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
Personal Blogs
Week 5
Tuesday, 21 Oct 2008, 10:49
Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Owen Barritt, Tuesday, 21 Oct 2008, 11:07
OU URLs
Tuesday, 14 Oct 2008, 13:22
Visible to anyone in the world
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.
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/ob735
mapping to http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog_bg/view.php?user=ob735
wiki
http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/ouwiki/H808+08I/Alan's+group
mapping to http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/ouwiki_bg/view.php?id=H808+08I&page=Alan's+group
These would be much easier to work with.
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:
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/ob735
mapping to http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog_bg/view.php?user=ob735
wiki
http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/ouwiki/H808+08I/Alan's+group
mapping to http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/ouwiki_bg/view.php?id=H808+08I&page=Alan's+group
These would be much easier to work with.
H808 Week 2
Friday, 3 Oct 2008, 21:11
Visible to anyone in the world
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:
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
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