Podcasting
Sunday, 11 Jan 2009, 15:53
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Edited by Owen Barritt, Sunday, 11 Jan 2009, 16:03
Podcast
http://www.switchpod.com/users/ob735/feed.xml
http://media.switchpod.com//users/ob735/podcast.mp3Audio player: podcast.mp3
A brief discussion on tagging and sharing, their use in popular websites and how they carry accross into elearning.
Reflection
Installing all the recommended software was straightforward (already had Audacity installed, so only needed to install Juice in the end).
Started with subscribing to a few of the podcasts recommended in the course webpage and the podcasts that were already up from the other students to get an idea of what to record on.
Spent a while trying to figure out why Juice wasn't finding any podcasts to download on any of the RSS feeds I'd added. It turned out to be that my laptop was trying to go through the proxy server at work, but I was at home. Switched it off when I realised and everything worked perfectly.
In recording the podcast, as with any presentation, I planned what I was going to say first and then recorded the audio. I did the recording in stages stopping during the natural pauses, relistening and possibly re-recording each few seconds.
I did wonder whether this would make it a bit jumpy, but listening back to it, it doesn't seem that noticable and allowed a process of reviewing while creating (as I would normally use in a blog post).
There is unfortunately a slight hum on the recording, which I suspect is down to the quality of the microphone. Given more time I would have experimented with audacity to see if there was a way to filter this out, but suspect it would be impossible without cutting some of my vocal sound.
It would probably have been beneficial to have spoken loader and closer to the microphone to make the audio clearer as my voice is quite quiet in places.
Definition of Learning Technologist
Tuesday, 2 Dec 2008, 15:15
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Learning Technologist
Technical expert whose role is to influence the use of technology in the curriculum by gaining insight into the curriculum and sharing own technical expertise with academic staff often as part of a broader role (Oliver, 2002).
They can just apply educational recipes using "off the shelf" products (Lisewiki & Joyce, 2003), but the more effective practitioners will be pedadogically driven (Oliver, 2002).
References
Lisewski, B. and Joyce, P. (2003) ‘Examining the five-stage e-moderating model: designed and emergent practice in the learning technology profession’, ALT-J, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 55–66.
Oliver, M. (2002) ‘What do learning technologists do?’ [online], Innovations in Education and Training International, vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 245–52.
Learning Technologists
Sunday, 30 Nov 2008, 22:07
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Edited by Owen Barritt, Sunday, 30 Nov 2008, 22:10
I have just finished reading the paper by Oliver (2002).
It was strange reading this as it the general descriptions generally seemed to fit my current job, although I've never really heard the term used before.
I currently collaborate with the teaching staff I work with to develop the curriculum using technology. Educational value is the main focus of what I do. Although I have little authority over the curriculum we use, I have influence through technical knowledge.
I've been in this role for around 3 years (although it has changed a lot in that time and I have had some influence in how it has developed) and have been working for the WSET for around 4 years. I am in the 25-35 age range and am not involved in lecturing.
My role is broad and includes providing admin support for distance learning students as well as collaborating with other members of staff to develop technology use in distance learning and classroom based courses (we have just invested in interactive whiteboards and I played a role in the selection of these and am collaborating with teaching staff to develop activities to use with these).
Until I recently persuaded my boss that it would be beneficial for me to have more time to devote to other things, I was also the librarian.
Recently I have been gaining more of a managerial role for the elearning we do, so perhaps that represents me broadening out into more of an 'elearning professional'. It will be interesting to see how these views change as I read the other papers for this.
References
Oliver, M. (2002) ‘What do learning technologists do?’ [online], Innovations in Education and Training International, vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 245–52. Personal Preliminary Definitions of Profession, E-learning and E-learning Professional
Thursday, 27 Nov 2008, 17:48
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Profession
Based on the definitions by Sockett (1985), Perkins (1985) and the traits of Millerson (1964) (all cited in Warrior, 2002). I define a profession as:
A highly skill occupation based on theoretical knowledge, intellectual training and education, which performs a crucial social function.
Elearning
Based mainly on my own practice, I would broadly define elearning as:
Education and training performed at a distance using IT resources.
Elearning Professional
Based on the 2 definitions above, I would define an Elearning Professional as:
An individual skilled in facilitating education and training of others, at a distance, using IT resources, based on their theoretical knowledge, intellectual training and education.
References
Warrior, B. (2002) ‘Reflections of an educational professional’ [online], Journal of Hospitality, Leisure, Sport and Tourism Education, vol. 1, no 2. Available from: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/hlst/documents/johlste/0030_warrior_vol1no2.pdf (accessed 27 November 2008).
Perkin 1996 and Professional Society
Tuesday, 25 Nov 2008, 15:07
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Edited by Owen Barritt, Tuesday, 25 Nov 2008, 15:31
Perkin's (1996) views on society are interesting and I can see some truth in what he describes. Modern industries are consolidating into larger companies through Mergers and Acquisitions (Baldwin et al, 2001), which will obviously lead to Executives and professionals gaining more power, with industries having a wide range of influence on government policy and society as a whole. For example, the current influence of the oil industry (Baker Institute Energy Forum, 2007) and drugs companies (Smith, 2005).
As Perkin highlights this will require greater demand for expertise, which is demonstrated clearly in the UK with the government's push to get more young people through higher education (Labour Party, n.d.).
Although professionals play a large role in shaping modern society, modern information technology and social networking also play a key role as proposed in the Information Society and Networking Society models (Wikipedia, n.d.). Perkin does take these into account to an extent by discussing the need for professionals to develop these technologies, but clearly does not consider them to the extent they have grown in the 12 years since the paper was written.
References
Baker Institute Energy Forum (2007),
Strategies and Influence of Emerging National Oil Companies on World Energy Markets, Available from
http://www.rice.edu/energy/research/nationaloil/docs/PECNOCstudyprotocolfinal.pdf (accessed 25 November 2008)
Baldwin L, Camm F, Morre N,
Appendix C: Industry Consolidation Trends in
Federal Contract Bundling, Rand Corporation, Available from
http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1224/MR1224.appc.pdf (accessed 25 November 2008)
Perkin, H. (1996) Chapter 1 of
The Third Revolution: Professional Elites in the Modern World, London: Routledge.
Labour Party Website,
http://www.labour.org.uk/ (accessed 25 November 2008)
Smith R (2005) Curbing the Influence of the Drug Industry: A British View. PLoS Med 2(9): e241, Available from
http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020241&ct=1 (accessed 25 November 2008)
Wikipedia (n.d.),
Information Society, Available from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_society (accessed 25 November 2008)
Wikipedia (n.d.),
Network Society, Available from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_society (accessed 25 November 2008)
Week 7
Friday, 21 Nov 2008, 10:31
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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.
Week 6
Tuesday, 21 Oct 2008, 11:07
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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...
Tags:
revision tracking, reflection, mystuff, technology, h808, forum, critique, open source, collaboration, pebblepad, foliolive, tagging, sharing Week 5
Tuesday, 21 Oct 2008, 10:49
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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+GridWeek 4
Tuesday, 14 Oct 2008, 17:20
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Edited by Owen Barritt, Tuesday, 21 Oct 2008, 10:50
I started the activities for week 4 quite late, because I wanted to do the reflection activity from week 3 first.
The reading for this section was quite daunting when I looked at the first paper, which appears to be 27 pages long. It turned out the main part of the paper was only 16 pages and the rest was appendices and references and the other 2 papers were much shorter.
My aim is now to start the reading at the beginning of the week for sections with large amounts of research in order to allow more time, even if the actual activities wait until later in the week.
The activities this week included a brief "online discussion" activity where we posted what we found out to the discussion forum. Although there were some interesting things shared and it was interesting to see what Mitchell picked out from the same paper I read, the discussion was very much everyone making a blog-style post to the forum and no real discussion around it, which seems a shame.
I am now trying to get into the materials earlier in order to reply to people when they first post these comments in order to actually have a discussion on the topics which arise. We all seem at the moment to be working individually with very little discussion of our ideas.
The criteria was interesting to put together, as part of my work I reused the Penn State examples, because I felt it was important to include good and bad examples. Alan has suggested that I go back and replace these with my own examples to show greater understanding, which I will probably try to do over the coming weeks.
OU URLs
Tuesday, 14 Oct 2008, 13:22
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Edited by Owen Barritt, Tuesday, 21 Oct 2008, 11:08
I'm getting increasingly frustrated with the URLs the OU tools use. Surely, it would be beneficial to make these more user-friendly?
If we didn't have to visit the appropriate item to find out the URL (I can't remember any of the URLs below for example, so if I wanted to post them again I'd have to re-look them up), then it would be easier to share these in blog posts, discussions, etc and might encourage us to do it more.
To highlight this, here's a selection of the URLs I'm currently using for this OU course.
Blog
Main blog page:
http://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=ob735
I already have a unique username given to me by the OU (ob735), why do I need a separate number for the blog? Is the backend for the OU blog really limited to using numbers for usernames?
Surely
http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?user=ob735
would be a lot more obviously mine and easier for others to access.
MyStuff
Item for Activity 2.1:
http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/portfolio/index.php/mystuff/itemsview/1/____display/itemId/iddfcf7249ef6f0ec429e81ca29533586a
This isn't very obvious what it is or who it belongs to. There is no way I could post a link to this with going to the item and copying the URL.
This is probably very dependent on the backend, but might be worth feeding back to the developers and bearing in mind when other choose eportfolio platforms.
Wiki
Alan's Tutorial Group Page
http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/ouwiki/view.php?id=129238&page=Alan's+group
OK, this is semi-friendly as the pages are referred to by name. Would it not be easier if the id was the course code instead (ie H808+08I). Again is the wiki id really limited to numbers?
http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/ouwiki/view.php?id=H808+08I&page=Alan's+group
Further Tidying
These could all be further tidied by using something like mod_rewrite (depending on what runs the OU's servers) to tidy up the URLs even further.
eg
http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/ob735mapping to
http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog_bg/view.php?user=ob735wiki
http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/ouwiki/H808+08I/Alan's+groupmapping to
http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/ouwiki_bg/view.php?id=H808+08I&page=Alan's+groupThese would be much easier to work with.
Sharing on MyStuff
Tuesday, 14 Oct 2008, 12:50
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Edited by Owen Barritt, Tuesday, 21 Oct 2008, 10:51
So far, MyStuff doesn't seem to make getting formative feedback on your work very easy, especially as it's very difficult to know when someone has commented on items.
With regards to sharing, I'm not really sure that this is serving much purpose with H808 at the moment. I'm not sure if anyone other than Alan has looked at any of the items I have shared, and I haven't looked at any one elses items (another thing I will have to make time to do, but where to start? What benefit would it offer?)
If these were referred to in reflections and discussions on blogs, then there would be more incentive to view them. Links could be included in the discussions to help view the items. This would be easier if the URLs were more user-friendly (in general all the OU technology could benefit from reviewing the URLs used, but I'll save this for a separate post).
Week 3
Tuesday, 14 Oct 2008, 12:43
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Edited by Owen Barritt, Tuesday, 14 Oct 2008, 17:05
I wanted to continue my reflection on the first 2 weeks with some on the rest of the course as we go along, so in an attempt to catch up I shall start now considering week 3.
The activities for week 3 seemed to be mainly reading the case-studies and considering how they related to our own situations.
Personally, I haven't had a large amount of experience with ePortfolios, so MyStuff is coming as a first introduction. However, I am interested in seeing how they can be used for formative assessment and progress tracking.
My version of Activity 2.1 may have benefitted from including more critique as I felt at the time I was being mainly descriptive of the applications I read about. However, as these are just notes on the papers we read, maybe it's better that it is descriptive. There was some reflection in the posts on the forum.
At the end of that week was the optional reflection activity. I was keen to do this before starting on the reading about reflection and this did push me well into week 4, but I think it was worthwhile to get my thoughts together for the first 2 weeks.
Tutors' Reflection
Sunday, 12 Oct 2008, 21:54
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I haven't looked at the any of the tutors' blogs yet, but as I wrote the last post, it struck me that it might be interesting to read any reflections they had on how the course was going to see if it highlighted the guidance they were offering and the issues they were perceiving with it.
I shall have to look into those over the coming week
Reflection on my personal PDP
Sunday, 12 Oct 2008, 21:53
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Edited by Owen Barritt, Sunday, 12 Oct 2008, 21:55
I've just posted my own PDP analysis grid and learning objectives on MyStuff (shared with Alan and the rest of the tutor group).
Going through the grid, I feel fairly confident with most of the technology related aspects. I am comfortable working online and feel happy with my ability to communicate online (although there are always new things worth learning in that respect including how the lack of voice intonation can effect how written comments are perceived by other readers). There are a couple of items I haven't really tried out, but I feel fairly confident to pick these up quickly once I've given them a try.
My main weaknesses appear to be in how to apply these for effective teaching and learning.
I am currently fairly unfamiliar with elearning research (except for the bits I read so far during this course - which have already help to start to rectify this situation) and different learning models, etc and will be looking to acquaint myself with more about these as we go through the course.
What research I have seen in the first few weeks of the course and the experiences of using MyStuff, the webforum/Firstclass and this blog have already given me some ideas I can use in my practice and highlighted some issues which may arise. It will be interesting to see how I (and the other students) find the rest of the course, what issues we hit and how our own online community develops as the course continues.
H808 Week 2
Friday, 3 Oct 2008, 21:11
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Edited by Owen Barritt, Friday, 3 Oct 2008, 21:12
The group discussion task of the drivers for ePortfolios was an interesting experience for week 2.
As I mentioned in my post to the forums reflecting on the activity, I am currently looking into using discussion forums in an online course I administer. I hadn't considered how much extra time you need to allow for online discussion tasks as opposed to their face-to-face equivalents.
John and Mitchell had initially suggested using the wiki to collaborate our efforts on this task. As the task was based around filling in a template, this seemed ideal as it would allow all members of the group to add their thoughts directly to the template.
However, this only highlighted the delays in online discussion, which I feel many of us had not taken into account, as no general concessus was reach over it. In the end as it was getting towards the end of the week and the task would need writing up anyway, I created the wiki page using the contributions on the discussion forum from various members of the group (particularly those of Brian and Colleen).
Mitchell added his additions to the wiki directly later.
As of week 4, the only people who have editted the wiki page for this task are Mitchell and myself. I'm not sure whether this is because the task was essentially done by the time it went on the wiki or whether people are unfamiliar with using a wiki.
Although, it was in some of the introductions, I'm not sure how familiar the rest of the group are with technology. It could be that they are all experts or all complete novices, but assuming there are some people there who are not familiar with wikis, this may have been another factor which slowed getting our work online.
Reflecting on this, I can see that, although it was a useful eye-opener in my experience and so a useful activity for this course, in general, activities using the wiki and discussion forums would benefit, at least in the early stages of a course, from more guidance as to:
- what is expected
- how to use the technology
- how online group tasks differ from face-to-face ones
- the allowances students need to make as a result
The wiki page containing the drivers templateE-Learning Professionalism
Thursday, 2 Oct 2008, 21:20
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Edited by Owen Barritt, Thursday, 2 Oct 2008, 21:24
Going back over the introductory podcast from week 1 of H808 now, I share some of the views of each of the presenters.
I can see, as Robin Mason highlights, that professionalism in elearning should be built upon both practice and research. As Gill Kirkup points out, factors contributing to educational professionalism in general will still be valid in an elearning context. We still need to respect the student and to offer commitment to incorporating research into our practices, developing communities, encourage participation and continuing professional development and evaluation.
I would agree with Robin Goodfellow's thoughts that elearning professionalism should include a "a commitment to learning for civilisation as well as personal development", i.e. a commitment to contributing to the field for the aid to all those involved in it, including students, tutors, administrators, etc and also to make it more approachable to those not currently part of the elearning community in any respect.
However, I do not see professionalism as being as clearly split into "big P" and "little P" as in his discussion. A couple of the speakers mentioned membership of professional bodies and qualifications as being possible contributions to professionalism. Although, I can see these has having a place in ensuring professionalism, I can't see that they define it. People who have these qualifications/memberships aren't necessarily always professional and vice versa.
Finally Chris discussed of the development of elearning and the introduction of the world wide web being one of key factors in this. I would agree with this, and would see it as being quite difficult to have viewed elearning as a profession before this, as it seems it is the web which has really allowed the building of educational communities within distance education.
I would agree with Chris, that elearning includes aspects of other professions, but I don't think this makes it any less a profession in itself.
I don't think it's entirely clear what an elearning professional is, but I would say that it would include aspects covered in each of the 4 viewpoints of the speakers in the podcast.
H808 Week 1
Thursday, 2 Oct 2008, 21:18
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Edited by Owen Barritt, Thursday, 2 Oct 2008, 21:21
It took a while for me to get started in week 1. Work and issues with having 2 versions of Acrobat preventing me from viewing pdfs via either IE or Firefox slowed the start a bit as I couldn't initially access the course and assessment guides. However, once fixed (I told firefox to open pdfs externally using the latest Acrobat rather than trying to open them in the window) things got started.
The first activity was interesting, in that everyone seemed to approach it from different directions. Some people focused in their posts on the introduction of themselves and why they were taking the course whilst others focused on their thoughts on the team members views on elearning. Not many people went into detail in both aspects. Personally, I was in the former group, but I shall take the opportunity to consider the latter in a separate post shortly.
I found staying focused on the podcast for 30 minutes challenging. My attention drifted off several times. Although the podcast was split into sections it was presented as one file on the website, with no way to easily skip to the next section.
As podcasts historically developed to present radio-style shows, which can be downloaded to mp3 players, I can see that it would seem normally to compile all these pieces into one "show". However, as most mp3 players will happily play a playlist of mp3s and the world wide web has developed to be able to present information non-linearly, there seems no requirement for them to be 1 file.
As it is presented there are 3 ways to access the content of the audio
- download the mp3
- listen to the audio on the web
- download/view the transcription
Having done the later 2, I can see that it would have been a real aid to concentration to have had something to view whilst listening to the audio. Maybe this is an argument for making the streamed content video based, so you could see the person talking in each case also.
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