Google vote

It strikes me that Google docs could be used as a free voting system if your students have web enabled devices. Just set up a google spreedsheet with a form, share the address (you can email them a link) so your students can complete it. The results can be quickly published in a web page through one of the gadgets: either a google graph, or a word cloud (see below the form). Why note vote through the form included below for three online tools that you use for learning or teaching?

Word clouds for textual analysis

Word clouds, including the pretty ones produced by Wordle (see right) can be a useful first step in analysing textual data. I regularly trawl through free text responses to surveys, looking for themes and patterns. By first creating a word cloud, which shows words used most frequently in a larger size, I get an idea of what to look for and how to categorise responses.

For example, the word cloud in this post is from textin response to a question asking students about the benefits of using wikis. From the cloud, I was able to instantly see some themes, and I could then go through and categorise the comments a little more methodically with the help of the keywords suggested by the cloud. The word clouds can also liven up any report or presentation made using the data.


Word clouds are not perfect, or even very scientific, for this kind of text analysis: they do not show the context in which the words were used (it could have been poor or good in front of the word 'access in the above example) and and don't account for similes (there may only be one word that corresponds to access, but several that represent organisation). A semantic word cloud, that recognised context and similes would be very powerful. There is a very nice prototype called 'concordle' (produced by Ladislav Kocba) that shows one way that context can be accounted for in a word cloud to produce a useful concordancing tool (very useful for textual analysis).

In fact, the survey software I use (Bristol Online Survey) produces word clouds, but not as prettily as Wordle does. If you use Wordle for this kind of analysis, beware that data you save is no longer yours. For this reason, when I use Wordle, I paste the data, take a screenshot of the wordcloud and then close without saving the resultant word cloud.

Google Docs also produced Word Clouds, and the spreadsheet forms can be used as a survey tool. There are lots of possibilities for gathering data and publishing clouds online through Google Docs. I plan to experiment with the possibilities this offers.

A former colleague, Andy Ramsden at Bath, uses word cloud as a way of aggregating textual responses gathered during a live presentation by getting the audience to text him from their phones, and then cutting and pasting the results into a word cloud generator. Word clouds are great for quick and dirty presentation of texts. Word clouds have lots of uses beyond making pretty pictures, or tag clouds at the side of a blog.

Authorstream

There are numerous ways of publishing PowerPoint files and presentations online. Slideshare is one of the most popular. One that is new to me is AuthorStream which seems well worth investigating. It seems you can upload presntations with recorded narrations and rehearsed timings, so that you are not just sharing slides, but also voice. In addition, they have a very nice plug in to Powerpoint, which lets you search online for images and YouTube videos and insert them directly into your presentation! A great tool for anyone who wants to use Youtube as part of a presentation.

Converting new duo190709

Uploaded on authorSTREAM by mikecameronuk | Upload your own presentation

Video out from Touch Pro II

The video from the Touch Pro II is impressive for a mobile device. An adaptor is needed which gives you a composite video connection. It would be better still if there were a way to convert this to VGA to work with more projectors. The software that allows you to edit the presentations (JECTCET Presenter) is quite powerful as well. It is inevitably a little fiddly to edit on a small screen, but it works quite well.

Mobile learning thoughts

Mobile devices are getting extremely powerful and this opens up plenty of possibilities for learning and teaching. the iphone, gphone and windows mobiles are not only more powerful than the desktops and laptops we had a few years ago, they are also much better connected and have applications that let us publish and share things instantly which brings its own affordances.

In a previous job I had to cart around 2 laptops and 2 projectors for a training course we delivered at a remote site. Even though the projectors we had were relatively portable I longed for a lighter set of kit. The phone I have now has a TV out facility. The phone itself has the ability to run and edit Powerpoint presentations. I should therefore be able to edit a presentation on the way to an event and then run it by connecting my phone to the projector when I get there. This is nice to be able to do, even if it doesn't bring anything new pedagogically. I'm going to give this a try. From what I have read, the quality of the output is pretty good.

I can blog and tweet form my phone. With Twitpic I can include images taken from my camera. These images will be instantly available to the world (if they follow me or go looking for hashtags). Watching twittervision or flickrvision is not only hypnotic, it illustrates the speed, volume and sponteneity of information on the internet. There are plelty of educational opporrunities. On a fieldtrip you can take an photo and upload it straight to the web, complete with gps location. I'm sure this could be mashed up with Google maps to create a great resource.

It's the ease and speed that is amazing. I think Asimov said any technology worth its salt should seem like magic. I agree, I want technology to be amazing ans easy to the degree that it is transparent and I can fcus on what I am using it for, not how I do it. Whilst a lot of elearning tools have a way to go some technologies are close to magic.

I'm very impressed with some apps on the g-phone that augmented reality with data. A colleague showed me one that employed the camera in the phone together with the gps so that you could stand in say the centre of newcastle and point the phone up, down lft and right. When you pointed it at soemthing Wikipedia knows about, it gives you information on it.

This connectivity is leading to things we hadn't thought of a few years ago. There are lots of possibilities, and we'll see which ones take off and becomed tools of choice. Smartphones are still a minority sport amongst students though, so we'll see how menu acquire iphones in the next few years. Will it then be an iphone app that is the next big thing?

GoAnimate an online tutorial

There are now some very flexible and easy to use tools out there that are free to use with potential benefit to education. Go animate is one such tool. It lets you create simple animations with a variety of characters and prop. You can upload your own images and use them within the animation. In the example below, I uploaded screenshots of our Blackboard implementation and used the character as a virtual tutor in the guide. It was a wet and rainy Saturday afternoon, so quite distracting ;-)
GoAnimate.com: New duo by Mic Cam


Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!

I'm not sure how useful it is, or whether some would find the approach patronising, but it is at least fun and easy. These tools allow for some creativity. I'm going to add the animation to some training courses and see how people take to them.

What I think about when I think about learning

Quite often I come across references in books I'm reading which seem to me to summarise certain ideas and attitudes to learning and teaching better than the text books do. I want to build up a bank of these paragraphs in case they are useful in a lesson/paper. One example is a section of the auto-biographical book 'What I talk about when I talk about running' by Haruki Murakami. He describes learning to improve his swimming (to improve his triathlon times).

"Lots of people know how to swim, but those who can efficiently teach how to swim are few and far between. That's the feeling I get. It's difficult to teach how to write novels (at least I know I couldn't), but teaching swimming is just as hard. And this isn't confined to swimming and novels. Of course, there are teachers who can teach a set subject in a set order, using predetermined phrases, but there aren't many who can adjust thier teaching to the abilities and tendencies of thier pupils and explain things in thier own individual way. Maybe hardly any at all.

I wasted the first two years trying to find a good coach. Each new coach tinkered with my form, just enough to mess up my swimming, sometimes to the point where I could hardly swim at all. Naturally, my confidence went down the drain. At this rate, there was no way I could enter a triathlon...

My wife was the one who found me a good coach...

The first thing this coach did was check my overall swimming and ask what my goals were. "I want to participate in a triathalon" I told her. "So you want ot be able to do the crawl in the ocean and swim long distances" she asked... "I'm glad you have clear-cut goals. That makes it easier for me."...

What's special about this woman's teaching style is that she doesn't teach you the textbook form at the beginning... So in the beginning, she teaches you to swim like a flat board without any body rotation - in other words, completely the opposite of what the textbook says... As I practiced persistently, I could swim the way she told me to, in this awkward way, but I wasn't convinved it was doing any good.

And then, ever so slowly, my coach started to add some rotation. Not emphasising that we were practising rotation, but just teaching a seperate way of moving. The pupil has no idea what the real point of this practice is. He merely does as he is told...You end up end up exhausted and spent, but later, in retrospect, you realsie what it was all for. The parts fall into place, and you can see the whole picture, and finally understand the role each individual part plays. The dawn comes, the sky grows light and the colours and shapes of the roofs of houses, which you could only glimpse vaguely before, come into focus.

Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (Vintage, 2009). pp. 161-162