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.