Personal Blogs

Serendipity took me to Space Ed when I had just started H807 ‘Innovations in E-learning.’

Dr Price Kerfoot is an alumni of Balliol College and he was featured in the College Magazine. This Balliol and Harvard trained doctor had considered ways to improve the way in which medical students learn. A great deal must be learnt rote, you have to know your anatomy (to start with). This means dissecting a cadaver, making the information stick, then testing yourself relentlessly so that exams can be passed.

For anyone embarking on H807 'Innovation in E-learning,' although it isn't part of the course work (yet), I'd recommend listening to the following discussion on Thomas Edison.

The participants are right to suggest that in establishing a lab for inventions Edision create a model that has been followed by others. This may be particularly pertinent when you look at Facebook and Google, also the history of Apple - possibly also of Dyson. Indeed anyone who wishes to be engaged in successful innovative practice.

It would make an interesting discusion point for units on collaboration and leadership.

What delivers success?

How do you thrive on change?

Why is commercialisation vital to success?

I consider it to be an expression of the progress that I am making that the first part of the TMA I have just written I completed in a straight three hour run with nothing more than a treatment in the form of a Venn Diagram doodled on a sheet of A3 to draw upon and the assignment title and defining outline pasted onto the top of the page on which I have been typing.

There are notes and figures and grabs all over the place.

I immersed myself in the topic last night when I keyed in 'learning' to MyStuff and found I had 463 assets to ponder. Though nearly discombobulated by the sluggishness of MyStuff I just about had enough in the titles and tags of the saved pieces to know if something was or was not worth reviewing. It was an interesting journey, not least that for me H808 is very much the second module, with H807 feeling like a foundation course before the real thing. And yet for some people I appreciate H808 is their first or even their last module towards the MA.

Talking of which, I registered for H800 in February 2011.

I feel I'm on a roll and don't want to take a break.

Between getting the kids into school and making a fresh pot of coffee the thought I had wanted to share here was the problem I potentially face with the essay I've just written. Previously I have used a list of referenced ideas and strung them together like fairy-lights to produce an essay that may not flow, or wrap well around itself well, but does the business. I fear if I now try to retrofit references and quotes that I may spoil it. On the other hand, this is the difference between writing a letter home and an academic paper.

My belief is that I know to whom I am referring when I use their ideas and dropping in their names and correcting any misquotes and incorrect expressions of their ideas will do the job.

On verra.

Another figure that I spied ... I've hit 10000 hits in my OU blog, which translates as 1000 per month. As we have no way to read the stats that underly these figures I can only make a conservative guess that 50-75% of all of this action is me. On the other hand, I do notice that I've been getting 25, then 50 and possibly 100 'hits' a day even when I've not blogged at all. Vanity or curiosity, or both.

Do emerge from the electronic woodwork please.

A comment is part of the collaborative process that is the essence of the full e-learning experience.

Love this.

Oxford Video Advent Calender

Can we have one?

There was a point, certainly when the industry was unionised, when you could only specialise in one function. Production teams, even for something as simple as a 'talking head' interview cutting to a presenter might need six or seven people: producer, production assistant, director, camera, assistant camera, sound, assistant sound and a runner. This doesn't even include the presenter!

With thanks to Neil Anderson for directing me towards the Dia software.

This represents two things, a hierarchical division of roles in TV production, but also as you come towards the base the 'multi-tasking' of the various specialist roles.

When the unions lost influence in the 1980s the technology wasn't there to divide roles too much, but we settled into producer, director, camera, camera assistant and sound as the basic team. Then the producer/director roles merged. With lighter kit with fewer parts the camera assistant or runner would be dropped. Then along came the 'Video Journalist,' basically the self-operating producer/director/camera person with the sound engineer required as a second person and expected to carry kit, set lits etc: too. Meanwhile in post-porduction the editor is gradually taking on the mixing of sound, the creation of title and graphics (one a separate job/function). And then our producer/director/camera person, who can to a basic level edit using software built into the camera, takes on the editing role too - not just what we called 'off-line' editing, but the whole business to finished product. i.e. In broadcast TV, as well as for a wedding video, the production 'team' might be a one man band.

The relevance to H808 regards professionalism and the 'jack of all trades' syndrome that might see or expect a subject matter expert or tutor to have within a portfolio of skills, a growing number of other technical and craft skills. In other words, might a 'professional' be less so as and if they are expected to take on more tasks. If professionalism requires x hours of experience and y amount of technical proficiency, at what point is a subject matter expert tripped up or denied a 21st dialogue with their students because their skills with HTML are poor or non-existent?

From a TV and Film production point of view, with exception, the more roles the producer takes on the small the budget ... and the potential for amateurism.  At the base is any of us with a webcam and some basic software. In every one of these functions if you have the budget, then hire someone who has the kit, 3-10 years experience and who knows their 'craft.'

The point being that people learn a great deal that improves their knowledge and ability to carry out tasks, however this does not receive formal recognition so is not able to contribute to any professionalisation of their occupation.

Daft. The paradigm must shift. Or be ignored.

I'm spending time with a mate and colleague next week (weather permitting) who has put mobile learning into the Middle East and now has the financing to do more in 3D.

His qualifications?

A great mind and practical delivery of learning as linear, then interactive video and CD, to websites with a good deal of programming in between over the last twenty years.

There is a time to ditch the gaining of a further qualification.

Indeed, when I took up a version of this MA course in February 2001 it was for me nothing more than a piece of CPD on top of another post-graduate course I was doing in the production of cross-platform multimedia, the only person to be doing this through the EU funded programme EAVE ... all of this to feed into a full-time job producing innovative, cutting edge and online learning. I was studying at my expense to improve or tweak my practical application of all of this.

Surely the collobartive exercises of the last two weeks have shown that several people can do more than one person on their own? Why do teachers and educators operate in isolation trying to re-invent the wheel for the thousandth time when a learning experience or product shared is going to deliver something effective and fantastic?

CPD, which is the OU's MAODE, does not turn me into an e-learning professional.

I'm not interested in letters after my name; I have the M.A. and have put a couple of other post-graduate courses under my belt too.

The ONLY thing that counts is how I apply this learning.

The letters or professional tag mean diddly-squat.

All us of should be willing to be judged by our peers as to our professional status ... are we employed in this capacity? Do with have clients to serve or clients to win?

Don't get me wrong, for me this course is invaluable, a treat and indulgence, like grated Truffle on pasta.

I guess my mate and I will be back on Skype if the roads look poor. I'm not going to waste a hour of my life, let alone a day stuck in traffic on the M23, M20 or M40 trying to get to Bath on Tuesday.

My motivation? A good idea, a sponsor ... then do it.

Then pick up from what I've learnt in TV, have 26 ideas on the go with various grants, sponsors and clients supporting further development.

My next course, or refresher course?

Sales

REFERENCE. Professional Development fo Elearning. A Framework for the NEw Zealand Tertiary Education Sector. 2009.

Anyone played Twister

This is how I see ca7.2 in H808.

Table 7.1

Learning requires something from each of the quartiles (if I can call them that).

To study something you are familiar with in comfortable surroundings is one thing, but to study something with which you are not familiar in an unfamiliar setting has its values too because you have to make more effort, you gain insights, you may make mistakes and learn from them, or achieve something unexpected and feel rewarded for that. All of this can be planned for by your tutor. Why else the school-trip? Why else the brain-storming trip of business managers? How else did a team of advertising creatives come up with the line 'Refreshers the parts other beers cannot touch?'

Depending on the group and the course, or the desired outcome I see the value in putting a task or unit in any or each one of these

I was directed towards these key roles within a team by fellow Group 2, Trevor's Group member, Mark Collins

Some of the software is too clever by half. All of it has foibles.

Docx might punch some useful quasi-intuitive tools but it smacks of Apple pixie dust sprinkled over DOS. Failing to share docx word and excel docs with others with older software on PCs, let alone with MACs harks back to the early 1990s when this kind of incompatibility was common and a constant frustration in the 'creative industries' between those who were MAC based and those on a PC.

Up at 3.56am. Potty. But a couple of hours later and if I have been distracted I can only blame myself. The dog is asleep at my feet, the family sleep above me, though my head is full of domestic grief, not ours, but my daughter's boyfriends family starting a messy break-up with him temporarily ejected from his home and seeking sanctuary which we feel unable to offer.

Back to business.

My response too often is quick and emotional, this can apply to domestic life as well as work. I lead with the heart. I am learning to do otherwise, to make the time, to try to be rational, to avoid tipping from radical alternatives of hate and love, yes and no ... there is always a middle way, however hard it may be to negotiate or to my mind however dull 'middle of the road' might feel.

Middle of the road gets things done, with drama, in a professional manner, which may be the point in a module on the 'e-learning professional.'

H808, UNIT 6 A COLLABORATIVE EXERCISE

Having had some successful experiences I know what it takes, what skills, tools, timekeeping and commitment works. Where in the past I have been introduced by others to some simple online tools to share, collaborate and contribute work in an engaging way, both synchronously and asynchronously ... it may be my turn to get out of the passenger seat and take the wheel. Often you find the 'vehicle' drives in automatic, Skype and sync.in for example, Google Docs too, are far easier than you may at first imagine.

Tools for co-ordinating availability between people on opposite sides of the globe anyone? Personally I operate as if in three places ... spending a few hours on the Indian subcontinent, a few hours in the UK .... then reappearing on the West Coast of the US!

The 24 hour economy should not mean that you work for 24 hours. Or does it? Perhaps we'll reach the stage where we keep links with people permanently open wherever we go, as if they are sitting on our shoulders, forever at our side, omnipresent and god like (in the Greek sense).

‘If all you have in your toolbox is a hammer, the problem tends to look like a nail.’

Are Liveski and Joyce (2003) saying, with a sideways swipe at Salmon’s (2002) Five-stage model of e-moderation, that these approaches, pre-assembled, or pre-set course production guidelines or online tools, are somehow pre-empting and therefore skewing courses that may be designed with them, that the parameters are limiting, not freeing and allowing for innovation?

What Liveski and Joyce fail to envisage in 2003 is that we are not talking hammers and nails, with the Salmon Five stage model the hammer to crack all online learning nuts. We are talking instead of a multitude of seeds of e-learning possibility scattered across rich or poor ground ... some flourish, some do not. The authors fail to recognise the wealth of interactive learning development and computer based learning that was being produced long before Salmon came along and offered some practioners and simple approach to adopt.

REFERENCE

Salmon, G. (2002). E-tivities: the key to active online learning.

Liveski, B and Joyce, P (2003) Examining the five-stage e-moderating model: Designed and emergent practice in the learning technology profession

So there's a word for it. Courtesy of the Today Programme, BBC Radio 4 in the last few minutes (08.56)

People who deliberately play music without headphones as a form of bullying, saying 'sod off' to the world and an act of aggression.

Five or six years ago someone sat down opposite me doing this and I asked him to turn it down. If looks could kill ...

I moved down the train. He moved to a seat behind me.

I got off the train and moved to a different carriage. He followed again. This time I sat with my back to the wall. His pursuit ended when he reached his destination.

This weekend eight hours on the train I just got up and moved ... three times, to dodge leaky headphones, not even sodcasting.

You may say that the answer is for me to plug in too.

This is to do with e-tools. The hammer is some gargantuan piece of software that tries to do everything (and might), or that quirky Open Source tool you've come across that does one thing brilliantly.

The reality we need a bit of both. But which bits?

Sometimes I find software (and hardware) to be like unwanted flotsam and jetsam on a shore. You want someone to go in and clean up the mess. Perhaps the likes of Google and Facebook and of course Microsoft do this - they offer you a one-stop shop for everything in return to cash, you mind, or your wallet (or all three).

Then you find a gem or too that for a while become a vital part of the way you do things.

It's a messy business.

I liken this to the development of the automobile on speed.

The big players and small players, the manufacturers and the person in their garage, battle it out for our attention.

Increasingly we, the punter, will rely on brand names. I'm guilty of liking all things Google (to a degree), but loathing all things Microsoft (too empirical and geeky ... maybe Google's going this way). I'm not into Facebook because I was happy with the forerunners and in truth find little use for it.

It is certain however that IT skills should be placed alongside the three Rs. People need IT, unless they are too young (or too old). Or ... given the access issues (cost, Internet access) too poor.

The have's vs the have-nots, the north/south, east/west divide is not one of cash, but of access to IT.

Just when we thought we could rest comfortably at night, I would come across a compilation of what a group of some 600 e-learners consider to be the current 'Top 100 e-learning tools.'

http://www.c4lpt.co.uk/recommended/

Like all lists it's reassuring to see ones you use and like, of interest to find something new, worrying if something you swear by isn't on the list at all.