the introduction and went to the 'if you only do one thing...' section.  There are five 'stories' about how technology has enhanced learning - the task is to look at two that interest you, decide which is most powerful and relevant to you.
The first one I looked at was
'How Sugata Mitra designed a physical and social environment around computers so that young children would self-organise and teach themselves new skills through peer interaction and ‘emergent learning’ – watch Mitra’s 2010 keynote'

This is what I wrote on my blog at the time from the ALT conference 2010.
The key note speech after lunch by Sugata Mitra was fantastic.  I have heard him speak before at the RSC Northern conference last year and it is really fascinating to see the videos of his 'experiments' with hole in then wall computers in India and other countries.  It is interesting yet disconcerting to see and hear about his work in schools in Gateshead as it is close to home.  It would be brilliant to instill that motivation and interest in all children and particularly in teenagers to strive to learn and for it to be cool to learn........

I can't remember why I was disconcerted at the time so decided to watch it again and see how I felt..
I think the reasons I had and have mixed feelings were because although it was different and extraordinary, it felt like an experiment. That the children will learn is to some extent predictable - they like finding out things, they are used to using computers, there was one each in the classroom in Gateshead. Once they've got the hang of the idea that this is a different context and they have freedom to do anything then they probably will - especially 10 year olds - they're at the ideal age to absorb stuff.
But does this motivation and willingness continue with teenagers? Sometimes, depends what they want to know, depends what they need to know, depends on the environment.
But my main thought is - hey, just a minute, we would all like to teach and indeed learn in a free and exploratory environment where you could learn what you want and spend hours learning about what you love, to find out interesting stuff.  With no rules, with 'cheating', with no time restraints but it's not like that. It's all very well advocating inspirational and disruptive methods but at the end of the day the current education system requires children to learn what is needed to gain the qualifications they need to be successful. So change the system, change the curriculum, take the pressure off teachers so that they can do their best and then let children have freedom to learn.

I meant to do more work on this this evening and spend time looking at the other videos and look at others comments - but no more time. That's the problem - i could spend hours doing online learning stuff but work and life intervene - fortunately :)

One thing.... #ocTEL

The induction week 'if you only do one thing...' is to write an introduction about yourself and your experiences with TEL / technology as a student / teacher / learning technologist and how it affects the way you absorb, reflect, discuss etc. etc.
I have used TEL in a variety of roles while working as an ICT teacher in a secondary school and sixth form college, as an eLearning Manager (VLE and staff ICT training), as a Head of Learning Resources (elearning and library services) in a FE College and currently as a Student Information Points Manager in a University.
I've used VLEs and learning platforms to learn including my MSc which I did online and a variety of other online courses and MOOCs.  Also as a tutor using VLEs, virtual classrooms and web conferencing facilities.
The greatest benefit of TEL is as a means of communicating and sharing.  It enables communication through email, text and social media and opens up the possibilities of working with people collaboratively.  It provides a way of learning that is accessible and inclusive. 

(This is my second attempt at writing an introduction blog post - the first one I wrote spontaneously and re reading it realised it was too 'TEL and Me' - it's still here 
http://donlantechnologies.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/tel-and-me.html
if you want to read it). 

Dipping in to #etmooc #MoocsAndMe

Last week while on MOOC related activities mainly as part of the OLDS MOOC I saw lots of tweets about #ETMOOC.  I read through a few and then predictably, even though I'm meant to be only participating in two MOOCs (the OLDSMOOC and the Edinburgh E-learning and Digital Cultures one), went to the website.
I had seen information about the #ETMOOC and signed up with the intention that I will dip into it occasionally and see what happens.  Also I noticed that they have Blackboard Collaborate sessions which might be interesting and I like seeing how different people use either Blackboard Collaborate or Adobe Connect. Also there are twitter chats which are interesting to follow.
The #ETMOOC 'About' section describes how it is a Connectivist MOOC with a weak centre and that it is all about learners developing their own spaces for sharing, collaboration, reflection etc.  Somehow this is reassuring - I don't have any false expectations and I'm entering into this course very much on that basis. Also there is a lot of information about what is happening and how it is going to happen including topics and schedule and a calendar.  I'm not sure why I feel differently about this than I did when starting the OLDSMOOC - perhaps I have learnt very quickly what a Connectivist MOOC is about.  My enthusiasm is more focused but also it suits me to know exactly what's happening and preferably to have a list. I had decided with the OLDSMOOC and, from next week, the #EDCMOOC, that I was going to be committed to taking part and complete as many tasks as I can whereas I am happily dipping into the #ETMOOC just for fun. (one slight worry - why do they call the organizers 'conspirators'? - no matter)
So for Orientation week, I've looked at the #ETMOOC blog, I've followed the hashtag on twitter, I've joined the Google+ community, suscribed to the calendar and now I'm going to work out how to connect my blog.