I have been teaching a course on Wikis in Higher Education and have found Dave Foord’s STOLEN principles to be very useful. In the wiki spirit, he even provides a wiki where the STOLEN principles can be edited. To summarise
S – Specify Overall objective. The wiki must have a clear goal understood by all. If it is to be assessed, there should be guidelines
T – Timely. There should be a clear end-point for activities with intermediate deadlines for activities
O – Ownership. The class should feel that the wiki is theirs and that they are free to edit contributions. (The first time I edited a wiki entry I felt a bit uncomfortable – like I was correcting someone else’s work without their approval)
L – Localised objectives – guidelines as to how to structure wiki and how contributions are to be made. Give examples.
E – Engagement rules – who can edit what and when. Guidelines for acceptable usage.
N – Navigation structure
The ‘L’ should perhaps be a ‘G’ for guidelines or ‘S’ for scaffold but of course STOGEN or STOSEN are not English words.
Based on my own experience, I have added Practice, Feedback and Evaluation to come up with:
P – Practice – wiki literacy. Get used to using the wiki
O - Objective – clear task and objectives
S – Scaffold – help users both to work collaboratively and use the wiki tool
T – Time – deadlines and end-point
E – Evaluate & Feedback – Ongoing feedback to help students. Evaluate at end
R – Reflect - On student performance and use of wiki
Ownership which I think is important is included under Scaffold. Ongoing Feedback is included under Evaluate which is a bit of a kludge. Suggestions for improvements welcome.
December 22nd, 2011
I have been experimenting with Skype to allow remote participants to present to and participate in some of our face-to-face workshops. Screen sharing allows the presenter or participants to share their screen while speakers and microphones allow for two way communication. This is simple and can be set up in minutes by any two people with Skype accounts as in this YouTube video. You need to connect before initiating screen sharing. Group screen sharing is available with paid Skype accounts.
Initially, a participant on maternity leave presented her project from home. She presented her work and handled questions and answers from the class. With a fixed mike, the facilitator sometimes needed to repeat the questions from the rest of the class. She also listened to the other participants presentations and asked questions. I have tried this a few times now and find it works quite well. The only downside is that in the flow of the class, it is easy to forget about the one remote participant.
The next challenge is to use Skype in a taught face-to-face workshop where the participants are evaluating resources and learning how to use software tools.
I have also used Elluminate within Blackboard (now Blackboard Collaborate)for webinars. As it designed for online classes, Elluminate has many more features than Skype. However, Skype is quick and easy with minimal setup and suited to allowing an individual to join a classroom session.
October 4th, 2011
Higher Education Administration with Social Media, edited by Laura and Charles Wankel, published this year by Emerald is volume two in a series on social media in higher education and follows Educating Educators with Social Media. It focuses on administration with chapters from contributors describing how universities are using social media from student enrolment, through advising, mentoring and learning to public and alumni relations.
In this brief book review I focus on the chapter on learning which describes two case studies on social bookmarking and two on microblogging in Bournemouth University. Their aim was to facilitate collaboration and foster a sense of belonging through the use of social media.
Midwifery students used social bookmarking to collaborate on a project on breastfeeding guidelines while on their clinical placements. A tool within the VLE was chosen to keep academic work separate from the students’ personal lives. The need for consistent tag names was recognised. The social bookmarking tool enabled the student to share, discuss and evaluate web-based resources. Feedback from staff and students suggested that the collaboration worked well and would be continued.
University librarians also used social bookmarking within the VLE to tag multimedia resources according to their copyright status. This arose in response to requests from lecturers who wanted to use multimedia resources in their teaching but were uncertain about the legal position. Previously librarians in different schools found themselves answering the same questions about the same resources so the use of social bookmarking avoided duplication of effort on their part.
Lecturers found that first year healthcare students were making little use of VLE for communication and discussion perhaps because it was not suitable for instant communication. Twitter can be used on a smartphone and so allows immediate, synchronous communication. The lecturer created a private Twitter account. Group tweets were used so that students did not have to follow each other. Less than half the class participated perhaps because use of Twitter was optional or perhaps because Twitter was introduced late in the semester. Tweets included questions to the lecturer, peer-to-peer Twitter support and brief reflection. It is planned to use Twitter again from the start of the course.
The law librarian also used Twitter to gather and disseminate information from law databases, legal publications and colleagues. Though the service was aimed at law students the majority of followers were external to the university. Twitter was used as a broadcast medium rather than as a means of collaboration.
Based on the limited information in the book it would seem that the librarians and their ‘lecturer’ clients made the most effective use of the media. In particular, the use of Twitter with students was novel. Perhaps it did not address a real need of many students in either case. It would be interesting to learn more about the next iteration of the two student projects.
The next book in the series will be Teaching Arts and Science with Social Media. I look forward to reading more about the use of social media as educational tools.
September 10th, 2011
Photosynth is a handy tool from Microsoft that allows you to build a 3D image of a scene. To do so you take multiple photos of the scene from different angles and perspectives, upload the photos into Photosynth where they are combined to build a ‘synth’. You can zoom in and out and navigate around your finished synth. It is particularly suited to viewing a building from different aspects.
In my example I took 13 shots of Belfield House (University College Dublin) from the front and sides. I achieved a 77% synthy on this my second attempt, a considerable improvement on my first. ‘Synthy’ describes the quality of a synth by measuring the degree of matching. According to Microsoft, ” it’s the probability that one can navigate between two photos selected at random, without replacement”. You can locate the site of a synth on Bing maps (Microsoft’s version of Google maps). This is my beginner’s example:
Or much better ones on the Photosynth website.
August 29th, 2011
I have been experimenting with Google+, Google’s new social networking tool. Google+ has elements of blogging , Facebook and Twitter. In my mind, its circles allow you to organise your communications better than Twitter and Facebook. For example, you can organise your contacts into separate circles to discuss say ‘educational technology’ ,’photography’ or ‘politics’ . Contacts can be in one or more circles. Similarly you can belong to one or more of your contacts’ circles.
From what I have seen and contributed so far, posts seem to be shorter and less reflective than blog posts but longer than Twitter’s 140 characters. I have only found Twitter useful for announcements or as a back channel at conferences. I’ve never become much of a Facebook fan either – as I rarely want to share the same messages with family, friends or colleagues. I value boundaries. I don’t share Alec Couros belief (as in his keynote ‘Why Networked Learning Matters‘ at Ed-Media 2011) in the need to create a public digital identity complete with personal photos.
Google+ posts can be +1 (liked), shared or commented on. Comments are nested under the post which makes far easier reading than a Twitter timeline. You can also ‘chat’ and use a webcam in your circles. Have a look for yourself at Google+
August 12th, 2011
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