reflecting on first flirt with wikiing in L&T

On the negatives:

1. Students were thrown by the request to edit a page within Blackboard - cant get away from the fact that this may be partly my own baggage with this perception but that is literally what I witnessed from some who came in to attempt it. I would not lay all the blame on Blackboard as a monolithic VLE, nor the fact that the course is set up around didactic transmission of knowledge. It is the simple fact that it took a while to sink in that they could edit in there.
   
2. I think the layout that I have run with on several occasions now (only with a discussion list in the past) was too rigidly following the mindmap I did of module themes. To make this easier I need to streamline and probably leave out some pages. Even in the discussion list version this would be a good idea. In fact, I have had a sense that some of the themes cross-over anyway so there is duplication which can only lead to confusion. I could organise it with the front page having a limited list of topics and then students edit the front page to add a linktoanewpage naming it with the website's name which would then come up in the list of pages on the right. (Ok - done that now after an hour or so!)

I've set up an evaluation page anyway and emailed students asking for feedback so lets see what comes of that...

sms the lecturer

Have been triggered to thinking about this for a number of reasons. Partly it was the Dron book about so-called linear media. Txt messages are not free but peekamo makes it as near-to as could be imagined.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2005.11.014 have some good hints about unexpected outcomes. It seems that the time and cost of making an sms are factors of concern to students with many using pay as you go phones. It would make sense to give students 2 minutes at various points in the lecture to txt questions/comments.
One other issue raised is the fuzzing of boundaries between life outside the lecture hall and life inside it where students have subjected themselves to the pedagogic control of the lecturer and may be discomfited by him/her opening the lecture up in this way: normally we encourage students to turn their phones off! I liked the way that the messages were then made available after the in-class session in a discussion-type interface to encourage even more interaction.
I wonder if it might be possible to bring elements of the DFAQ system (see http://www.ifets.info/journals/7_3/5.pdf ) together with this...

wiki emergent

So having not been back to the wiki since launching it, I wonder what I will find. I put in a structure as best I could and hoped that students will grow it. But that may not be their response at all.
That quote that rejoining a discussion list is like trying to join a busy motorway may also apply with the wiki. What a late joining student will find is quite different to the first person who edited it. Can the wiki cope with this dialectic being scaled up to serve the learning needs of 80 students...?

new call for new literacies education

This time it's from the Horizon report:

The academy is faced with a need to provide formal instruction in information, visual, and technological literacy as well as in how to create meaningful content with today’s tools. Webbased tools are rapidly becoming the standard, both in education and in the workplace. Technologically mediated communication is the norm. Fluency in information, visual, and technological literacy is of vital importance, yet these literacies are not formally taught to most students. We need new and expanded definitions of these literacies that are based on mastering underlying concepts rather than on specialized skill sets, and we need to develop and establish methods for teaching and evaluating these critical literacies at all levels of education. The challenge is to develop curricula and assessment rubrics that address not only traditional capabilities like developing an argument over the course of a long paper, but also how to apply those competencies to other forms of communication such as short digital videos, blogs, or photo essays.

http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2008-Horizon-Report.pdf

peer marking process

Just when I thought I had done enough on paperless marking for a bit, up comes peer marking! arg!
We want groups of students to be able to give each member of their group a mark based on their evaluation of the relative contribution each made to the project: they will effectively be asked to assess each other on 'teamworking'. This will make up 20% of their final mark in a summative group project.
We did something similar using paper a couple of years ago and I collated the marks manually via excel and then did a mail-merge to send students their individualised score.
I have been doing a first trawl of likely options but blackboard appears to be something of a let down. Moodle has a 'Workshop module' http://docs.moodle.org/en/Workshop_module which may offer just the kind of thing we need - apart from getting someone to code it up for us bespoke. Here are some initial thoughts:
Easy group creation (upload a simple file with names, email, groupID, CohortID, ModuleCode)
The main interface is a kind of questionnaire:
List of group-member names along side (<=10)
List of criteria along top (<=5)
Grid with totals at the ends, confirm scores page.
Tutor users can add in the rest of the final mark (i.e. 80% using their own editable marking rubrick page - as above but including a comments box) edit scores and query to discover pool scores.
Option to email pooled score to each student once a deadline passes.

hmmmm...

m-IT Skills

It was in a meeting yesterday that this occurred to me. Micro-IT skills are what makes the paperless marking process easier or infernal to conduct. When I'm doing things I quickly work out the quickest way of doing things although I'm not averse to finding an even quicker way. For example, keyboard shortcuts (especially the really useful everyday ones CTRL+z, x, c, v). Everyone should know about these but seemingly not everyone does. It sounds really basic - the kind of thing people can pick up from ECDL but dont always. Anyway, now I've been asked to document the ones I recommend for paperless marking.... These skills are mighty with a small m, they also are the kind of thing I (mike - with a littlem (my moniker in Second Life) tend to emphasise so I coined the phrase m-IT Skills (this has nothing to do with one of the world's greatest Universities although someone there has probably beaten me to it!)

affective intelligence gap spotted

... trying to capture the moment here but I have recently had a couple of email replies to mine which had clearly made the recipients yelp, judging from the responses. Note to self: I need to set the tone of a 'functional' email before sending.

e-fluency?! ;-))

King's Learning Activities look a lot like Goodyear explains (i.e. Ohlsson, Morrison & Collins) in various places as contributing to 'epistemic fluency' but I am uncomfortable with that term. Perhaps it should be shortened to 'e-fluency'!?!

King, A. (2007). Scripting Collaborative Learning Processes: A Cognitive Perspective. In F. Fischer, K. Ingo, H. Mandl & J. M. Haake (Eds.), Scripting computer-supported collaborative learning : cognitive, computational and educational perspectives. (pp. 14-37). New York: Springer.

Reasons to love my computer- connections

Because some days I do need them - this is a kinda note to self that occasionally something graces my in box and I realise that that would not have happened any other way. In this case it was a brief email from that lovely man, Seth Chaiklin. In this way, connections in danger of becoming dormant are re-activated or at least kept alive.

eee

This is getting quite exciting. £240 (inc VAT & Delivery) for all the everyday stuff you do on the Internet. I would choose this form factor over a smartphone anyday.
http://www.rm.com/FE/Products/Product.asp?cref=PD1024415
http://www.pocket-lint.co.uk/reviews/review.phtml/2731/3755/Asus-eee-701-pc-laptop.phtml
This is getting quite exciting.