I’ve just got back from a day of delivering ePortfolio workshops. One of my workshops was quite fun as we had lots of kit to look at, raising awareness of the different types of kit http://www.flickr.com/photos/kevhickey/tags/eportfolio/
The second raised questions about assumptions made when choosing and using an eportfolio system.
These assumptions include:
- Getting an open source system will be the cheapest option
- It’s important to get a system which is part of an existing VLE system
- A learning provider should get one system that does everything
While discussing the use of technology to capture evidence, the conversation turned to using mobile phones. Some felt mobile phones should not be allowed in colleges under any circumstances, to the extent of using technology to block signals. There’s an ongoing Jaiku discussion into the legalities of this.
On the other end of the scale the LSC via MoLeNET is making £4 million pounds available for colleges to use in Mobile Learning projects, allot of which will involve mobile phones, and according to my sources about 25% of these projects are being lead by colleges in the North West. Yay! Although big funding bids aren’t essential for making use of mobile phones. I recently recorded a podcast interview with Saima Hanif, an ESOL tutor at Hopwood Hall, who has encouraged he students to use the voice recorder function on their own phones to record and play back their conversations http://www.rsc-northwest.ac.uk/content/view/649/262/
Talking of podcasts, If you haven’t done so already I strongly recommend you check out James Clay’s podcasts which can be found on hisblog. They are panel discussions on various elearning issues, the current one covers the 1st birthday of the ASUS eeepc and PowerPoint alternatives, and I was lucky enough to be part of the panel.
I also want to mentionDave Fords podcast.The recent ones review and compare Xerte, eXe and wimba content creation tools, which found really useful as I am currently crating content as part of my H810 Open University Course.
I am a few weeks into the OU course now.Here are a few of the online tools which have made life a little easier:
Google doc’s-great for making notes and writing up the weekly assignmentsbecause I can access it from any computer without having to carry it around on a usb stick and have multiple copies.Not that great for my tutor marked assignments as it doesn’t have the formatting functionality of word, although I did upload a pdf of the competed assignment to Google docs, so I could access it where and when I needed.
WordPress-I chose to set up a second wordpress blog here to post my weekly assignments rather than use the moodle blog I was provided with , mainly because I can personalise it, which is important for a course where you never get to meet your tutor group face to face.
Google Notebook- the course has involved allot of online research.With the Google notebook browser extension, I can select some text or an image on a website and right click to add it to my notebook.My Google notebook on the notebook page I can arrange my clippings into folders, add tags and add my own notes.All the clippings can be collapsed and expanded, moved around, and they all have the link from where I originally got them.There are other programmes that do something similar, including read and write gold.
Mindomo – I have found it useful to use this online mind map to arrange my thoughts and plan my essay/reports.
Moving away from ALT-C, Techdis and RSC Scotland (South West and North East) have been working on collating a number of open source applications which can be stored on a 2Gb USB stick. Click here for more details, there’s even an advert:
Last week was the first official week of my OU course. So far I seem to be putting in alot more than the recomnded 15 hours a week just to keep up, but hopefully that will calm down as I get used to it.
One of my “summer jobs” was to produce an emagazine supplement on choosing an ePortfolio.This is basically a mini site which looks at different interpretations of what an ePortfolio is and what questions you need to ask when choosing one.It was also a good excuse to create a cartoon using www.Toondoo.comand embed a flickr image, including notes, using Mbedr.
It has now been published and can be viewed here and if you like it and you’d like to add it to a website or VLE, you can download a zipped version here.
This week I started my Open University course.I wish I could say its going without a hitch, but there are teething problems.The first action I had to complete was access a blog page which had supposedly been set up for me.It hadn’t.My second task was to update a Wiki. Unfortunately I was using Chrome, the new browser from Google, and there were problems.James Clay has blogged about the reasons for this here better than I could.
It’s really made me appreciate how one or two small problems can really knock the confidence of a learner, particularly if they happen at the beginning of a course.
On the plus side, my tutor and fellow students seem to be a helpful and interesting group, and the forums are filling up nicely.Let’s hope there are no more gremlins.
One of the toys we got recently, was a digital notepad, it has particular potential for ePortfolios. Anyway I decided to make a video explaining what it is. This is my first real attempt at using iMovie so this short clip took over day to make. Anyway here it is.
Wordle is a sites which can create a tag cloud from a series of text. The more times the word appears, the larger the word is. To see what I mean have a look at the example below which was created from Darwins Origin of the Species, thanks to Project Guttenberg for supplying the text.
I’ve known about this site for a while but it wasn’t till recently I saw a really good way of useing it.
We asked people to complete a survey where they could write about what limited their use of elearning. All the free text responces were put into wordle and the tag cloud showed the word “Time” far bigger than anything else. No Suprise.
iTunesU is avalable via the iTunes store in iTunes and is a collection of free video and audio content form Universities arond the world. From the UK, the Open University and University College London (UCL) have added some content.
I had a look around the Teaching & Education Category and found “Free is Good” which is a series of video tutorials about free programs and websites for teachers. The videos are created by Frank Miracola and are avalable via Michigan’s MILearning page on iTunesU.
I’ve had a look through some of the videos and so far the best thing it has shown me is ZoomIt which provides some useful shortcuts for onscreen presentations.
CTL + 1 zooms into any part of the screen, great if you are demonstrating software or a website
CTL + 2 write on the screen with a mouse, just like an Interactive whiteboard. Type R, G, Y, B to change the pen to Red, Green, Yellow or Blue
CTL + 3 Bring up a timer counting down (10 mins is the default but you can change that)
I’ve Just done a quick search about the OU course i’m about to start and found a blog post that says “H810 is an innovative collaboration with TechDis, who are providing us with curriculum around the topic of accessibility. “…..interesting.
Over the last week I have been hearing a number of questions and answers about learners being ready for web 2.0 and how can it be used for learning.
James Clay used his Jaiku microblog to ask “Are learners ready for Web 2.0?”.To some extent this question was answered by the release of an Ipos MORI survey into student expectations commissioned by JISC.A group of 16-18 year olds, who were intent on going to university, were questioned on their IT use and expectations.
·65% ‘regularly’ use social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace or Flickr
·27% ‘regularly’ use wikis, blogs or online networks
This suggest that a significant number are using web 2.0, but does that mean they want to use it for college work?
As part of a conference on communication Ray Robetson from West Suffolk college explained how they embraced web 2.0 and social network sites instead of using their VLE.They have a main elearning blog which has a blog roll of blogs from many different departments.Their art department even has a myspace page which displays students work.One of the reasons these sites were chosen over a VLE is because it gives the learners ownership.No matter how much web 2.0 capability is added into a VLE “The VLE is owned by the university” (Emma Purnell, PGCE student, Taken from the learners voice).
My personal opinion is that in order to maintain popularity with learners, VLEs should be developed to be incorperted and embedded into whatever system the individual learner requires.I have just discovered that this idea is being developed at the University of Wales where a facebook module is being developed to display information from their VLE.
There could be a backlash if colleges push too hard into a learners personal digital space.Its like a teenager no longer thinking a band is cool once they find out their parents like them.
I think the next question to ask is are colleges and teaching staff ready for web 2.0?
ractices and Debates H800″
