As I wrote my speech for this event I realised that this project has been such a pleasure to work on thanks to to the enthusiasm and good will of a great many people, and for those who weren’t able to join us on the day and hear said speech, I’d like to share my thanks in this blog post.
Firstly, thanks to everyone (all 23 of you) who took part in this year’s cohort, who between you came to the 12 meetings, 6 writing retreats and 4 open events. Members of the cohort are at different stages of their CMALT journey but I’m really pleased to say that everyone who started with us, is still planning on completing their portfolio – so at the very least I haven’t put anyone off!
Congratulations to the 12 people who have submitted portfolios and are patiently awaiting their results – I’m planning another event like this later in the year to celebrate these results and I hope that these celebrations will be an ongoing part of the annual CMALT calendar. [Update: Further congratulations are now due to the 5 people, so far, who have passed their CMALT accreditation]
Thank you to all of the line mangers who supported their CMALT applicants and encouraged them through the process.
Thank you to Melissa Highton, Director of the Learning, Teaching and Web services division (LTW) for instigating this project and for her ongoing support.
Thank you to Jenni Houston for supporting the scheme from Digital Skills and Training Team and to Stuart Nicol, my line manager in Educational Design and Engagement Team, for their continued support.
Thank you to the people from other institutions who were already running cohort schemes and were kind enough to advise me in setting up this scheme:
Sarah Sherman from the Bloomsbury Group
Stefanie Anyadi from University College London
Julie Voce at Imperial College London
Thank you to Daphne Loads from the Institute for Academic Development (IAD) for her advice on setting up the scheme, facilitation of writing retreats and for speaking to the cohort about reflective portfolios.
And thank you to Rosie Bree for setting up the Writing Retreats and to the Institute for Academic Development for providing the room and supporting the Writing retreats
Thank you to Rachael Mfoafo for her excellent organisation of rooms and catering.
Thanks to all of our guest speakers:
Professor Lesley Diack who shared her insights as an experienced CMALT assessor
Toni Fisher, E-learning Advisor at Robert Gordon University who joined us for a webinar to share her recent experience of successfully completing her CMALT accreditation.
Eugen Stoica from the Scholarly Communications Team who spoke to use about Copyright and Open Access
Stuart Nicol who spoke about Open Educational Resources
Ruby Rennie who shared her insights on Accessibility as School Coordinator of Accessibility
Stephanie (Charlie) Farley Board Game Jam (Make your own OER using OERs)
Thank you to Martin Hawksey, Maren Deepwell and Thomas Palmer from the Association for Learning Technology –for their ongoing support and enthusiasm.
We have now opened the scheme for its second year, and I am greatly looking forward to working with another cohort as they start their CMALT journey.
I work as a Learning Technology Advisor in the Educational Design and Engagement team within Learning Teaching & Web Services (part of Information Services). I applied for the bursary as I am increasingly supporting staff working on fully distance online programmes and as the number of ODL programmes increase this is becoming a bigger part of my job. For example as service lead on QuestionMark Perception assessment system I support several ODL programmes in the creation and delivery of assessments.
What did I get from taking part in IDEL?
It was really interesting to get a student’s perspective on the institution I work for. I expected to get this by being a participant, and to an extent I did, but the most interesting insights came from getting to know the other students on the course. Despite it being fully online I had plenty of opportunities to talk with other students through online tutorials, in Skype, Collaborate and Second Life and also from the discussion forums in Moodle.
My collection of IDEL readings
Each week we were given a range of readings, some core and also recommendations for further reading, a proportion of these were in alternative formats like videos, but the majority are journal articles. Not only did it make an impressive pile by the end, but also allowed me to explore the technology around reading. I had a go with Mendeley (reference manager and PDF organizer) and tried reading and marking up text electronically, After that experiment I quickly opted for printing out documents on paper – I have to admit that having access to a laser printer did help! Before finally considering screen reading software (TextHelp Read and Write 10 – for which the University has a site licence), as it turned out from a tutorial discussion several other students did their reading this way. Studying for IDEL was a great way to make the space and time to read and I enjoyed some thought provoking articles regardless of how I read them.
IDEL activities offer its students opportunities to use a wide range of tools, thanks to this I was able to re-evaluate applications I thought I already knew such as Twitter and Second Life and also to explore/play with new tools such as Powtoon Cartoon creator and thinglink to make interactive images.
Themes that emerged from my blog posts over the IDEL course – appearing a Word Press Widget
One of the course requirements was regular blogging. I really enjoyed the reflective space of the blog and the encouragement to share my written reflection frequently, which was helped by the frequent feedback I received. We used WordPress and I like the fact that I was building up confidence in an openly available tool which I can continue to use for work or private projects in future.
The blog activity formed 60% of the assessment and the other 40% was a piece of work on a subject you selected, related to one (or more) of the course themes. I chose to create an Open Education Resource (OER) about OERS in HE – using the free website building tool Weebly. Completing it was hard, with the hand in date is just after the Christmas break, but-all-in-all a really useful experience. Choosing to create something ‘publicly viewable’ really did focus my mind and I think made me work harder!
Would I recommend IDEL to other Learning Technologists?
Absolutely. It’s a fantastic introduction to the possibilities of online education and the IAD bursary offers a great opportunity to take part in a highly regarded online master’s programme.
And if you do enjoy your IDEL experience, you can apply for a further bursary for a 20-credit course, which means you can leave with a PG Cert in Digital Education which is a great addition to your CV.
TREE (Technology Resources for Educational Enhancement) Logo
For the last year I’ve been working with my colleague, Steph Hay, on a project to deliver an interactive educational resource discovery tool, and we are really pleased that the beta version is now live: Tree (Technology Resources for Educational Enhancement).
provide information that people can find for themselves
communicate the versatility of our tools.
Anyone can access the tool but it is primarily aimed at teaching staff, particularly those new to the University.
I wrote about this project in a previous post where I talked about the requirements gathering process. To recap- we used an agile methodology for this project, keeping users at the centre of development throughout, from user stories for gathering requirements to frequent user testing.
I can’t believe how far we have come in the six months since I wrote that post. At that point it was still called the ‘Resource Discovery Tool’.
What’s in a name?
We started thinking about what to call this tool early in the project. ‘Resource Discovery Tool’ was too broad and non-specific, and for librarians means something more akin to a library catalogue. But it did lead us to some interesting conversations with our library colleagues. We collected name suggestions from participants in the requirements gathering sessions and then set up a survey in Bristol Online Surveys to poll opinion on these suggestions:
ASK (Academic Services Knowledgebase)
ASK FRED (Academic Services Knowledgebase Finding Resource Education Discovery)
Enquire Within
WhatTeachingTools?
TREE (Technology Resources for Educational Enhancement)
And the winner was: ASK (Academic Services Knowledgebase) (with ASK FRED a close second).
So why didn’t we call it that? Well, one of the fun things about working in a large institution is that there is so much going on, and it turns out that this name is already earmarked for another project. So we went back to the drawing board and sent out a second survey offering the choices:
GUIDE (Guide to University Information supporting Digital Education)
WhatTeachingTools?
TREE (Technology Resources for Educational Enhancement)
And so the winner was TREE (Technology Resources for Educational Enhancement). We were pleased with this name as we hope this name reflects what the tool is for and the acronym TREE offers interesting visual options for branding. Alas, it also offers Steph a world of pun options and word play became a large part of the TREE meetings and quickly infected our communications!
A tree and the McEwan Hall silhouetted against an orange sky
Growing TREE, from seed to sapling
We decided to build in Drupal, as the university website is also moving to this and there is in-house expertise to call upon when advice was needed. Continuing the Agile approach we went through four short build and checking cycles to reach this first live version. I say we, but really it was Steph who has worked the magic in Drupal on this project.
For each build we also undertook user acceptance testing (UAT), to check TREE was functioning as planned. For the first two rounds we send out test scripts (with a list of tasks) and asked users to complete these and email them back to us. This was great because testers could complete these when it suited them, from their own desks. However, it was difficult to frame tasks to test all aspects of the tool (for example how people react to a null search response) and it was not always clear from notes what testers had done at points. While the UAT was useful and successful, it did not allow us to do as much usability testing as we would have liked.
So for the last two rounds of testing we tried another approach called ‘accompanied surfing’. For this we booked a room and invited users in to sit with us as they worked through the tasks on the test script, talking through their thought processes as they did so. This offered a far greater insight into users expectations and search strategies than the earlier User Acceptance Testing.
TREE is currently in its ‘beta’ phase, which means that while fully functional and ready for use, there are further improvements coming and we are hoping for continued feedback and comments from users. These can be sent to us via the form on the on the Tree (Technology Resources for Educational Enhancement) website.
Further growth
I’m really pleased to have been involved in this project and it’s really satisfying for Steph and I to have created a live web tool, it’s a great feeling to see those user requirements turn into a real functional tool.
I’m also really pleased that this is just the start for TREE, as a phase two project has been agreed. Future developments may include:
extending the range of services included beyond those offered by IS
adding functionality to rate or comment on services.
We hope that TREE will be the ‘go-to’ site for any staff member at the University of Edinburgh interested in central services for technology enhanced learning.
Seeing the TREE in the woods?
Alongside further development comes raising awareness. We want to tell everyone involved in teaching in the University of Edinburgh about the TREE tool.
We are fortunate that so many people at the university contributed to this project and would like to thank all of them:
17 participated in requirements gathering workshops
143 completed the requirements gathering survey
14 took part in prioritisation events
47 individuals took part in user testing
many more provided help and consultation.
This is a large institution and it will take effort to make sure all staff in a teaching role are aware of the TREE tool. We are sending out emails and news items to every list we can access but would really appreciate help with this.
So please tell people about TREE
Please can you forward the TREE link (http://www.tree.is.ed.ac.uk/) to any list or person you think might be interested. Please add the link to any webpages, wiki pages or documents where you think it would be relevant, for example those you give to new members of staff.
I look forward to letting you know how the next phase of development goes in a future post.
I photographed this seagull who was very interested in joining the session on Pinterest, no doubt already an expert tweeter.
The full programme offered multiple streams of presentations and in this post I’m sharing brief notes of my highlights of the day.
I arrived part way through the key note from Sue Beckingham (from Sheffield Hallam University) but did manage to catch some useful links giving advice for students :
Also a useful resource for staff, from Professor Andy Miah (University of the West of Scotland) The A to Z of Social Media for Academia, which lists platforms used by acedemics in their professional lives (you can contribute to this by email or follow the hash tag #socialmediaHE)
Steve Harrison (@newsnumeracy) from Liverpool Hallam University gave an interesting presentation about Twitter as a tool for teaching and learning in the context of an undergraduate Journalism course. He explained that in Journalism Twitter is part of the professional repertoire. When I questioned this later he explained that using Twitter cannot be optional for Journalism students as they would not be able to get a job without being able to use it. So expertise with Twitter is threaded through the three years of the course in increased levels of complexity. In first year students learn to write news tweets in 140 characters, in the second year students use protected Twitter accounts as part of an assessed piece of work and in the third year the students use public Twitter as a source which they use to research and distribute live news stories.
Facebook Groups
Several speakers were talking about the use of Facebook. Mark Feltham (@MarkFeltham666) from Liverpool John Moores University shared his approaches to teaching 1st year students a core module in fundamentals of science, which offered several challenges including large amounts of statistics and a Monday 9am teaching slot. His approach included an innovative mix of: flexible pedagogies; student choice; and the ‘maker ethos’; and utilised Facebook groups. Marks presentation offered 10 reasons why you should use Social media in your teaching including several which focus on Facebook as a familiar place for students (he found 99% of students are already on it) which is quick and easy to use. He also found it easy and more creative to set work in Facebook, for example posting videos or using tools like Bitstrips. It was found to be a great way to manage group work because it gave evidence of contribution and he could ‘scrape posts’ to document this.
Anne Nortcliffe from Sheffield Hallam University also spoke about using Facebook to manage a computing course on which she taught. The students volunteered to set up and manage the closed group and also came with Anne to MELSIG to talk about their experiences. It was interesting to hear from the students directly and they spoke enthusiastically about this approach. They liked being able to see who had seen what was posted and that you could ‘tag’ people to draw their attention to things , features they don’t have in their VLE. They liked it because no one got left out of events if they were organised in Facebook. They also found it the easiest way to contact someone and worked out that tagging their tutor Anne was the best way to get her to contribute to a discussion. They described Facebook as ‘second nature for students’.
LinkedIn advice for Students
Charlotte Cork, World of Work Team manager, Liverpool John Moores University offered advice on LinkedIn from the context of advising students, but much of which is applicable also to staff profiles. For example I now know that I can change my ‘professional headline’ rather than leaving it at its default setting of my current job title. She suggests that part of the value of LinkedIn for students is the insights that can be gained from looking at the profiles of people working in your field, their skills and career paths.
Oli Young of Sheffield Hallam University, described his use of Pinterest as a tool to bridge theoretical gaps. He is teaching subjects such as Business Management, Hospitality, Finance and Legislation to students at level 4, 5 & 6 with little work experience. The students have a task to plan an international conference, and use Pinterest as a board to collect resources, such as venues and destinations. This means that when students move on to further aspects of the process they already have developed a context for the project and so it is more meaningful and less abstract.
The focus of the day was on use of social media tools but I was interested to note that most speakers also talked about using the institutional VLE alongside these for other aspects on the course such as core content or assignment drop boxes. It interests me to see how the pieces such as core supported systems, external tools and service integrations fit together in different institutions.
MELSIG has a forthcoming event BYOD4L Bring Your Own Devices for Learning an open (registration free) learning event for students & teachers (facilitated, stand-alone, for other groups/courses) running online 14th – 18th July 2014.
Earlier this week I was able to attend the International Conference on Networked Learning when it was held in my home city of Edinburgh. I’ve not been to any of the previous conferences and was pleased to find this to be a very friendly and welcoming conference attended by an interesting group of delegates. It was also a very well organised event (and I’m not just saying this as much of this was so ably arranged by colleagues at the University of Edinburgh).
#nlc2014
The conference hashtag was #nlc2014 and there was lots of twitter activity. I’m not yet experienced enough at multitasking to contribute to twitter during the sessions, but I could see that plenty of people around me where doing so. Interesting slides where photographed and on the twitter stream before I’d thought to take a photo. It also allowed me to get an idea of the sessions I’d not been able to attend. Tweets and retweets were coming from people not attending and it was clear that people were following the conference from elsewhere which really added to the buzz of the event and feeling of connecting to a wider community. I’m now following many people from this event which should give my Twitter account a new lease of life!
During the three day event I attended two key notes, two symposia and 17 full papers presentations/pecha kucha presentations and it appears (now that I am back in the office) that I wrote 18 pages of notes. Leaving me with the dilemma of how to distil this experience into a coherent blog post! I’m also aware that this is a very active group so much of the conference has already been blogged and tweeted (I’ve added some links at the end of the post).
For this post I’ll briefly talk about the two plenary speeches which were definite highlights for me. I think these have been recorded so should be available for others to enjoy, I’ll add the links when they are available.
Neil Selwyn: Why it is crucial to be critical
The first was from Neil Selwyn, Professor from Faculty of Education, Monash University in Australia. He gave a thought provoking opening plenary on ‘Why it is crucial to be critical’ in which he suggested that ‘Being critical is not in the ed-tech DNA’. He encouraged us (as educational technologists) to ask awkward questions:
Ask awkward questions – Selwyn
Q. what underlying values/agendas are implicit?
Q. in whose interests does this work? Who benefits?
Q. what is new here?
Q what are the un-intended consequences…what are the second-order effects?
Q. what are the potential gains…what are the potential losses?
Q. what are the social problems being addressed?
He also suggested 5 things for educational technologists to do:
Need to de-personalise how we perceive ed-tech
Need to be nasty (but after some debate downgraded this to snarky)
Need to do this with humour and good grace
Need to be contrary, contradictory, uncertain
Need to be persistent and prominent
Followed by the call to: write often, publish often and publish widely.
Steve Fuller: The lecture 2.0 or why the future of the University depends on brand
The second plenary speaker on the second day was Steve Fuller, Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology in the Department of Sociology University of Warwick who gave a talk ‘The lecture 2.0 or why the future of the University depends on brand.‘
He started by asking: What difference do Universities make? Are they past their sell by date? Going against the current trends he states that lectures are very important. What is valuable about the lecture is not that it provides reliable transmission of information. Lecturers should exemplify ‘daring to know’, not be someone who can be reduced to their PowerPoint.
He made the case that since the Enlightenment the value of a University education was to teach individuals to learn for themselves and to make judgements for themselves. The right for free expression came along with this. Academic freedom was a guild right, because they had developed the skills to make judgements.
He proposed Lecturing as an art form of the University. Other providers can produce materials to transmit information and there are other accreditation bodies. Writing was made to come alive in the lecture. It is/was a branding medium, great Universities had the great lectures. They understood the difference between speaking and writing as mediums. The importance of improvisation, saying much more than is in the notes. For Steve Fuller being a good performer is important for an academic.
This was a great conference and I’m aware this post doesn’t really do justice to the breadth of the work presented. I’ve been privileged to meet fascinating people undertaking interesting work and I’m going to think further about how this impacts on my job, particularly around the development of the Social and Cloud based learning and teaching consultancy service which I am currently supporting and developing.
The first Networked Learning Conference was held in 1998, and has been held every two years since. The 10th conference will be in 2016, with the venue to be decided. Even if I can’t be there in person I’ll be following it on twitter.
