FUSION 2011 Desire2Learn Conference

July 15th, 2011

I’ve been fortunate to be able to attend the Desire2Learn (D2L) annual conference FUSION 2011 in Denver, Colorado this week and have enjoyed a great atmosphere, met lots of people, and learned more about D2L and how it can support teaching. I’ve still got two days of workshops to attend and look forward to some more in-depth best practice sessions on how D2L can support authentic teaching practice through assessment, analytics, learning design and ePortfolio.

Denver thunderstorm

There’s been spectacular thunderstorms each evening this week and the thunder & lighting generally announce a good downpour. The days have been warm but I haven’t been outside all that much as the conference has kept us busy from 8-4:30. There have been lots of sessions to choose from, including hands-on workshops to help people learn more about particular tools. Plenty of D2L staff have been available to discuss issues and I liked the triage desk (with staff dressed in white coats & stethoscopes) where you could go and chat about feature requests or other things that are of concern/need fixing. Nice.

I usually find conferences are a good litmus test of how we are travelling with regard to our practice and use of technology for learning and teaching. It’s been good here at D2L, to be confirmed in a way that indicates that we ‘up there’ with regard to best practice and robust implementation. Great to talk to other educators though, and hear about alternative ways of doing things and I’ll be reviewing all this as I debrief after the conference.

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the storm before the calm (has passed)

July 6th, 2011

The last few weeks have been the storm before the calm. My university has chosen D2L to replace our Blackboard LMS (WebCT Vista) and we’ve been busy implementing for Trimester 2. As usual lots to sort out, configuration, training, educational development, meetings, negotiations, hand holding, requesting, testing and trialling. This week we went live with a limited number of units/subjects and for my Faculty this means around 100 staff and nearly 4,000 students – we’re all set for when teaching starts next week. There’ll be some evaluation of the processes and how it’s all gone once things have settled down and teaching’s well underway. All good and exciting work, but it’s been a wild ride that’s been a storm at times, and now I’m ready for some calm.

Storm in Colorado
Storms in Colorado (photo credit Jerry W. Lewis)

So, for some calm I’m heading over to Denver, Colorado on Friday where I’ll be attending the Fusion 2011 Desire2Learn users conference. I’m looking forward to it as it will be the first D2L conference I’ve attended, I’ve never been to Denver before, and the weather’s going to be much warmer than I’ve been experiencing lately (and I hope it’s calmer than the photo I found to illustrate this post).

I’m also looking forward to meeting other D2L users and having an opportunity to share our stories while doing some networking. The D2L staff will also have my attention as we get to know each other and establish our partnership as client and vendor. Amongst other things, I’ll be learning as much as I can about the ePortfolio tool and how others are using D2L for blended learning.  I’ll also be giving a presentation with a colleague in which we will provide two perspectives (learning systems and an academic) of the implementation process so far. I’ll be sharing some insights via twitter of course (@colwar) and intend to supplement them here with some blog posts.

Now to pack my bags – I hope there’s some good company & movies on the plane.

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re-imagining assessment – can it be a reusable resource?

June 14th, 2011

It was via a recent tweet by my friend @rellypops that I was introduced to a wonderful collection of resources that got me thinking about student assessment and how we might begin to provide other forms of evaluation that provide more scope for creativity and engagement than the ubiquitous essay.

Narelle’s tweet led me to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Connections site that invites its “staff to offer their personal perspectives on works of art in the Museum’s vast collection. Their voices range from the authoritative to the highly subjective, and touch upon any number of themes and concepts.”

MMA Connections Hands

What I like about this project of a potential 100 episodes, is that each person brings a knowledge and passion to the subject they are covering. They have selected specific art works from the museum that focus on, or reference a theme, such as Hands, City, Water, Light, Maps, etc. I think this is a great resource and models a nice format that could be used by students to use in assessments such as reports. To take a problem, issue, or topic and to research around that, collecting relevant information in text with illustrative and supporting images, and then creating a story that links the parts to create a snapshot that is greater than the whole. This type of project outcome can quickly become a useful collection to share with other students and a resource to add to an ePortfolio. Are we able to rethink assessment so that it is conceptualised as a potential resource, something of value that is reusable?

Not that everyone has the capacity to develop a website such as this with it production values, but there are a number of other ways to create such a multimedia collection. You could do this as a narrated PowerPoint (such as Pecha Kucha style), or online using Voicethread, or an image sequence in QuickTime with an audio track that is saved as video, or a even with screen capture software such as Camtasia. I’m sure there would be many more… Can you suggest other ways?

Of course this isn’t to dismiss the fact that these could also be done in ‘analogue’ by creating a book or folio by hand. I’m just cognisant of the benefit of a digital format and that is can be shared with many. Is anyone already doing and happy to share their story?

I’d love to hear about your ideas about thinking differently about assessment, particularly in higher education.

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So what’s the problem with lecture recordings?

April 18th, 2011

There has been some recent commentary about the value of recording lectures at university and elsewhere (see Mark Smithers’ blog and comments). To set up and automate such a system involve high infrastructure costs, and questions being asked about the return on investment with regard to use & reuse of recordings. Just how

At my university there is a significant usage of recorded lectures, and students demand access to them. Staff are stressed over whether the recordings have worked and are of good quality. Some staff even fear that they will receive bad student evaluations if the system fails and students complain over not having access to recorded lectures to supposedly review their study.

Microphone

Photo credit: Ben McLeod

I don’t want to go into the pros and cons of recorded lectures or of the systems that support them. What I wanted to write about was the process we’ve just begun of reviewing our current lecture recording system. We undertook a logic mapping workshop with relevant stakeholders from across the university and spent some time working through strengths, problems, solutions and benefits (sort of like SWOT but different).

One of the outcomes of this process was to suggest that we may need to think differently about our idea of what a lecture is. The technology has been constraining the paradigm of what we understand the lecture to be. Originally developed to be able to record the delivery of an oration and maybe also capture a series of powerpoint slide or some video, the software was modelled on the idea of one teacher talking to an audience (of students). Blended and flexible learning paradigms are showing us that the traditional oration (while appropriate in some circumstances) needs to be adjusted to support new ways of teaching and learning.

I’ve been encouraged that we will be developing a proposal and framework that understands that we may need to record more than just a stand & deliver lecture. We’ll be seeking to be able to record interactive lectures, short ad-hoc talks & presentations (with or without video). The aim then, is to also be a catalyst to help teachers come to understand different models for getting a message across.

As Stephen Downes recently argued in a debate, ‘The Lecture Must Stand’, it just needs to be adapted appropriate to the need.

 

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social media – sometimes a lens darkly?

April 17th, 2011

Social media as a platform, supports communication and connectivity and is fairly instantaneous and generally public. It has become a popular avenue for individuals to share news, ideas, resources, and spruik their personal opinions. For reasons explained below, I’ve felt compelled to pen a few words regarding a (darker?) side of social media that I find rather sad. In so doing I may just be suggesting that social media exposes the darker side of human nature in a more public way. All the more reason to provide guidelines and models of best practice for people in the workplace and our educational institutions.

Social media apps

There’s been plenty of mainstream media coverage of recent Skype, Twitter, and Facebook controversies in Australia, where people have made inappropriate and immature comments about others that are disappointing and embarrassing. While I find aspects of this unfortunate and disturbing, I understand that it may be simply reflecting what may often happen in a smaller sphere, and not out in public. What surprises me is that the people getting up to this sort of behaviour should know better. Are people more inclined to act this way because they can hide behind their social networking software and not have to say things to someone’s face?

I admire that TV shows such as Q&A invite the participation of social media into the program and allow the audience and viewers to comment. I believe this can be a good thing, but I find that it also encourages and provides a platform for people to take a cheap shot, or be critical without backing up their position. Maybe I’m being naive, but I wonder why there seems to be too much of a willingness to slag off and polarise. I’m not sure if the motivation is to express an alternate view, seeing how clever they can sound, or just to draw attention to themselves. This bothers me enough to the extent that I don’t even want to watch the program, let alone follow the #qanda hashtag. I’m not for a moment suggesting that there are no useful, thoughtful questions and comments that people do make, it’s just the other stuff detracts from the conversation/discussion and often isn’t funny.

I suppose my point is that it can be difficult (but not impossible) to have useful & wholesome debate using social media, it’s just that it often seems to be a bunch of people making noise that irritates, like a dog barking away behind a fence. I’m thankful that at least I can choose not to listen… What do you think?

Oh, and if you’re after some guidance on how to use social media and participate in social networks there’s no excuse as there’s plenty of resources…

Telstra’s 3 Rs of Social Media Engagement

Intel Social Media Guidelines

Framework Social Media Guidelines | Australian Flexible Learning Framework

Enterprise: A List of 40 Social media Staff Guidelines (Laurel Papworth)

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from the walled garden to the open meadow

February 5th, 2011

In my workplace we’ve been using Yammer for a while now and I’ve noted that a social networking site (built in drupal) that was serving our web 2.0 community wasn’t being used anymore. I’m OK with this development as Yammer is working well and creating a larger community than we had in the old ‘alt_deakin’ site.

Alt deakin

What got me thinking though, was the rich resource that existed in that old site and the possibility that it would be archived and ‘lost’. I had been doing a regular posting each week (for a couple of years) of something I’d found (or been lead to) on the interwebs that I thought might be interesting to others. Another factor was that this site (along with yammer) is behind the institution firewall and not accessible to everyone. While I do share things via Twitter with the #yam hashtag, I find a blog post can provide a more comprehensive coverage. My dilemma then, was how to have a copy of these posts for my own reference and make them available somewhere else, for everyone else. To bring it all out into the open. I thought I’d embark on a two staged project to sort out my problem.

Stage 1 – I’ve been busy in my spare time ‘porting’ my posts across to a new blog space called ‘eclectica‘ and updating them where necessary. I’ve started with the most recent so the archives will slowly grow till they reach back a couple of years. Hope to see you there sometime.

Stage 2 – Will be to combine them all them into an epub so as to have an indexed document that’s self contained and reasonably accessible across a range of platforms. I’ll keep you posted on how that goes…

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