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.

What I found out about the difference between Digital Storytelling and telling stories using technology…
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“Adios, theory!” wrote Charles Darwin, in the margins of a book he owned, referring to the impact which that section of text could have on his own theory of evolution. Fortunately for us, the theory survives, and so does the insight this note gives us. This is just one example from a rich pattern of annotations scribbled into the margins of practically every book which he owned. The collection is currently being digitised, and much of it is now available online, both in the form of transcriptions and images of the original (rather challenging) handwriting. This enables scholars to follow the development of Darwin’s thinking throughout his life. See

http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/collection/darwinlibrary for more information and a link to this collection. This was also covered in ‘The Material World’ on BBC Radio 4. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b011zzhq

While this resource is fascinating in its own right, it also set me thinking about the value of note taking in general. If Darwin did it in such a comprehensive manner, it’s probably quite a good idea, isn’t it? Donald Clark raised this question in his ‘Plan B’ blog recently. “Note taking increases learning, results in deeper learning and leads to further learning”, Donald tells us, and I agree with him. How better to make sure that you have an understanding of what is said than by taking a note – to quote, comment on, evaluate, or to disagree with the speaker. All of these show evidence of processing what is being said, which is a prerequisite to learning.

I sometimes fail to take notes, and I nearly always regret that. However, there is one thing I have learned never to say when I am giving a presentation: “Don’t worry about taking notes, it is all in The Powerpoint”. What the speaker says may perhaps be in there, but what the listener is thinking can never be…

Efforts to reduce carbon emissions and other waste by organisations generally fit into one of two categories, namely technical or behavioural. For example, you can either design a system which switches of people’s personal computers automatically, or you can increase awareness so that they are more likely to do this themselves. However, at Pembrokeshire College, a more integrated approach has been adopted, as Geoff Elliott told us in an online workshop for RSC Wales yesterday.

The college uses the technology to provide people with an immediate and precise prompt, in the form of an on-screen meter which tells them how much energy you are using. This is enabled by hardware supplied by Enistic.com, which is networked to provide an integrated monitoring service. Once people are aware of their energy usage, they are far more likely to think about their own behaviour. The evidence of the project is that metering of actual usage is more immediate than an average statistic of how much energy is typically used in an average scenario.

This is where the ‘Geen Pledges’ come in. People are offered a menu of pledges to which they can respond by choosing: ‘Already doing this;
Pledge to do this; or ‘Not Applicable’. They then receive prompts and reminders to keep them focused on these pledges. The menu of pledges can be expanded by suggestions, on approval of management.

What problems did the project encounter? Monitoring energy use at an individual level turned out to be far from trivial. Hardware needed to be installed at each workstation, and this needed to be relatively unobtrusive, accounting for all the appropriate equipment, and also networked. Geoff told us that the technology has now moved on considerably, and he would possibly make different decisions if he were to start the process again. Whatever systems are in place, it is of key importance that the people involved have a positive attitude. At Pembrokeshire, they made the induction experience a good social one, and they have also set up an action group on environmental issues.

The plans for the future are to make the software open source, and able to function independently of the college’s Moodle system. This gives the best chance of disseminating the very worthwhile outcomes of this project, and for others to emulate its successes. The vast majority of the delegates attending expressed either a tentative or a definite interest in support an effort to improve the software. Those reading this may like to join them.

You can listen to a recording of the session here: http://bit.ly/irWjxp
You can find out more about the project here: http://www.pembrokeshire.ac.uk/news/general/greening_ict

This advice from JISC Digital Media about ways to improve your videos is so useful that we decided to post it on our blog. For more information about the advice, guidance and services that they provide please visit http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/

Improve your Videos in 4 Easy Steps

Often the difference between’ acceptable’ and ‘rather good’ is quite small. This, in my experience is certainly the case with amateur videos. I’ve seen a lot of self-made videos, particularly in the world of education, and again and again the same problems keep cropping up, problems which are actually very easy to rectify.

Here are my top 4. Pay attention to these and you will immediately see an improvement in the materials you produce on video.

1) Bad Lighting

The advent of autoexposure systems on camera and camcorders may have simplified the process of getting a properly exposed image but it hasn’t eliminated the need for user involvement. If you still believe that you can simply point your camcorder at a subject and it will produce lovely videos, you’re in for an unpleasant surprise.

The problem is simply this: the camera doesn’t know what the subject of your video is: is it the tree on the right? The picture hanging on the wall in the top of frame? Or perhaps the person standing slightly left of centre. The camcorder will use some sort of algorithm to come up with an exposure that will work in many circumstances, but it will rarely be perfect and will often be awful.

So how can you help your camcorder to calculate better exposures? Here are a few tips.

· Make sure there’s some light falling on your subject, preferably from the front (i.e. from your side of the subject) and a bit to one side. If the illumination comes from a ceiling light, it should be behind you and to one side. This applies to sunlight as well – but beware of squinting subjects.

· If you can’t get good lighting of your subject in the current location, move to a new one! Even if you can get good lighting in your location, be prepared to move both yourself and your subject around to find the best light.

· People tend to have their desks next to the window whenever possible. Unfortunately, this means that when you shoot someone at your desk it’s very likely that there’ll be a window behind them. If this is the case, do not shoot them at their desk – or at least try to find an angle where the window isn’t behind them, because otherwise you are guaranteed to have a bad image.

2) Shaky camera

This is perhaps the most common problem with amateur videos. Oddly, it is also the most easily corrected. How? Simple: get a tripod and use it religiously. It is not possible to hand-hold a camcorder of any size for a significant length of time without introducing some sort of shake or wobble into the image. This applies to pocket camcorders as well, because it is not the weight of the camcorder that’s the problem but rather the length of time you have to hold it still.

When you get a tripod, make sure it is a video tripod, not one for a stills camera. The difference is in the tripod head: a proper video head will permit smooth camera motion (panning left and right and tilting up and down), something which is not possible on a stills tripod.

There’s really no excuse for not using a tripod, not even expense. It is possible to get little desktop tripods (not the best solution but still better than hand-holding) for as little as £3.

3) Bad sound

In order to get a good picture we want to have the camera far enough away from the subject to see them. In order to get good sound we want to have the microphone very close to the subject’s mouth. So what do we do if the microphone is built into the camcorder? Simple: we get either bad sound or a bad picture – and picture unfortunately tends to trump sound.

This is unfortunate because the sound quality of the video is usually more important than picture quality, particularly when making educational resources. Is there a solution to this seemingly intractable problem?

The best solution is to use an external microphone such as a lapel mic. Even the cheapest such mic will give results significantly better than a built-in mic. We can then get excellent sound without compromising on picture quality. There are camcorders available at all price ranges which take external mics: make this a requirement when purchasing one.

Failing this, it is necessary to find a location which can at least partially make up for the shortcomings of the built-in mic. Try to shoot your video in a room which is not only quiet but also not too bright acoustically. The less noise there is on the audio part of your recording, the better the sounds you want will come out.

4) No editing

Even a tiny amount of editing can improve the look of your video immensely. There are numerous free editing systems available nowadays which can provide you the tools to perform basic editing, and even more sophisticated free systems are beginning to appear.

The most basic type of editing is called topping and tailing. Not surprisingly, this consists of removing the bits and the beginning and the end which you don’t need.

If you want to get a bit more sophisticated than that you might edit further to ’clean up’ the video: to remove mistakes, pauses and sections irrelevant to the intended purpose of the video. In addition it is possible to import slides into much simple editing software. These can then be inserted where appropriate in the video. Not only will the quality of the slides be better than if the projected slides were shot with the camcorder, they can also be used to hide edits made during the clean up.

JISC Digital Media is a JISC Advance service which provides advice about anything having to do with digital media. All of our advice including the helpdesk, our extensive library of documents and more is completely free to any FE or HE institution in the UK.

These days it seems that students have become huge consumers of technology but in many ways that is where their interaction ends. To many it is not important to know how something works as long as it does the job. Whilst the use of word-processing and spreadsheet software is an essential skill, the UK is facing a shortage of people who have the knowledge to develop new software be it for business use or for gaming.

The Royal Society published a report last year which shows a fall of 33% in just three years in ICT GCSE students, a fall of 33% in six years in A level ICT and 57% in eight years in A level Computing students in England and similar declines found elsewhere in the UK.

David Braben who has been at the forefront of games design for years recently addressed the Learning without Frontiers conference, “Every kid I talk to says that ICT is dull. They hate it, the majority is learning how to use certain MS tools and how to find the on and off switch”.

David is a key figure in a project called The Raspberry Pi foundation which is developing a small computer which will make computing affordable for everyone. The USB stick sized device sports an HDMI port to connect to a TV and a USB port to allow it to be connected to peripherals such as a keyboard and mouse. It will be available with open source software such as Ubuntu, Iceweasel, KOffice and Python which will allow students to get to grips with the basis of programming.

The amazing thing is that Raspberry Pi is expected to cost as little as £10 which will mean that a basic computer will be affordable for everyone. The cost of computers has been a problem for many schools and colleges and this has often meant that ICT education has been confined to ICT labs; the Raspberry Pi will mean that students could actually take their work home with them.

For more information about The Raspberry Pi foundation, you can visit www.raspberrypi.org

JISC RSC Wales’ Esther Barrett describes her experiences using iGoogle and how she has at last given up her paper diary! About time too…
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A video blog about online conferences
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