I've now got a bit behind with this blog, so here's an attempt to catch up a couple of weeks.
Week 7 was looking at multimedia and once again we did the group tasks on the wiki. This time I setup the page at the beginning of the week and suggested using a table to show rate our competencies.
I started by putting a few obvious ones in and left space for other members of the group to add more. I also put a space for discussion at the bottom.
This task seemed to work better then some of the previous group based tasks and most of the group contributed at least details of there own level of competencies.
Unfortunately, the deeper discussions seemed to be limited to just myself and Colleen. I'm not sure how to get the rest of the group more involved. Perhaps it was mainly a matter of the TMA being just around the corner. I also got the impression that some members of the group were still doing the work from previous weeks. Perhaps it's just a matter of allowing more time for these tasks.
The second part of the activity was to record another multimedia item. I was intending to record a popcast of my reflections, but by the time I had been able to get to the shops to buy a microphone it seemed sensible to move onto the TMA.
I'm still intending to do this, but as it's holding back the rest of my reflections I shall just write this transcript for now and record the popcast over the weekend.
Personal Blogs
Week 7
Friday, 21 Nov 2008, 10:31
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Week 6
Tuesday, 21 Oct 2008, 11:07
Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Owen Barritt, Tuesday, 21 Oct 2008, 11:13
Having not really used an eportfolio before this course, it was interesting to look at some of the alternatives to MyStuff.
I looked at PebblePad and FolioLive.
PebblePad looked more user friendly with usability being it's main focus. However, whereas MyStuff seems based on the same principles of tagging and sharing that major social networking sites such as facebook and myspace are, in PebblePad although these features are present they seem to take more of a back seat.
FolioLive seemed to have less features, it didn't appear to offer much in the way of sharing options (other than to the course tutor) and it didn't look like you could tag work against the syllabus. However, as students paid their own subscription to the portfolio it did fit the lifelong webspace model more than the other 2 alternatives.
In all, all 3 had good features the other 2 lacked. However, in general, I like the principles that MyStuff is built on. Tagging, sharing, revision tracking, comments, etc. As has been pointed out my other students, however, it is quite clunky, but it is also fairly new in terms of development.
The online discussion for this task seemed to be minor, however. It seems a shame that full discussions don't seem to be taking place for these activities. There appear to be only a few students contributing to discussions and most of these take place in the course forums where other discussions take place rather than activity discussions where it seems to be more sets of postings with a few comments.
I'm not sure whether it's just that most students don't have time to look at many of the messages in the forums or whether the rest of the students are taking more of a passive role in the forums. Perhaps more discussion based activities are needed to encourage others to take a part in these discussions to make them seem more of a required part of the course.
I also had a look at the Open Source discussions in the supplementary activity. It was interesting that Martin's points on the open source products seemed to mirror what I had found when I first started using Linux as an open source desktop for my home PC. Given how much the desktop software has been developed over the past few years with the development of major products such as openoffice, it would be interesting to see if eportfolio development has mirrored this, if so some of the open source products could have a lot going for them now.
And now this blog is finally up to date with where I am in the course...
I looked at PebblePad and FolioLive.
PebblePad looked more user friendly with usability being it's main focus. However, whereas MyStuff seems based on the same principles of tagging and sharing that major social networking sites such as facebook and myspace are, in PebblePad although these features are present they seem to take more of a back seat.
FolioLive seemed to have less features, it didn't appear to offer much in the way of sharing options (other than to the course tutor) and it didn't look like you could tag work against the syllabus. However, as students paid their own subscription to the portfolio it did fit the lifelong webspace model more than the other 2 alternatives.
In all, all 3 had good features the other 2 lacked. However, in general, I like the principles that MyStuff is built on. Tagging, sharing, revision tracking, comments, etc. As has been pointed out my other students, however, it is quite clunky, but it is also fairly new in terms of development.
The online discussion for this task seemed to be minor, however. It seems a shame that full discussions don't seem to be taking place for these activities. There appear to be only a few students contributing to discussions and most of these take place in the course forums where other discussions take place rather than activity discussions where it seems to be more sets of postings with a few comments.
I'm not sure whether it's just that most students don't have time to look at many of the messages in the forums or whether the rest of the students are taking more of a passive role in the forums. Perhaps more discussion based activities are needed to encourage others to take a part in these discussions to make them seem more of a required part of the course.
I also had a look at the Open Source discussions in the supplementary activity. It was interesting that Martin's points on the open source products seemed to mirror what I had found when I first started using Linux as an open source desktop for my home PC. Given how much the desktop software has been developed over the past few years with the development of major products such as openoffice, it would be interesting to see if eportfolio development has mirrored this, if so some of the open source products could have a lot going for them now.
And now this blog is finally up to date with where I am in the course...
Week 5
Tuesday, 21 Oct 2008, 10:49
Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Owen Barritt, Tuesday, 21 Oct 2008, 11:07
Week 5 seemed a little lighter on the workload for the compulsory topics, so allowed me some time to go back, add some references to the eportfolio items from the early activities, test the revisions feature of mystuff, post a few reflections to here and get up to date with other people's blogs.
I've now set up a feedreader to read the blogs of the other students on the course. It a shame more students aren't blogging, but then not everyone has the time or the motivation to do so.
It was interesting to see some of the tutors comments about how the course is going, particularly Robin's comments about the first group activity, in which he seems to have felt it didn't go as well as it could. As I've already said on here, I found it quite enlightening, so a very useful activity even if it didn't (in fact because) it didn't run smoothly. I posted a comment to him to let him know.
The needs analysis grid was a useful task to get an idea of self-assessment and setting objectives. I posted some reflection on this task as a separate post here.
I was interested in contributing to the supplementary activity for this week and collated a lot of the points from the needs grids that were shared on the wiki. Once I'd done this, the other students who had contributed appeared to stop (possibly because they'd moved onto the next section), which made me question whether I should continue as it wouldn't really be a group task if I did it myself and it seemed less useful to do the task on my own. However, Helen did point out that it was worth perservering with anyway and adapt to any collaboration that comes along.
I've now reduced the list slightly myself and will have another look at it later. All collaboration welcome, if anyone wants to revisit this activity, the overall list is on the wiki at:
http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/ouwiki/view.php?id=129238&page=Skills%2FCompetencies+list+for+PDP+Grid
I've now set up a feedreader to read the blogs of the other students on the course. It a shame more students aren't blogging, but then not everyone has the time or the motivation to do so.
It was interesting to see some of the tutors comments about how the course is going, particularly Robin's comments about the first group activity, in which he seems to have felt it didn't go as well as it could. As I've already said on here, I found it quite enlightening, so a very useful activity even if it didn't (in fact because) it didn't run smoothly. I posted a comment to him to let him know.
The needs analysis grid was a useful task to get an idea of self-assessment and setting objectives. I posted some reflection on this task as a separate post here.
I was interested in contributing to the supplementary activity for this week and collated a lot of the points from the needs grids that were shared on the wiki. Once I'd done this, the other students who had contributed appeared to stop (possibly because they'd moved onto the next section), which made me question whether I should continue as it wouldn't really be a group task if I did it myself and it seemed less useful to do the task on my own. However, Helen did point out that it was worth perservering with anyway and adapt to any collaboration that comes along.
I've now reduced the list slightly myself and will have another look at it later. All collaboration welcome, if anyone wants to revisit this activity, the overall list is on the wiki at:
http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/ouwiki/view.php?id=129238&page=Skills%2FCompetencies+list+for+PDP+Grid
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