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The Developers Group

Sunday, 19 Feb 2017, 17:02

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Edited by Christopher Douce, Sunday, 19 Feb 2017, 17:19

On 15 February 2017, I attended a meeting called ‘the developers group’ that was held in a hotel in Birmingham (since the Birmingham regional centre was just about to close). This blog post is intended as a set of notes for any of my colleagues who might be interested in AL development.

The meeting was a ‘reboot’ of an earlier group called ‘developing the developers’; an event that I had been to a couple of times. From memory I remember being pretty baffled as to what these meetings were all about and how they could help me in my job. Given all the constant organisational changes, I was curious about the shape of the new group that it replaced.

Introduction

The event was opened by Toby Scott-Hughes, who heads up the university ALSPD team. I think ALSPD is an abbreviation for Associate Lecturers Professional Development. His introduction had the title ‘what is ALSPD and what does it do for you and your ALs?’ Thankfully, Toby presented some pretty clear answers.

I made a note of the following headline, which I have loosely paraphrased: ‘it is a group that provides an opportunity for AL managers and developers to meet with one another, to run a series of constructive workshops and to pass on skills to colleagues and to help with the development of associate lecturers’.

The group also seems to have another remit, which is that it aims to provide some staff development for staff tutors and faculty managers. A number of questions were noted, including: ‘what would be useful to upskill you?’, ‘what do you need most support or help with?’ and ‘how can we help to help you to work with your ALs?’ The ‘the developers group’ is a vehicle that facilitates targeted staff development with a view to helping the associate lecturers that we support and line manage.

Here’s a bit more description: ALSPD has a broad remit, which includes the AL representative office. ALSPD consists of a group of educational developers, administrative and management staff, and it works closely with AL services. A key point was made that they ‘are responsible for running cross faculty AL development events in locations across the UK’ as well as working with faculty specific student support teams across the country. They also fund one-off development events. Toby mentioned there were 80 events that were held in the last financial year. A really important point was made: even though offices were closing, associate lecturer CPD was not being centralised; we can still run events across the country – the key point that tutors have to live somewhere does seem to have been accepted.

As Toby was talking I was thinking of CPD topics that might really help me as a tutor. Two of which sprung to mind were: ‘how do we deliver tuition in larger groups when we’re working on line?’ and ‘how do we facilitate online team teaching, and what are the best practices?’

AL services: working with you and in the future

When I worked in the London office, the Computing and IT, Maths and Engineering staff tutors had access to two faculty assistants who did quite a bit of administrative work on our behalf. Things have changed in that we have to do slightly more admin than we used to do before, and administrative support is provided by a team that is based in one of the student support locations.

During this bit of the day we were asked the question: what is and isn’t working well? I remember that there was some reference to an ‘operational blueprint’, but different staff tutors and faculty managers may well be working in a very different way. I asked for some training in to what this ‘blueprint’ was all about, so I could understand more about what I can expect from the new team, and what they can expect from me.

A key point was made that we need to feel a part of a larger team and there is a worry that a home worker might become ‘semi-detached’ from the university. My 'day in the life of a staff tutor' blog post, which relates to a trip to Manchester, reflects the point that steps have been taken to try to bridge the distance between academic line managers and associate lecturer services.

Support for AL management

Karen Hamilton, one of our ALSPD educational developers facilitated the penultimate session. Karen reiterated the emphasis of the group: ‘although the group is about developing the ALs, how can we do this if you’re not provided with the appropriate training and development yourself?’

We were given three cards. The first one had the title: ‘what can I offer to the developers group?’ This card had a subtitle that read: ‘skills, ideas or experience of AL development you would like to share’. The second card read: ‘what I would like to get from the developers group?’ Again, it had a subtitle: ‘things that would help me to be more involved with AL development or to line manage ALs more effectively’. The final card was slightly different: ‘something more creative’; this final card was asking us to recommend speakers and to say why the might be of interest.

We chatted in our groups and duly completed our cards. I recommended a number of speakers and wrote down titles of sessions that I had once helped to facilitate.

Introducing the replacement for OU Live: Adobe Connect

For anyone who is reading this from outside the university, OU Live is a badged version of a tool called Blackboard Collaborate that is used to deliver online tutorials. Due to Blackboard Collaborate reaching the end of its life, the procurement team has chosen to replace it with a popular conferencing tool called Adobe Connect. This final presentation of the day, made by Anne Campbell and John Slade, was my first bit of official university training about Adobe Connect.

We were swiftly taken through a set of features. We were told that it was possible to edit recorded sessions (or, specifically, cut sections of a session out). Recordings could be downloaded, and we could (at last) see how many students had seen the recording of a session (but not who had seen a recording).

There are some interesting differences; there are three types of users: host, presenter and attendee (as opposed to OU Live that had only two types: student and moderator). The concept of a panel has been replaced with the idea of a ‘pod’. Although there is the concept (as far as I know) of a whiteboard, they are a bit more limited in the sense that you can’t upload images to them. This said, Adobe Connect works better with PowerPoint files, and you can include slide transitions or animations (which means that you don’t have to create loads of extra slides if you wanted to do something similar in OU Live).

I was glad to hear that students will still be able to express themselves using emoticons (there is a compelling pedagogic argument why this is a good thing, despite this expression sounds a little strange!) Tutors can have up to 20 breakout rooms, and you can invite ‘external speakers’ into sessions.

Anne and John told us something about the training that will be offered to associate lecturers. Training will be provided by Adobe Connect people, and ALs will be given a training allowance to attend training sessions. The training will comprise of three hour long modules. These sessions will be run three times a day for five days a week. There will be a practice site and a supporting forum. I made a note that the first bit of training (for the early adopters) might take place between March and April.

Final thoughts

I left ‘the developers group’ feeling pretty encouraged. Whilst the remit of the earlier group wasn’t that clear, the remit of this new rebooted and reformed version seemed to be pretty well defined. I clearly got the message that it was about two things: (1) helping academic line managers to help tutors, with a view to (2) helping tutors to deliver excellent teaching and support to their students.

After the meeting, I felt confident enough to put my head over the parapet and agree to become (and I can’t quite believe I’m writing these words) an Adobe Connect ‘champion’.

More information about the pedagogy of using OU Live can be obtained by having a quick look through earlier blogs about OU Live. On a related note, more information about past AL development events is also available

Tags: developers group, al development, birmingham, alspd, adobe connect

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TM470 New tutor day

Tuesday, 22 Nov 2016, 09:45

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Edited by Christopher Douce, Tuesday, 22 Nov 2016, 09:46

I first joined The Open University as a part time tutor back in 2006 where I tutored a module called M364 Fundamentals of Interaction Design. Knowing that this module was coming to an end I decided to apply to tutor on another module: TM470 The Computing and IT project, and I was successful!

I was invited to attend a ‘new tutor day’ which took place in the West Midlands regional centre in Birmingham (which is, sadly, closing in the new year) to learn about the ins and outs of tutoring this module. This was also an opportunity to meet my TM470 mentor, fellow TM470 tutors, and some of my colleagues who support the delivery of computing and IT modules from the Manchester and Birmingham offices. This blog post has been drawn from a set of notes I’ve made during the day, which took place on 2 July 2016.

Project choice

I’ve noted down the question: ‘what makes a good project theme?’ It’s a simple question and one that is very important: students must have a clear idea about what the problem is that they want to solve within their project. It should also have sensible limits, i.e. students shouldn’t aspire to creating the next big app for the iPhone.

Successful projects are those that draw upon practical skills that have been learnt (or studied) in previous level 3 modules. A project could also build on something that has been done before. Students should (ideally) be knowledgeable about the domain or environment in which a project relates to (so they don’t have to spend lots of time doing research into an area that isn’t familiar to them). Also, importantly, a project should be connected with something that a student is interested in doing (so they maintain their motivation).

Another bit of advice is: students should stick with using software that they know; don’t be tempted to play with new things, since it’s easy to get tied up in knots.

Sometimes students might be tempted to draw upon projects that relate to their work place. An important point is: work and TM470 have different goals; it is probably best to keep work and study separate for the simple reason that changes at work might jeopardise the project. This rule, however, doesn’t have to apply in all cases: students need to understand what is required from TM470.

Another really important point is: a project doesn’t have to have a successful outcome to submit a final project report. Students can still pass if things go horribly wrong: it is the description of the project, the learning, and the reflections that all count towards the final scores. If these are done really well, students will get a really good pass.

Another note I’ve made is all about research: ‘not really understanding what is meant by research that is academic, or what is meant by an academic literature review (and analysis)’. Some projects may be research projects, in the sense that they are an in-depth and critical study of a particular area. If students choose research projects, the need to be clear in terms of what is required of them.

Independent learning

TM470 is different to other modules, since what really matters is being able to demonstrate independent learning; tutors will not be subject experts in all the areas in which projects are chosen from. A note I’ve made is: ‘if software breaks, it is part of your job on a project to fix it’. The role of a tutor is to push a student into this mind set.

Practicalities

I made a note that we discussed the importance of the introductory letter, and that we might connect this to the use of our module discussion forum.

A really important resource is the OU Library which allows student direct access to a wealth of prestigious journals. Another thought is to direct students to library tutorials (understanding eJournals) about how they can get started.

The project module doesn’t have any official tutorials, since it is difficult to run group events where every student is working on a different project (and will have different learning needs and problems). This said, some tutors do use OU Live to run some unofficial introductory tutors.

Towards the end of the day, we discussed practicalities about end of module assessment marking, and assignment marking. Key questions that were asked were: ‘how do you do it?’ and ‘what processes do you use?’ The module has a very clear set of marking guidelines that are also known to the students. Ultimately, everything comes back to the question of whether students have met the learning outcomes.

Reflections from first presentation

Now that I have more of an idea how the module works and how it is structured, I think I will run an introductory OU Live tutorial at the start of the next presentation. This will allow me to learn more about the student’s ideas and understand more about their potential problems. I will also use this to emphasise the importance of time management.

In comparison to other modules that I have tutored on, I found the marking to be pretty straightforward once I knew how it worked. It took me a bit of time to find the forms, and then to internalise the marking criteria (but this is always the case when starting to work on a new module). One of the things that I really enjoyed was looking at the diversity of the projects, and how the students tackled them.

Tags: birmingham, new tutor day, tm470, project module, project

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Enhancing the employability of computing students through an online professional presence

Monday, 25 June 2012, 09:44

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Edited by Christopher Douce, Monday, 13 July 2020, 12:17

A HEA workshop held on Friday 9 June at Birmingham City University set out to answer the following questions, 'how important is our online presence to prospective employers?' and, 'what can students do to increase their online visibility?' Of course, there are many other related questions that connect to the broader subject of online identity, and a number of these were explored and debated during this workshop.

This blog post is a summary of the workshop. It is, of course, a personal one, and there's a strong possibility that I might not have picked up on all the debates that occurred throughout the day. If there are other themes and subjects that some of the delegates think I'm missed, then please do feel free to post comments below.

Pushing employability for computing graduates

Mark Ratcliffe from the HEA kicked off the day by talking about the employability challenges that computing graduates face, connecting with his experience as being head of subject at Aberystwyth University and his work at eSkills. An interesting point and observation was that demand for computing skills has increased over the last ten years but the number of computing graduates has been reducing. There is also a gap between computer graduates and graduates from some other disciplines in terms of gaining full time employment six months after graduation.

Technical skills are fundamental and necessary skills, but so are interpersonal and business skills. Placements were cited as an important way to enable students to develop and to gain first-hand experience. Technical skills are important, and evidence of them can be gained through application forms and interviews, but also through approaches such as portfolios of evidence. Evidence of our work and interests is increasingly available to be seen by others through online sources.

The second introductory presentation was by Mak Sharma, Head of School at Birmingham City University. Mak spoke about some of the changes that were occurring to the institution, and also mentioned a number of familiar (and unfamiliar) technologies, all of which can play an important role in computing and technology education: Alice, Greenfoot, Scratch and Gadgeteer. An interesting point was the connections between industry training providers and the university. I sense that collaborations between the two sectors are going to become increasingly important.

ePortfolios in the big bad world

Andy Hollyhead, from Birmingham City Business School started his presentation (Prezi) by sharing with a video entitled Stories of ePortfolio integration, produced by JISC and BCU (YouTube). The video features a demonstration of an ePortfolio system called Mahara which has been linked to the university's Moodle virtual learning environment.

An ePortfolio is, in essence, a tool which can be used to store data, usually documents. It is also a tool that can have different uses. On one hand it can be used to help students to reflect on their own studies. On the other it can be used to share information with a wider community of people, and this may potentially include potential employers. An ePortfolio can also be used to demonstrate evidence of continuing professional development (CPD) within an organisation.

An important question is 'how long can I have access to my data for?' This question is particularly relevant if a university implements an ePortfolio that can be used to create a professional presence and suggests that institutions need to consider policy as well as technical issues. To circumvent this challenge, standards bodies have proposed standards to allow the sharing of ePorfolios between different systems. Andy mentioned other systems such as VisualCV and PebblePad. One of the greatest challenges is, of course, to understand the variety of different ways in which ePortfolio systems can be used.

Using code repositories in programming modules

Whilst ePortfolios can be used to share information and documents, John Moore from the University of West London spoke about the notion of source code repositories and considered how their use may enhance the employability profile of students.

Version control systems are an essential part of the software development process. The facilitate collaboration and sharing. They also enable developers to learn how software has changed over time.

There are, of course, a wide range of different systems, such as CVS and Subversion (Wikipedia). John focussed on GIT (Wikipedia), which is a distributed version control system that has been created for Linux kernel development. John also shared with us a number of different public repositories that may be used, such as Bitbucket, Gitorious and Github (none of which I had heard of before).

John said that 'logs define you as a programmer' (logs, of course, being commit or change logs, recordings of when a programmer has made an addition or change to a repository). To boost a 'programmer profile', students are encouraged to participate in open source software development. Not only may this present evidence of technical abilities and understanding, evidence of participation also represents evidence of team skills.

John's presentation gave way to a really interesting debate about how experience and understanding of version control systems represents an important employability skill. I also remember hearing that students from different backgrounds (and perhaps different undergraduate degrees) have different levels of expertise. What is without question is that industry makes extensive use of such tools, and it is the challenge of educators to encourage their use.

Student professional online branding

Thomas Lancaster from Birmingham City University introduced us to the notion of a 'personal brand', before describing what we might be able to do to create an online version. One thing that students could do is create a LinkedIn profile. Thomas then went onto mentioning tools such as Facebook and Twitter, which can yield potentially more immediate information about a potential candidate. Thomas argued that computing students should ideally have their own professional website which presents an identity whilst also practically demonstrating their technical skills to other employers.

Sharing information online is, of course, not without its risks, and everyone needs to be mindful of this. One thought is that no-one can say who is going to be doing the next internet search against your name. Since the web had now become the 'read-write' web, we now need to be careful about what we share, a balancing act between information availability and information privacy, a point that was returned to time and again throughout the day.

Building professional web presences

Building on some of the points that Thomas made, Shovan Sargunam gave us a practical demonstration of how to create an online professional presence, through the creating of a WordPress (Wikipedia) based website. A couple of the steps included registering your own domain (if it's not too late), then choosing an internet provider, and then installing or configuring WordPress.

WordPress isn't the only way to go. In some ways, it very much depends on the tools that you are familiar with. Shovan also mentioned some other useful sites (in addition to LinkedIn) that enables users to create online profiles, such as About.Me and CreativePool.

Student's online profiles for employability and community

Information about ourselves that we share online can have a number of different uses. One other use lies with the way in which information can be useful in the development of an online community. Karen Kear and Frances Chetwynd from the Open University described a research project that is aiming to uncover more about how online profiles are used by students who make use of online discussion forums. Research is carried out by through questionnaires and online synchronous focus groups. There are, of course, a spectrum of different opinions (and practices). Some students are happy to share information and photographs of themselves, whereas others have concerns about privacy.

Exploring the employer use of professional presences

Vanessa Gough, from IBM, presented a rather different perspective and one that was very welcome. Vanessa is responsible for industrial trainees and she makes the point that given the number of applicants that are made to IBM, she (and perhaps some of her colleagues) just don't have the time to go rummaging around on the internet for information about candidates. This said (and these are my own words here, rather than Vanessa's), it doesn't mean that this doesn't happen.

Vanessa described how new recruits can make use of social media to communicate with each other to become increasingly familiar with the organisation in which they work. Twitter and Facebook can be used to share information about what it is to work and live in certain locations.

A really good point was the social media offers candidates a way to 'get to know' an organisation and begin to understand a bit about its culture. Engaging with an organisation's social media streams and learning from them has the potential to enable candidates to stand out from the crowd.

How social media can enhance your employability

The final presentation of the day was by Vanessa Jackson, from Birmingham City University. Her presentation had the interesting subtitle of, 'can you tweet your way into a job?' (which follows on nicely from the earlier presentation). Vanessa introduced us to a site called SocialMediaTutorials. This is a set of Open Educational Resources which are available through Creative commons. One of the videos describes a case where a student was able to gain a work placement or internship by directly contacting people who worked within a local radio station.

Reflections

One term that I had not heard of before, was DPQ, or drunken post quotient (as introduced by Andy Hollyhead). The higher the metric, the more trouble we might (potentially) cause ourselves. It was a concept that was immediately understandable, for a number of reasons that I'm not going to go into.

My own personal opinion is that having an online professional presence is a 'good thing', especially if we work within a technical discipline such as information technology or computing. This said, there are certainly differences of opinion. Some of us simply don't want to share aspects of ourselves online, and there are good reasons for this, which we should respect.

These thoughts made me consider online presence in terms of a number of different dimensions. Firstly, there is the dimension of security and privacy, and the tension that exists between the two. Then there is dimension of the personal and public (or personal and professional). Coming back to ePortfolios, there's also the dimension of demonstration (of achieve) and reflection (to achieve). Finally, there is the dimension of the audience - a difference between the general and specific.

Towards the end of the day there were a number of interesting debates. Two questions that I've noted are, 'how might we embed the notion of professional presence into the computing (and wider) curriculum?' and 'what is the perception of others if one doesn't have an online professional presence?'

An interesting thought is that it's not always what you share on the internet that is a concern - the people who you know may potentially cause some difficulties. The canonical example of this where a friend or colleague shares pictures of a 'night out' somewhere, the details of which should have remained personal. A point here is that we all need to be vigilant. Performing internet searches against our own names (or 'ego-googling') is no longer an activity that can be mildly interesting or titillating. Instead it could now be a necessity to ensure that correct and appropriate information is available to be shared with others.

For me, one of the outcomes of the day is a reminder that different tools can be connected together. For a while I used to be an avid Twitter user until I discovered that it was gradually taking over my life and felt that I had to 'reclaim back' some of my privacy. I've now reassessed my own online professional presence, and what I want to do is use Twitter more as a feed for other social platforms, such as LinkedIn and Facebook. So, in time, I hope to increase my online visibility - but I am also very aware that I'm unlikely to have a complete understanding of the implications of doing this. I guess what I'm going to do is to always be careful about what I share and when.

The workshop slides are available (BCU website). Many thanks to Birmingham City University for organising an interesting and thought provoking event!

Tags: employability, eportfolios, hea, birmingham, online identity

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Using and teaching mobile technologies for ICT and computer science

Monday, 16 May 2011, 14:26

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Edited by Christopher Douce, Monday, 3 Mar 2014, 18:48

I recently attended an event entitled Mobile Technologies - The Challenge of Learner Devices Delivering Computer Science held at Birmingham City University last week, organised by the Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) Higher Education Academy (HEA) subject centre.

This blog post aims to present a summary of proceedings as well as my own reflections on the day. If any of the delegates or presenters read this (and have any comments), then please feel free to post a reply to add to or correct anything that I've written. I hope these notes might be useful to someone.

Keynote

The day was kicked off by John Traxler from the University of Wolverhampton. Just as any good keynote should, John asked a number of searching questions. The ones that jumped out at me were whether information technology (or computers) had accelerated the industrialisation of education, and whether mobile technologies may contribute to this.

John wondered about the changing nature of technology ownership. On one hand universities maintain rooms filled with computers that students can use, but on the other hand students increasingly have their own devices, such as laptops or mobile phones.

John also pointed us towards an article in the Guardian, published in July 2010 about teenagers and technology which has a rather challenging subtitle. Mobility and connectedness, it is argued, has now become a part of our identity.

One thing John said jumped out at me: 'requiring students to use a VLE is like asking them to wear a school uniform'. This analogy points towards a lot of issues that can be unpacked. Certainly, a VLE has the potential to present institutional branding, and a uniform suggests that things might done in a particular way. But a VLE also has the potential be be an invaluable source of information to ensure that we know what we need to know to navigate around an institution.

For those of us who had to wear school uniforms, very many of us customised them as much as we possibly could without getting told off for breaking the rules. Within their constraints, it would be possible to express individuality whilst conforming (to get an education). The notion of customisation and services also has a connection with the idea of a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) (wikipedia), which, in reality, might exist somewhere in between the world of the mobile, a personal laptop and the services that an institution provides.

Session I

The first session was opened by Kathy Maitland from Birmingham City University. Kathy talked about how she used cloud computing to enable students using different hardware to access different different software services. She spoke about the challenge of using different hardware (and operating system) platforms to access services and the technical challenges of ensuring correct configuration.

John Busch from Queen's university, Belfast made a presentation about how to record lectures using a mobile phone. It was great to see a (relatively) low tech approach being used to make educational materials available for students. All John needed to share his lectures with a wider audience was a mid range mobile phone, a tiny tripod, a desk to perch the mobile phone on, and (presumably) a lot of hard won experience.

John gave the audience a lot of tips about how to make the best use of technology, along with a result from a survey where he asked students how they made use of the recordings he made of his computer gaming lectures.

A part of his talk was necessarily technical, where he spoke about different data encoding standards and which standard was supported by which mobile (or desktop) platform. One of the members of the audience pointed us to Encoding.com, a website that enables transcoding of digital media. The presentation gave way to interesting discussions about privacy. One of the things that I really liked about John's presentation was that is addressed 'mobile' from different perspectives at the same time: using mobile technology to produce content that may, in turn, be consumed by other mobile devices.

Laura Crane, from Lancaster University then gave an interesting presentation about using location, context and preference in VLE information delivery. Laura's main research question appeared to be, 'which is (potentially) more useful - it is information that is presented at a particular location, or information that is presented in a particular time?'

This reminded me of some research that I had heard of a couple of years ago called context modelling. Laura mentioned a subject or area that was new to me, namely, Situation Theory. Laura's talk was very well received and it inspired a lot of debate. Topics discussed include the nature of mobility research, the importance of personal or learner attributes on learning (such as learning styles). Discussions edged towards the very active area of recommender research (recommender system, Wikipedia), and out to wider questions of combining location, recommender and affective interfaces (interfaces or systems that could give recommendations or make suggestions depending on emotion). A great talk!

Darren Mundy and Keith Dykes gave a presentation about the WILD Project funded by JISC. WILD is an abbreviation for Wireless Interactive Lecture Demonstrator. The idea behind the project is one that is simple and compelling: how to make use of personal technology to enable students to make a contribution to lectures. By contribution, I mean allowing students to add comments and text to a shared PowerPoint presentation.

A lecturer prepares a PowerPoint presentation and providing there is appropriate internet connectivity, there is a link to a WILD webpage, which the students can send messages to. This might be used to facilitate debate about a particular subject, but also enable those learners who are less reluctant to contribute to 'speak up' by 'texting out'. We were also directed towards the project source code.

During the talk, I was introduced to a word that I had never heard of before: prosumerism (but apparently Wikipedia had!). At the end of the talk, during the Q&A session, one delegate pointed us towards the SAP Twitter PowerPoint plug in, which might be able to achieve similar things.

This last presentation of the morning really got me thinking about my own educational practice, and perhaps this is one of the really powerful aspects of using and working learning technology: it can have the potential to encourage reflection about what is and what is not possible, both inside and outside the classroom. I tutor on an undergraduate interaction design course with the Open University, where I facilitate a number of face to face sessions.

Due to various reasons my tutorials are not well as attended as they could be. Students may have difficulty travelling to a tutorial session, they may have family responsibilities, or even have jobs at the weekend. This is a shame, since I sense that some students would really benefit from these face to face sessions. The WILD presentation make me wonder whether those students who attend a face to face tutorial might be able to collectively author a summary PowerPoint that could then be shared with the group of students who were unable to attend. Interactivity, of course, has the potential to foster inclusivity and ownership. Simply put, the more a student does within a lecture (or puts into it) the more they may get out of it.

Session II

After lunch, the second session proved to be slightly more technical. The first half was merely a warm up!

The second session kicked off with demonstration by Doug Belshaw. Doug works for JISCInfoNet. This part of JISC aims to provide information and products known as InfoKits which can be used by senior management to understand and appreciate a range of different education and technology issues. We were directed towards examples, such as effective practice in a digital age, and effective assessment in a digital age. A new kit, entitled JISC mobile and wireless technologies review is currently under presentation.

Doug asked the audience to share information about any case studies. A number of projects were mentioned, along with a set of links. During the discussion part of the demo we were directed towards m.sunderland.ac.uk , and this makes me wonder whether the 'm.' is a convention that I'm not aware of (and perhaps ought to be!) Something called iWebKit was also mentioned. Other projects included MyMobileBristol.com, in collaboration with Bristol University and Bristol City Council. For more information visit the m.bristol.ac.uk site.

There was also a mention of a service provided by Oxford University, m.ox.ac.uk (the project also has an accompanying press release) This service appears to have been developed in association with something called the Molly Project, which seems to be a mobile application development framework. There was a lot to take in!

Gordon Eccleston from Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen gave a fabulous presentation about his work teaching programming the iPhone. Having remained steadfastly in the desktop world, and admitting to being a laggard on the mobile technology front, Gordon answered many questions that I have always had about how one might potentially begin to write an iPhone application. Gordon introduce us to the iPhone software development kit, which I understand was free to universities. The software used to create Apps is called Xcode. Having predominantly worked within a PC software development environment for too many years than I would care to admit, a quick poke around the Apple Tools website looked rather exciting; a whole new world of languages, terms and technologies.

Gordon had a number of views about the future of App development. He thought that XHTML 5, CSS 3 and accompanying technologies would have an increasingly important role to play. On a related note, the cross mobile platform PhoneGap was mentioned during the following presentation which makes use of some of these same technologies. (Digging further into the web, there's a Wikipedia page called Multiple phone web based application framework, which might prove to be interesting. There was also some debate about which platform mobile might dominate (and whether mobile dominance may depend on whether how many Apple stores there may be within a particular city or country!)

Gordon also briefly talked about some of the student project he has been involved with. A notable example was an iPhone app for medical students to learn ophthalmology terms and concepts. There were some really good ideas here; how to create applications that have direct benefit to learners by the application of mobile technology through learning how they can be developed.

Karsten Lundqvist from the University of Reading offered technology balance to the day by presenting his work teaching the development of Android applications. Karsten began his presentation by considering the different platforms: iPhone, RIM, and Android, but the choice of platform was ultimately decided by the availability of existing hardware, namely, PC's running Windows or Linux. In place of using Xcode, Java with Eclipse was used. I seem to remember that students may have had some experience using C/C++ before attending the classes, but I can't quite remember.

The question and answer session was really interesting. One delegate asked Karsten whether he had heard of something called the Google Android App Inventor, another mobile software development platform. It was also interesting to hear about the different demo apps. Karsten showed us a picture of a phone in a mini-segway cradle, demonstrating the concept of real-time control, there was also a reference to an app that may help people with language difficulties, and Karsten pointed us to his own website where he has been developing a game template by means of a blog tutorial.

Towards the end of Karsten's session, I recall an echo from the earlier HEA employability event which explored computing forensics. One of the ideas coming from this event was that perhaps it might be a good idea for institutions to share forensic data sets. An idea posed within this event was that perhaps institutions might be able to share application ideas or templates, perhaps for different platforms. Some ideas might include fitness utilities, 'finding your way around' apps (very useful: I still remember my days being a confused fresher during my undergrad days!), simple game templates, and flash card apps to help students to learn a number of different concepts.

Plenary

The plenary discussion was quite wide ranging, and is quite difficult to down to a couple of paragraphs. My own attempt at making sense of the day was to understand the key topics in terms of 'paired terms', which might be either subject dimensions or tensions (depending on how you look at it).

VLEs and apps: different software with different purposes, which connect to the idea of information and content. Information might be where to go to find a lecture theatre, or the location of a bank, and content is a representation of the course materials itself.

Ownership and provision: invariably students will have their own technology, but to what extent should an organisation provide technology to facilitate learning? Provision has been historically thought of in terms of rooms filled with computers, and necessarily conservative institutional IT provision (to make sure that everything keeps working). Entwined with these issues is the notion of legacy information and the need for institutions (and learners) to keep up with technology.

Development and usage: where does the information or content come from? To what extent might consumers of mobile information potentially participate in the development of their own content? Might this also create potential dangers for institutions and individuals. This is related to another tension of control, namely, institutional versus individual control, of either information, content or technology.

Guidance and figuring things out: when it comes to learning, there is always a balance to be reached between providing just enough guidance that enables learners to gain enough information so that they find the information that they need. On one hand, there may be certain apps that facilitate learning in their own right, apps that provide information, and apps that may present content held within a VLE. One idea might be that we may need a taxonomy of uses for both an institution and an individual.

Industry and academia: a two way relationship. We must provide education (about mobile) that industry needs, and also make use of innovations coming from industry, but also we have a role to innovate ourselves and potentially feedback into industry. (I seem to recall quite a few delegates mentioning something called mCampus, but I haven't been able to uncover any information about it!)

Other discussion points that were raised included the observation that location-based information provision is new, and the need to interact with people is one of the things that is driving the development of technology. A broader question, posed by John Traxler was, 'does mobile have the potential to transform teaching and learning?' Learners, of course, differ very widely in terms of their experience and attitude to interactive products.

Points such as accessibility, whether it being availability of technology or ability to perceive information through assistive technologies are also substantial issues. The wider organisational and political environment is also a significant factor when it comes to the development of mobile applications, and their subsequent consumption.

Footnote

All in all, a very enjoyable day! As I travelled into Birmingham from London on the train on the morning of the event my eye caught what used to be the site of an old industrial centre. I had no idea what it used to be. I could see the foundations of what might have been a big factory or a depot. I was quite surprised to discover that Millenium Point building also overlooked the same area.

Walking to the train station for my return journey to London, I thought, 'wouldn't it be great if there was an app that could use your location to get articles and pictures about what used to be here before; perhaps there could be a timeline control which users could change to go back in time to see what was there perhaps twenty, thirty or even one hundred years before'. I imagined a personal time machine in the palm of your hand. I then recalled a mash-up between Google Maps and Wikipedia, and had soon uncovered something called Wikimapia.

Like so many of these passing ideas, there's no such thing as an original thought. What really matters is how such technology thoughts are realised, and the ultimate benefit they may have to the different sets of end user.

Tags: hea, mobile, birmingham, mobile learning, iphone, android, apps

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