The presentations from the conference “Innovating e-Learning 2011″ are now available openly online at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/elpconference11, These presentations include both the Powerpoints and the recordings of each session on Elluminate.  This event, which took place in November last year,  was the sixth in the popular series of JISC online conferences. Like its predecessors, it brought together delegates from the FE and HE sectors for presentations and discussions of the key issues facing educators in a shifting technological landscape.

There were traditional keynotes from Lord Puttnam, Bill Rammell and Mike Sharples, and an original, thought-provoking and highly participative closing keynote by Ewan MIntosh. More than ever before, the conference opened its doors to the wider educational sectors in the UK, especially those who teach in workplaces and communities, as well as FE colleges and universities. We saw presentations from the wider sectors which had ‘Innovation’ running through them like a stick of rock. I am thinking particularly of the sessions on ‘Students as Agents of Change’ by Elisabeth Dunne and colleagues at Exeter, and ‘Workforce and Employer Needs – a Collaborative Solution’ by Andrew Comrie and colleagues from Scotland. This latter presentation showed how collaboration across organisations from a range of sectors can work in practice, providing that common aims are agreed, and also how learners can benefit from a blended learning experience, even when they have limited prior experience of using ICTs in an educational context. For me, another highlight was Bex Ferriday’s (Cornwall College) presentation, in which she debunked many of the myths about the dangers of using social networking (Facebook) in Further Education.

Take a look around – I hope that you will enjoy what you see.

‘Teachmeets’ are a radical concept in staff development: instead of presentations given by experts, participants can hear raw stories told by other teachers from the chalk face. It’s a chance to learn from and share with real practitioners about their successes and experiences. In other words, it is about teachers teaching each other.

This idea has been spreading amongst school teachers for several years now, but has not yet made a significant impact in Further Education. A new collaboration between NGfL Cymru and RSC Wales aims to change this, by bringing a ‘Teachmeet’ into an FE college, and give teachers in FE the chance to experience this type of event for themselves, and perhaps to participate by giving a presentation. Presentations can be ‘Micro-presentations’ – lasting 7 minutes, or ‘Nano-presentations’ – lasting 2 minutes. The event will be streamed via the web to anyone who would like to connect and watch the proceedings.

‘Teachmeet: Bridging the Gap’  will take place at Coleg Llandrillo Cymru (Rhos on Sea campus) on Wednesday February 8th from 17:30.  If you would like to give a presentation, or you would just like to come along and find out how this works, please visit the Wiki here: http://teachmeet.pbworks.com/w/page/48452275/Bridging%20the%20Gap

….and sign up. It’s going to be “turbo-charged CPD”.

My thoughts on how apps are changing the way we use our mobile devices to access information on the move.

View a recording of our Lunchtime Byte – Google Goggles – apps for searching the internet without typing text!

Readers of this blog will know that it is crucially important to make learning opportunities and resources accessible to all learners. The reasons for improving accessibility are all around us: legal reasons, business reasons, moral reasons and pedagogic reasons.  However, dealing with the issues which emerge is far from being a trivial task, and many educators and managers find this area challenging.

Technologies bring new complexities to this area. On the one hand they can be hugely enabling, allowing learners to interact with people and resources in ways which were unthinkable hitherto. However, the introduction of new technology without due attention to the needs of disabled people can occasionally lead to the opposite effect, and teachers who fear disempowering some learners may also fail to adopt new technology which could otherwise prove very helpful to all their learners.

There is no magic solution – no ‘fairy dust’ as Jane Seale so delightfully puts it (Seale, 2006). We cannot sprinkle a little accessibility here, a little accessibility there, and expect to make improvements. There are plenty of ‘tools’ (software and hardware)  which claim to enhance accessibility, but it is often very hard to know how effective these might be under any specific circumstances. Recognising appropriate contexts and modes of use are real skills, requiring both practical experience and a robust conceptual framework which takes into account the interests of all the stakeholders.

Acquiring these skills is not entirely straightforward. Fortunately, some really good opportunities for staff development in this area are emerging. One place to go is the JISC TechDis website. This service is now includes (amongst much else) ‘TechDis Tuesdays: Dialogues for Difference’, a fortnightly series of online workshops, starting on January 10th 2012.  There is no registration charge, and these sessions are a great opportunity to learn from peers and experts alike, to develop your capability to help learners. More information can be found here:

http://www.jisctechdis.ac.uk/techdis/news/detail/2011/TechDis_Tuesdays_news

Meanwhile, the Open University offers ‘Accessible online learning: supporting disabled students’, an online masters level module, which as an alumnus I can recommend thoroughly. You can find more information here:

http://www3.open.ac.uk/study/postgraduate/course/h810.htm

If you don’t want to commit to the time and expense of a masters module, but still want access to the OU’s resources,there is an alternative. The ‘Accessibility of eLearning’  module is freely available online. You don’t get the support and the assessment, of course, but the quality of the materials is excellent. You can access the course here:

http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=397765&direct=1

Reference: Seale, J (2006) E-learning and disability in higher education: accessibility theory and practice. Routledge.

There are ‘workshops’ and ‘workshops’, aren’t there? Some involve just listening, sometimes there is some token group discussion,  sometimes feedback on flipcharts. Occasionally, participants get to actually do things, and these are usually the best workshops. A few weeks ago, for example, I found myself as part of a group which was collectively balancing a thin plastic rod on its fingers; harder than it sounds, and surprisingly instructive.

I have sometimes found it difficult to translate intense and creative workshop activity into the online environment, and to judge by how rarely people try this, I suspect that others may feel the same way. A workshop at  JISC’s online conference (#jiscel11) given by Simon Bates and Judy Hardy of Edinburgh University, really broke this particular mould. Simon and Judy introduced us to the Peerwise system – developed and hosted at the University of Auckland – which enables students to write multiple choice questions, and to answer, comment and rate the questions posed by their peers. I think this is a brilliantly innovative idea, which I plan to write about elsewhere. However, the other aspect which interested me was the genuine interaction between participants which arose from the hands on nature of the activity. The whole experience was every bit as good as having the presenters in the same room. Completely from scratch, I acquired all the experience I needed to start using the system; including writing questions and answering, commenting and rating the questions of other partipants. Following that, we were able to come back and discuss how the experience had been, and how we could apply this to our own contexts. In other words, it was a complete workshop experience, except that it was entirely online. It has certainly cured me of the illusion that ‘interactivity’ in webcasting systems is limited to polling tools.

You can find out more about the Peerwise here: http://peerwise.cs.auckland.ac.nz/. It is free and easy to use: everyone managed it online without too much guidance.

I have been enjoying the opening couple of days of the JISC online conference activity week (#jiscel11). Two of the presentations which really impressed me from the first couple of days were by Bex Ferriday (Cornwall College) and Richard Speight (Cartrefi Cymru). These two people have very different styles, but what they share is the courage to try new stuff, and the sensitivity to adjust their methods according to the needs of the learners. Bex started from the premise of a lovely inversion of the ‘Field of Dreams’ strapline: “If you build it, they won’t come”.  (Having built one or two things that people haven’t come to over the years, I can really appreciate that thought.)  Bex’s alternative to this ‘build it’ approach is to go into the space in which the learners are already operating, in this case Facebook. This means that they are already comfortable knowing what to do, and no training is needed. There are some familiar counter-arguments, of course. Don’t the learners resent the intrusion of a teachers into ‘their’ space? What happens to learners who are excluded by lack of skills or resources? And so on… However, what I learned from this discussion was these barriers can be show-stoppers if you let them, but they don’t need to be. However, to make this work you need to listen to the learners, and to understand the technology. For example, it is necessary to understand the uses of (and differences between) pages and groups on Facebook. It is also possible (and tolerated or even encouraged by Facebook) to set up separate identities for your teaching and your social life. Appropriate actions at these levels can take the sting out of the whole question of whether or not to ‘friend’ with learners. To find out more, you can download and view a recording of Bex’s presentation online here: http://www.wiziq.com/online-class/653673-facebook-in-teaching-and-learning

Richard Speight’s approach is a little different, but equally user- centred. He recognises the power of social media, and uses a whole range of tools for engagement, and this enables him to be entirely flexible regarding what suits any specific learner, or group. He stresses the idea of ‘playing’ with the ideas and the technology, and paying attention to the ‘rolling feedback’ of participants. These can be people who are already enrolled on courses, potential learners, or fellow professionals. For example he sees Prezi as not simply presentational software, but as a social tool. Prezi is not only visually engaging, but also has the potential to embed a host of other media. Still more powerfully, Prezi Meeting allows groups to work on presentations online. Richard’s agile and broad –based approach enables him to respond to the needs of diverse groups, including those for whom Facebook may be a closed book.  Richard’s original presentation is available on Prezi here:   http://bit.ly/you2point0.  It is silent, I am afraid, but it’s still a great example of visually compelling use of the software, and contains some really useful links. Wouldn’t Prezi with audio be fantastic development,  by the way?….

Richard and Bex are great examples of people who are working with all kinds of learners, including informal learners out there in the community.They are both constantly learning from their experience, and are willing to share what they are learning. I am looking forward to seeing where their voyages of discovery will be taking them next…

I will be a new face to those of you familiar with the current team (though friends and family have commented that I’m looking a bit haggard lately – possibly as a result of all the reading I’ve been doing to get myself up to speed with what’s going on in the sector).

I’m adding to the varied backgrounds of the RSC Wales team as I’ve been working in advice and guidance in the HE sector for the past eleven years but, as I often told my students, there’s no such thing as a fixed career path nowadays; portfolio careers are the way ahead.  So here I am: bringing a range of skills, a very keen interest in the use of technology for learning, and an eagerness to get involved in the FE sector, to support providers in encouraging learners to realise their potential.

I’m excited to be working with such a diverse group of people, both within the team and the wider FE sector.  In my first ten days I’ve met representative from FE colleges in Wales through the Learn Tech Wales group and a visit to a UK Curriculum group meeting in Liverpool helped me to make contacts with RSC FE advisors from across the UK regions.

I hope to make many more connections within the next few months.  You can contact me at c.m.allemano@swansea.ac.uk or on 01792 513313.

The problem with most conferences is that lots of people can attend, but few get to actually say anything. It’s a familiar story: a keynote presentation to perhaps three hundred people, a few questions from particularly courageous or important people, and some snatched conversation over coffee. This kind of experience does not, for me, turn an event into a conference.

The JISC online conference is different. It is online, so it is readily accessible from home, and it consists of a mixture of live and asynchronous sessions, which include forums and blogs, as well as all the supporting materials which go with the presentations.  This means that the opportunities to interact are genuine, and occur throughout the conference. If you want to challenge a speaker, or to know more about what they saying, you can submit your comments as the presentation is in progress using the online chat pane.  If your question relates to others which appear, the facilitator will be able to draw them together to make some general points. With luck you may get an answer on the spot; if not, there will be ample opportunity to continue the discussion later on in the discussion forums. These give more thinking time, and represent an opportunity for delegates to include examples from their own experience.

A decade ago, an awful lot of discussion around e-learning was theoretical, because there simply wasn’t a broad practice base to which the conversation could be anchored.  Yes, there had been pilots and projects, and some universities were beginning to scale up, but most organisations were looking at this from the outside. All that has changed now, and experienced practitioners are to be found in universities and colleges and across all educational sectors, including the workplace and the community. The programme at JISC online reflects this shifting pattern, and I am sure that the discussions around the presentations will also reflect the values and interests of this broader community. I am looking forward to these conversations, and I will be listening especially closely for those voices from the sectors which have previously been regarded as on the fringe of the main action, such as those based in workplace and ordinary communities. These voices may not be the dominant ones just now, but in these shifting times who is to say that they don’t point to the future?

The pre-conference ‘actitivity week’ starts on November 15th, and the main conference programme on November 22nd. If you have not already booked a place, it’s not too late. More information and links to the booking forms are here.

I was asked this question at a conference last week. Sometimes, I am tempted to say something like “Oh, it’s easy, just sign up and follow some interesting people…”. However, that would be a cop-out, and anyway lots of people sign up, get bored quickly and their account becomes dormant. We all know plenty of those. So I thought I would put together some guidance which might make the difference for someone who just in not sure how to go about it. This is my attempt. Please feel free to comment….

Before You Start: Decide on an identity. If it is memorable, then so much the better. Try to make is short, as long Twitter identities are harder for people to reference in their tweets. If you are thinking of using it on behalf of your organisation, first make sure nobody else has got there first, and then sign up as soon as you can, to secure your chosen identity. However, you may also want to set up a personal account and get some practice on that before you start using the organisational one. If you don’t mention the organisational account to begin with, no one will notice that it is there.

Getting Started: Go to http://twitter.com/ , fill in the ‘Join Today’ form, and confirm your account. Then choose a Twitter client. You could manage to tweet without one of these, but it’s so much easier to participate in discussions if you use a client. I use Tweetdeck; others use Seesmic or Hootsuite, for example. Tweetdeck also has its own accounts: I wouldn’t sign up for this in the first instance, but it may help later, if you want to tweet from multiple machines and devices. Get familiar with the basic grammar of Twitter, i.e. what the symbols mean. The best guide I have found so far is rather called “The 12 most confusing things about Tweets, Retweets, Replies and Direct Messages”, but don’t be put off by the title. This guide will tell you everything you need to know.

Building your Network: Follow enough people. How many is enough? Certainly more than 20, probably more than 50. You won’t have time to read every tweet that is sent by all your friends, but that doesn’t matter. How do you know whom to follow? I would start with your friends and colleagues, and check their profiles: look at their list of followers, and also people they follow. You will probably get tired of this, at which point I would just look at their last four or five tweets.  When reading tweets, notice people your friends refer to; check out recent tweets of people you haven’t heard of. If they associate with your friends, they may be interesting.  Also keep a look out for hashtags (#). Sometimes these don’t mean a lot, but on occasion they can take you into useful conversations, and bring new people to your attention. At any given time, I use Tweetdeck to keep a continuous search on one or two hashtags (it’s the ‘Add Column’ button at the top). If the stream dries up, or gets annoying, just delete that column. You can find those tweets again if you need to.

I hesitate to suggest what you should put in your own tweets, but whatever you do, please say something! If you think that it will interest someone specific, then use their @ identity to bring it to their attention. This can have the added benefit of introducing someone to your followers. It tells them that this is someone you know, and find interesting. That says a lot. Also use the @ symbol to acknowledge sources of information – that is a way of saying ‘thanks’ to people. I hope this helps you. Let me know how you get on. Tweet me via @paulbrichardson once you are set up…

If you are not sure what citizen science is all about, then please read on. It’s not as hard as it sounds. The basic idea is that anyone can ‘do’ science, because it is very often just a case of gathering data in an intelligent way, and machines (including computers) are not very good at that. This means that you can learn something, and at the same time get that warm feeling of contributing to some useful projects.  I have become involved in a couple of projects recently, and here are some of my reflections on that experience.

If wildlife is your thing, you may have already tried the Open University’s iSpot, which provides a space for naturalists to upload their sightings. This site is used by some very experienced naturalists, and you can upload records as ‘unkown’ if you would like someone to help you identify an animal or a plant. More recently, I have been looking at other wildlife projects. Currently, I am helping researchers to find out the extent of the horse chestnut leaf miner, in a project called Leaf Watch. This initiative maps data on the severity of any damage caused by this pest.  After a few minutes of viewing the instructions I found that I could easily distinguish between damage by the miner, and various other pests and diseases to which these trees are prone; I was then ready to start sending records to the database. You take a picture of a typical leaf, and upload some other information about the surrounding vegetation, and your recorded is uploaded, together with a location tag.  You will need a smartphone for this, and there are apps for both iPhone and Android.

If you prefer to say indoors, you could try ‘Old Weather’, which is helping  to improve our understanding of climate change. Climatologists have at their disposal some pretty clever tricks for measuring how the planet has changed over the millennia, but it is not simple to get precise and reliable measurements of temperature over the last one or two centuries. Ironically, some very meticulous and accurate records exist under our noses, in the form of ships’ logs, but there’s a problem: they were recorded with pen and paper. Some creative thinkers at the Citizen Science Alliance have a solution to this, and they have developed an online database of these data, to anyone can upload records. You need a to interpret the logs by reading the (sometimes challenging) handwriting of the mariners, and typing the data into the database. While you are doing this, you get to find out other incidental details of ships life, which can also be incorporated into the database. I have been working on the data from HMS Suffolk, and I am getting a feel for how many torpedoes she carried (lots) and how many hands were cleaning the deck (lots), as well as the Caribbean climate in August (very hot). This project  is one of many in the ‘Zooniverse’ family of projects. As the name implies, most of these projects are astronomical in flavour. If you select one of these, you can find yourself categorising galaxies and stars, or looking for distant plants.

I recently checked the #citizenscience tag on Twitter, to get a flavour of global activity of this kind. One of the most interesting projects was Safecast, which has been tracking radiation levels in Japan since the Fukushima disaster. This began as an informal citizen science project, but has since been formalised into a more rigorous data gathering exercise. Over last weekend, #citizenscience was bursting with messages about hurricane Irene, where people were submitting data from their rain gauges. If you want to see the most extreme of the (really scary) statistics on Irene, look here.

All of these projects indicate the power of crowd-sourcing for science. I am sure that lots more of this will be happening soon, and there will be plenty of opportunities for teachers and learners to get involved.