In an effort to kickstart this stalled blog I’m going to take a leaf out of the books of @dajbelshaw, @jukesie and @sboneham and do weeknotes, summaries of what I achieved, learnt, reflected on etc. that week. I’ll hopefully publish it every Friday.

They will get better…promise!

Follow Doug, Steve and Matt’s weeknotes.

Pecha Kucha’s

At the Netskills planning meeting last week we all had to do a 5 minute presentation on a topic of our choice. Particularly enjoyed @carlvincent’s on agile project development (going to use this model to develop my next workshop) and @sboneham’s on the convergence of internet of things, web3.0 and mobile usage, although all of them were interesting and enjoyable. I tried to explain “slicing” as a way of assessing reflective learning through the use of Play-Doh (need a full blog post to demonstrate this). What did I learn?

• It’s liberating doing a presentation without any form of technology other than pens, a flipchart and cutlery.
• Be careful not to rely too much on a quirky visual hook, spend as much time on getting the verbal explanation right as well. It can also be distracting.
• 5 minutes is not a long time, pick a topic that you can comfortably cover in the time.
• If I’m anxious about a presentation it tends to go better than if I’m quietly confident. This is annoying!
• I’m my own worst critic. It probably didn’t go as badly as it did in my brain.

Augmented Reality

Thanks to Steve’s quick presentation I’m going to investigate spatial tools for a possible workshop/set of resources. I had a go using a range of tools over the week:

Hoppala – requires you to set up a  of developer account on Layar and quite fiddly for non-specialists

Junaio – a much quicker route to sharing information about places to a network of friends.

Wikitude – the app I’d heard most about but I’m quite disappointed by, mainly because it doesn’t remember my settings and keeps crashing.

A full blog post will be forthcoming shortly but my overall impression was that the tools are still pretty crude. The second and third generations will be much more interesting especially if Google Goggles is as good as people suggest (please can we have it for the iPhone now!).

New workshops

Netskills is running a season of workshops in Newcastle and London in October and November. I’ve been writing the new one on Digital Storytelling and adapting the workshop on Blogging and Social Networking and Supporting the Student Learner Experience (not advertised yet) so they fit better with where technology is now. Really looking forward to getting these on the road.

Doug Belshaw’s Google Earth site

In preparation for the Google Teacher Academy UK’s launch, Doug asked for help compiling a site with guidance on using Google Earth for education. Being a geographer and interested in the tools I said yes. Doug’s done a huge amount really quickly and I’ve only added a little bit to the Advanced Use section. It’s a really useful resource for anyone interested in making the most of this fantastic application. Please contribute as well.

I had a wee word with myself about signing up to get involved in things and then not actually contributing. With so many collaborative projects and requests for help out there, there’s a risk of getting all keen, signing up and then not following through on commitments. I want to avoid becoming one of those people.

Diigo

As I’m using Diigo much more now for bookmarking and sharing stuff I’ve set it up to auto post new additions to my library on this blog every Sunday. I think this will be a further incentive to use social bookmarking more constructively.

I’ve also been setting up a series of “lists” on different subjects. Here’s my collection of links on Digital Storytelling. Check out the rest of my Diigo Library.

FOTiE 2010

I’ve not been doing a lot of horizon scanning recently so  I signed up to go to the Future of Technology in Education conference in London on 1st October. I’m really looking forward to this as it seems to carry quite a buzz with it.

It’ll be great to finally hear Ollie Bray, James Clay, Miles Berry and Matt Lingard, all of whom I follow on Twitter but have never actually heard speak.

Of particular interest is James Alliban and Miles Metcalffe who are doing 2 20 minutes slots on AR and Geolocation (see above).

Steve and Will from Netskills will also be there. Come say hi!

And on a personal note…

We need a holiday Chez Chalk! It’s 4 months ince we came to Newcastle and we’ve not really had a proper break. Both Chalklets (elder and younger) seem to be at the end of their tether but they’ve been through such a massive change and dealt with all mummy and daddy’s wobbles remarkably well. They’re still my inspiration.

We failed to complete on the purchase of our house on Monday (someone else’s solicitors at fault) but we should be moving next Monday. One week either way isn’t going to make much difference in the grand scheme of things although I was a little repressed ball of fury in the office on Monday. Sorry, m’colleagues!

After all that, I’m still thrilled to be in Newcastle.

Image – Xavier de Jaureguiberry – Att-NC-ND

CC Image - Karen Cropper - Attribution

Martin Weller’s blog, The Ed Techie, was the first technology blog that I followed and he’s a constant stream of intrestingness. His latest post is really valuable for anyone interested in ed-tech generally, but also open educational models specifically. He has done interviews with a number of OU luminaries (Martin Bean, Grainne Conole, Andrew Law and Simon Buckinham-Shum) and basically asked them 4 questions:

• What are the benefits of technology for learning?
• What are the interesting areas around openness at the moment?
• Are there any interesting trends we should watch over the next few years?
• What do you think about the open, online approach of the conference?

The interviews are between 8 and 15 minutes long each.

I was particularly interested in Grainne Conole’s point about moving towards more open models of research and blogging ideas in progress to get the communities input rather than waiting to publish them in closed  journals.

The conference is running next week on the 22nd and 23rd June and he’s posted the agenda here. Follow Martin’s blog and his Tweets for more info.

PS: Trying to embed this playlist was an unexpected hassle. Ended up having to go into the source code of Martin’s blog and copying the embed code from there. Thanks to Steve for his help. Do you know an easier way?

Image by lanier67 Att-NC-ND

Last week Will , Steve and myself from Netskills went down to this year’s Eduserv Symposium in London. It was on the theme of The Mobile University and it was a thoroughly enjoyable learning experience.

The slides and videos are available here. Particularly worth a look are Paul Golding’s keynote and Christine Sexton’s presentations. They both give a great picture of how patterns of use are changing but from very different perspectives.

(Sorry about the wierd ratio. Best to click full screen anyway…)

Set aside a few hours if you can over the next few weeks to have a look.

I set out what I wanted to get from the conference in an AudioBoo.

What I found most interesting was that I had a bit of a reality check and had to reframe my expectations for what students were demanding from the university in terms of mobile learning.

I love using my phone for learning and reflection. I’ve got relatively easy access to my blog dashboard, I’m using AudioBoo more regularly and all the usual stuff like Tweetdeck, DropBox, capturing images and video etc. I find the idea of using my mobile to break my learning out of the training room or lecture theatre and to bring my daily experience into my learning world. Although devices like the iPhone are designed mainly for accessing and consuming media the most exciting aspects are the ones where learners can particpate in, explore and discover the world around them.

What surprised me (and I know this makes me look naive) was that it seems most students don’t view their technology in the same way.

Both Chris Sexton and Simon Marsden’s talks highlighted that students wanted something altogether more functional.

What they wanted was information. The things that are important to a student are things like where is my next lecture, can I view my library record, can I easily access my email, can I see maps of the campus.

This leaves me with one or two unresolved questions in my head:

• Do students partition their use of mobile technology? i.e. This is my social fun time and my learning time is different.
• If they were encouraged to use their mobile devices as a creative learning tool would this actually appeal to many of them?
• Should it be down to teaching staff to lead students towards this sort of use or should students be given the freedom to explore themselves? Will it happen anyway as mobile use increases?

I hope I don’t sound dismissive of student’s expectations of mobile learning. I was just one of those moments where you find your own perspective unexpectedly shifted for you. I realised that the majority of my use of my own device was for routine information purposes. The app I used most often over the few days I was in London was Tube Exits, helping my provincial self navigate the Underground. I highly recommend it by the way – well worth the money.

Ironically, this reframing was helped by a conversation I was having on the conference backchannel with Carl and Chris back at the office.

I still want to explore the use of mobile technology for creative uses but I think it’s important for me to keep my pragmatic hat on as well.

Etienne Wenger at Mediating Boundaries

Last week a number of us at Netskills attended the Mediating Boundaries conference, subtitled “Traversing the landscapes of online communities of practice.”

Quite apart from the fact that walking round the University of the Arts, London during degree show time was fascinating, it was a great conference. The event was scheduled to coincide with the presence of Etienne Wenger in the country and the day was based around his thought-provoking keynote and contribution to the discussions afterwards. There were also contributions from other involved in the Business and Community Engagement programme.

The video from the event will be available shortly and I’ll update the post when it is but here are 2 sets of reflections from the event.

My AudioBoo recorded shortly after…

…and these are Lindsay Jordan’s 3 blog posts on the “Wengerfest” as she calls it.

• Apprenticeship and Transformative Learning
• Identity and Community
• The Meaning of Life

My posting was a bit of a snapshot and Lindsay’s go much deeper but hopefully that gives you an idea of the richness of the event, particularly Etienne’s contribution.

As with most of these things I’ll be coming to different conclusions about how I felt about the JISC 2010 conference for a while but this is how I see it 48 hours after the conference itself. You can catch up with goings on by downloading the virtual goodie bag from JISC events.

I set out what I was going to try and achieve in my last post and by and large I managed them (with the exception of doing AudioBoos)

It was good to spend time with the Netskills team, getting more of a feel for what their different areas of expertise are and how they fit into the bigger JISC picture. It was also good to start making contact with a few people from the other JISC Advance services and beyond. There wasn’t a huge amount of time to chat but I enjoyed making the initial connections.

I feel the conference marked the end of the beginning for me at Netskills and now I need to settle down and do something productive although, going by my performance the day after the conference, I’m not off to a great start.  ;)

As for the conference itself here are my headline points:

• Martin Bean’s keynote was great (he’s the charismatic VC of the Open University and worth catching if you can). He outlined many of the trends and challenges facing HE today, principally:
  • How to turn the tidal wave of new information into meaningful knowledge.
  • The need to break down barriers between the education sectors and allow people to move in and out of education freely
  • As class sizes grow the face to face time with tutors will become too scarce and valuable to waste on straight information download sessions. This has many implications for whether to make this information freely available as OER.
  • As fees increase then students will demand more that the way HE and FE operates meets their lifestyle and work style needs.
  • The OU is exploiting the use of informal learning opportunities to generate interest in their offerings. YouTube Edu and iTunes U act as megaphones for the OU.
• The Parallel session on Research-Led Teaching was interesting (especially Gilly Salmon’s explanation of the Media Zoo at Leicester Uni) but I left feeling that all three presenters had interpreted the brief differently and therefore I was a little muddled.
• I appreciated the fact that the session on ePortfolios focussed on pedagogy rather than analysing the different tools available. I started this job a little sceptical about the future of ePortfolios but I’m now more convinced of their value. The different speakers gave a really good account of how eportfolios can impact learning.
• I was ambivalent about the final keynote by Bill St. Arnaud on the need for Green IT. What he was saying was hugely important  but his style of delivery left me unmoved and I think with a topic as emotive as that I would liked to have seen a bit more of his passion. He did present some innovative ideas which you can see in his (rather detailed) slideshow.

I surprised myself a wee bit as I’m usually a bit of a wall-hugger at conferences but made the decision early on to be more forthcoming which paid off in meeting some interesting people. It’s quite nice to properly meet some people I’d only known through Twitter before.

Martin Bean's Keynote

That’s a tiny snapshot of what happened, though. I’m sure further reflections will pepper future posts.

You can get another JISC newbie’s views by looking at Doug Belshaw’s conference blog or reading back through the #jisc10 hashtag.

]]> http://www.electricchalk.com/2010/04/15/jisc10-review/feed/ 0 http://www.electricchalk.com/2010/04/12/jisc-conference-2010/ http://www.electricchalk.com/2010/04/12/jisc-conference-2010/#comments Mon, 12 Apr 2010 08:00:39 +0000 Chris http://www.electricchalk.com/?p=884 Today the Netskills team are off en masse (pretty much, anyway) to the JISC Conference 2010. It’s my first big chance to get a feel for JISC as a wider organisation…]]>

Today the Netskills team are off en masse (pretty much, anyway) to the JISC Conference 2010.

It’s my first big chance to get a feel for JISC as a wider organisation and help with my transition from 5-16 education to HE.

I have a number of things to achieve:

• Get to know the Netskills team better (the tools for which I suspect will be coffee, food and a little alcohol – not all at the same time)

• Sit in on some of the Netskills sessions to get a flavour of what the rest of the team is up to. This is what we’re up to on the Ning.

• Attending sessions.I’m down for:
  • What is the place of technology in research-led teaching? – suspect there may be interesting difference with school-based teaching
  • Managing Curriculum Change – interested from an MSc point of view
  • Eportfolios – not just another buzzword

• Meet Lisa Gray to discuss ePortfolios. My first formal project will be to look at our offering on this subject and Lisa will be a key contact.

• Meet anybody else who might be interesting. Come say hi if you can find me.

• Tweet. I might also try doing some AudioBoo summaries just for a bit of variety.

Netskills is going through a period of quite radical change, reassessing it’s traditional approach to development (running workshops, providing training materials) into something that better fits new styles of learning and the types of technology we’re encouraging people to use. We’ve been working on our story so that when someone asks “what exactly is Netskills, anyway?” we’ve got a credible (and meaningful) response.

So, hoping to learn lots, make new friends and have a bit of fun. I’ll post a review once it has all settled in my brain.

madamepsychosis - by-nc-nd

Over the last 2 days I’ve been following the tweets from the #bectax (link) and #gbl10 (link) events. It’s a great if slightly frustrating way to keep up with goings-on (frustrating ‘cos it makes you wish you were there).

I’ve yet to deliver a presentation or workshop where there is an active  backchannel and don’t have any planned yet but the thought of it does make by blood run cold rather.

These are my current thoughts about it which I wanted to capture and then possibly revisit having experienced it properly.

Why I don’t like the idea…

• Paranoia – I remember making soto voce snarky comments about a lecturer (his name was Peter Cundill) during a session he was running while I was a snotty under-grad. I was showing off and he was particularly unhappy about it. I’m ashamed of it now because I know how that sort of behaviour would affect me. To feel like a whole audience is having a discussion about you and your message whilst your doing it I think would throw me right off my concentration.

• Control – this is especially true about presentations where the twitterfall is visible behind the presenter. If I’m putting together a presentation I spend a lot of time getting the visual side as stripped down as I can. If the audience want to follow what is happening in the backchannel then by all means they can follow it on their own devices. But unless I say otherwise the podium is my space and I want to control the message that is delivered from there.

And now for the other side…

Why I love the idea…

• Feedback –  What a fantastic motivator to make your presentation the best it could possibly be! My aim would be to get tweets that were agreeing, disagreeing, offering alternatives, building ideas etc. What I wouldn’t want to see is comments highlighting a weak presentation style. I know I’ve delivered poor presentations in my time and yet the feedback from delegates is very complimentary and polite. People who haven’t appreciated I suspect have chosen to remain silent and anonymous (at least to my face!). The backchannel appears to be fearless even though it’s not necessarily anonymous.

• Interaction – OK, I mentioned my need for control before but I love engaging audiences and getting their thoughts. With Twitter you have an amazing tool for doing that in a much broader way than by raised hands and voices alone. I hope I would be brave enough to open up questions to the backchannel. If I was watching a presentation like that I think I would be really engaged.

• Networks – A perusal of the backchannel comments after an event is a great way of finding out the individuals who have a real interest in the topic you were discussing and that’s a great way for establishing those links.

• Engagement – I’ve heard some people argue that if people are tweeting during a presentation they can’t be concentrating on it. You could say the same thing about taking notes in that case! With Twitter people can take notes in a much more socially constructive way and that is likely to make your presentation MUCH more effective anyway.

So, on balance I think I like the idea providing I can keep on my toes as a presenter!

The most exciting thing about it is that it turns a presentation into much more of a social event. To some extent that means that the training I had on how to be a good presenter is gradually becoming obsolete – that was based much more on the one to many delivery model.

I also think it makes a conference hall a much more honest environment where people are able to express themselves in a way that they perhaps didn’t on their paper feedback forms.

Whether I’ll still believe that after having gone through the experience remains to be seen!

Image - Mr Ush on Flickr

I’m not going to BETT this year. My work is already funding my MSc so a I don’t feel I can ask Keith to fund a trip to Olympia, especialy given I have no pressing need to go.

I’m a little sorry as it’s only in the last year that I’ve started to follow the ed-tech community through Twitter and there seems to be a lot more interesting stuff round the fringes. Follow the #BETT2010 tag to explore some more.

I’ve rashly suggested that people could play a Twitter version of Tag while they are at Olympia but didn’t think what the rules could be.

Here’s my suggestion…

• It’s Tag in reverse. The idea is that players actively try to get caught as an excuse to meet other Twitter users in the education technology network.
• I’ve suggested that @dughall is it but as BETT happens over a number of days the first person that day to get to stand D10 (next to the Grand Entrance)and announces it on Twitter using the #tagbett hashtag. People who are “IT” have to tweet where they are every time they change location (stand, seminar, event, cafe etc) or every 10 mins or so until “found”.
• People following #tagbett then have to get to get to the location and find “IT”. When “IT” changes person both people have to confirm that they are now (or are no longer) IT.

Is that too massively complicated? Please comment and I’ll refine the rules…

Image Credit - Tom Barrance

Film Education’s CP3 conference is a routinely excellent occasion and well worth your attention if you are involved in using digital media in education. I’ve blogged about it before.

The last event was in Liverpool (way back in July) and CP3 has now completely revamped its site and updated it with the resources from the event. Have a look…

This is extraordinarily good value! You can download podcasts and transcripts of the keynotes and the materials from the many workshops (the best bit of the conference). The quality is as high as ever.

Have a look at James Durran’s Keynote and Tom Barrance’s Image, Text and Sound workshop as good examples.

Keep your eye on the website for details of next year’s conference.

Did you attend the Liverpool conference? Review it for us…

CP3 2008 - Brighton

If you are interested in using digital video as a teaching and learning tool then this conference by Film Education comes highly recommended. It’s in Liverpool this year.

I’ve blogged about it before and have been to 3 of them although I haven’t quite got over the shame of weeping over Ian Wall on the final day in Leicester (I was ILL! OK?)

They’re down to their last few places so move quickly…

Image Credit – Tom Barrance