Personal Blogs

So, having said I'd kick-start his blog into life to help with my studies after the Week 10 activity on blogging, we're now one month later and I haven't posted anything.

Best laid plans of mice and h800 students and all that.

In going back into the other activities, I must admit during the week's, while there were occasions where I though "oh yes, I must post some thoughts to that blog", most of the time I just completely forgot about it.  Even at the points I did think about it, I was in the middle of doing another activity.  Then you get to the end of the activity, stop and hey presto the intention has got burried alive by other thoughts.

In H808, there was more incentive to blog as you needed to demonstrate reflection for the assessment, but also I think (although this may just be my memory of the course being wrong) that there were more activities suggesting things to blog about.

This was one of the things I mentioned to Shaun in the forums, in that personally I would find it easier to blog on here if there were occasional prompts of ideas to blog about.

With a lot of the activities on the course, they give you points to think about, and we all write down our thoughts as posts in the forums.  At which point the vast majority of my thinking has already been written about either in my initial posts or in the replies on there.  If I have anything more I feel I need to add, I tend to add it to the forum.

I've just been relistening to the elluminate session we had the other week to get some thoughts out of it for the TMA.  Most of the discussions there are things that we've discussed in the forums, but with Shaun raising thoughts and questions it gives you another prompt to rethink in the light of.

The main reason I've come back to the blog now, is because I've had a prompt to rethink how I've approach the blog in the form of TMA2 without this I think it would have probably continued to sit here collecting dust for a bit longer.

 

 

Week 8 was basically the TMA.

I felt a little lost as to what was expected with this.

Part (a) was about the drivers and asked us to discuss these in a context familiar to ourselves. The context I know most about is wine education as that's what I do. However, there isn't really a strong drive to use eportfolios, so the discussion felt a little artificial. Some of the generic drivers were applicable though, but it was hard to put them into the context.

I'm not sure whether it would have been easier to choose a different context, but that would have involved a large amount of research as it would not have been familiar to me.

Part (b) was the reflection. I was unclear as to what contributed "one" piece of evidence. This blog, for example, is mainly a continuation of the reflections from activity 2.2, so I used a few excerpts as "one" piece, but it did feel that these should really be counted as more. However, they seemed a good way to show progression.

I tried using MyStuff to compile the evidence and essays, but the rtf output lost the tabulation in the wiki pages and the html output didn't open properly on my XP machine, only showing an xml file and no html files. I've tried it since and the problem seems to be with XPs compressed folders as my linux machine shows all the html files and folders. Discussing this with Robin, it seems that WinZip also opens them fine.

However, as a result I resorted to cutting and pasting into word and zipping them up manually for submission.

Results have since come back. I got 78%, which is frustratingly close to the 85% distinction boundary (compared to the 40% fail boundary). In general, for his comments, it seems Alan felt there was too much breadth and not enough depth to my discussion, which seems fair given my points above. The breakdown was 76% for the essay and 80% for the reflection, which also seems to match my feelings about the exercise.

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 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.

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

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 template