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

Livescribe

I'm trying out a Livescribe Pulse pen (which I bought for myself as a pressie). Essentially, it is a pen that captures anything you write on special paper, and also records audio at the same time if you ask it to. The audio and writing are synched such that you can click on your paper and hear the audio, or you can create a pencast that plays back the writing and audio together.

I have some projects coming up where I think it will prove useful. I'm hoping that it will help with interviews with staff for case studies. Since buying it, I've discovered the good people in the Technology Enhanced Learning group upstairs are also trying them out. In their case, they are using them with students with learning difficulties. It will be great to see how they get on with it, and I'm sure it will prove to be useful to those students. I wish I'd had one when studying at University.

The best use for me so far has been in lesson planning. I write a plan on paper (which feels the most natural way to sketch this out). I can then write an extra not and orally rehearse the kind of thing I'll say at each section. I can later listen back to those bits by clicking the paper. One nice thing about this is getting away from the screen and also from PowerPoint whilst planning. I'm becoming overly reliant on the latter. It also puts the emphaisis for me back onto what I am going to say whilst planning, rather than the bullets and pictures for the slide. It's not that I think PowerPoint is not useful, but I think I prefer this text and aural planning first, and then work out how to add slides to complement the session.

Enhancing the student experience through in class technologies

City University kindly hosted this meeting to consider organising a Special Interest Group on the subject of classroom voting systems. We hope to facilitate an online community and informal events to build a knowledge of good practice and promote appropriate use. Case studies, research and evaluation are on possibilites, but the group agreed to begin with a light touch approach. deciding on a title for the group was tricky, but important. There is a lot in a name. Objectives were easy to decide.

While the initial focus is on voting systems, I was pleased that we kept the brief more open to potentially include other technologies that engage students in face to face teaching sessions, be they mobile or less high tech voting (coloured cards or cubes).

Archives and Special Collections

It is amazing the resources that Durham University has. Sarah Price from the Palace Green Library gave a fascinating, enjoyable and useful presentation and tour of the Palace Green special collection today. She is keen for more people to take advantage of the collection. She has helped teachers and students from history, classics, anthropology, the sciences and engineering to take advantage of the collections.

There are a range of materials that would be of interest to researchers and teachers across subject multiple subject disciplines (not just history). There are science manuscripts, old maps, legal documents, novels, records, photos and even spears! One item, a death book, detailed how different people in London had died during the era of the plague. Causes of death recorded include "teeth" and "impotence".

Sarah does a lot of outreach work with schools. She is also involved in many education digitisation projects where the archives are made available online. Things that are not digitised already could be on request. There is a lot in the collection which could be used, and Sarah is keen to hear from people who are interested.

Voting systems still working for Durham Psychology Department

The Psychology department were amongst the more enthusiastic adopters of classroom voting systems at Durham University. I'm pleased to hear that they are still making good use of the 'clickers' a few years on. The usage pattern followed the usual Gartner curve from enthusiastic adoption and early experimentation, before settling into a model of continued use. They found a range of uses for them, from seeding discussion to collecting data. One lecturer adds to their research data set every time they present their results by gathering more data from the audience in the course of the presentation. They are also using them in outreach activity to schools, and on Open days to show the range of teaching techniques they employ.

Pedagogically, they ensure interaction for the whole class, and helps the teacher to adjust teaching based on what the students know. For example, one lecturer asked a difficult question at the beginning of the course to see what the students knew. The answers ranged from those expected from a novice, to those expected from someone who had passed the course. To his surprise, most chose the response expected at the end of the module! he had to adjust his teaching for the rest of the course, following the same outline and towards similar outcomes, but in a different way more in keeping with the student's understanding.

"Patterns" and learning

How can we share and communicate good practice. Colin Ashurst sees 'Pattern language' as a means of achieving this in various contexts. The approach is commonly associated with project management, and seems to have come from architecture (See http://downlode.org/Etext/Patterns/).

AS I understand it patterns are quick ways of reifying tacit knowledge without explaining so much that it becomes meaningless. It is a form of quick documentation that considers both the audience and context.

I had a very interesting chat with Someone from our History Department today. It seems they really do research led teaching in all its forms. Students review staff publications before release through a blog. Students get to be involved in academic research, and are attributed or acknowledged in published papers. This is a real empowering factor.

The history students even go out to schools and teach school children about areas of history. There are aspirations to do more. These approaches could and should catch on elsewhere.

Student study skills

This is the first report from a new team initiative, show and tell sessions within the Learning Technologies Team. Judith is the first member of the team to bite the bullet and show us what she has been doing for a particular faculty project. We plan to record the outcomes of the sessions in some form. This may be a video, podcast or in this case, a blog post ;-)

Judith Jurowska responded to a request at an Arts Faculty Learning and Teaching Committee meeting to put together a duo course for students to learn study skills. She started from faculty documentation to produce a word cloud and found that the main areas that came through were:

• Information gathering
• Analytical ability
• Referencing
• Essay writing
• Time management
• IT Skills

With help from the library and some of the department, Judith has put together a range of materials from existing content and from the web. Rather than re-invent the wheel, Judith took advantage of existing resources online. The materials now need some ownership from the academic staff in the faculty.

As a team, we think these materials could be equally useful for Sciences and Health and Social Science students. There is also the suggestion that the materials might work well in a wiki, or that a wiki could be added to the course.

Judith is ensuring that her work compliments and draws on projects undertaken by the library (providing library and information literacy tools), as well as those taking forward the Durham Award (a scheme to give students recogntion for transferable skills and non-academic activity). When finished and signed off, we would consider pushing out to colleges and tutors to promote.

Training Strategy

Staff feedback suggests that Summer and Easter are the best times for formal training sessions. Just in time training is both increasingly popular, and successful in getting staff to use the technology successfully in thier teaching. The Faculty Learning Technolgists are providing a great service in that regard.

• Some training naturally lends itself to the summer, particularly "Redesigning your courses" and "Authoring Online Tutorials".
• Others are more assessment driven "Preventing Plagiarism" and "Tests and Quizzes" and can take place later in the term.
• Blogs, wikis and podcasting can be helpful at various times throughout the year.
• For the summer of 2009, the move to BB 9 is key.
• one to one sessions are useful cover for periods when there may not be enough availability to put on full workshops.
• The plan needs to incorporate focus groups and previews at Easter and conversion courses in the summer.
• We need to establish an approach to providing appropriate training in Stockton. At present, we do not have mechanisms for establishing need and availability for what is a more limited audience. Regular survey or doodle lists may determin interest at Queens so that we can target training appropriately.

Good practice blog

We are looking to capture good practice quickly and easily. Following Andy Ramsden at Bath University, we are going ot give blogs a try. I think it doesn't require us all to use the same blog, so long as we can aggregate the results somewhere.

• I would like to be able to blog from my mobile.
• Something that easily takes video and audio is important.
• In an ideal world, it would be great to tweet the blog.
  

Must find out what plug-ins are available for Blogger.