I have discussed the features and benefits of each of these resources in depth throughout these posts, and how I have used many of them.

I have grouped the resources into main categories based on their main use (some have elements of more than 1, but these are what I believe to be the main one):

• collaboration – allowing  students to work with other students, and me to work with them and colleagues
• communication – sharing with, and receiving information from  students
• content management – organising and distributing the content associated with my teaching
• creating content – tools for creating content
• feedback – ways to find out what students think
• learning about good practice – places to get ideas from and to make sure I am doing things well
• technical standards – mostly just for reference, but good to know what underlies all of the resources I use

I have come across a mind-boggling amount of new information in this process, and the potential is great (along with the opportunity to waste huge amounts of time…)

So far I have used most of the resources listed, some have been interesting but of little immediate use, others have become a regular part of my teaching. These latter resources form my Top 10 list (no particular order apart from alphabetical):

1. Common Craft – my personal guides to all of this stuff – just great in a multitude of ways
2. Creative Commons - the reason I can use all the free content on the web that I can, and I plan to share my work using their licences in the future
3. Mahara – mostly for the promise it holds for future use, and how it addresses with an uncanny accuracy an issue I faced early on in my teaching
4. MindMeister – puts complex, interdependent systems into a neat, clean visual format – I like that a lot
5. Moodle – having completed this unit, I have a great appreciation of all the “background” work that allows me to use Moodle as an LMS – it really does work nicely
6. RSS – really an essential tool for managing content on the web efficiently. It’s a great way to share info with students and connect them with outside resources
7. Seven Principles of Effective Teaching: A Practical Lens for Evaluating Online Courses – this sums up all the important things I have learnt in an elegant way, and it is evidence based! (sort of)
8. SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) – a bit dry and slightly abstract, but this is the glue that holds all this together and I am grateful it exists
9. The Reluctant Online Professor – a nice read, with a good mix of technical and philosophical ideas to make it all seem OK
10. Xmarks – my favourite Firefox plugin. Despite initial teething problems I use it all the time – happiness is synced bookmarks

Here is a .pdf version of my Personal resource matrix

Here is a cut/paste from Word. I have an Excel version too which is very useful, as it can be sorted as needed, I would love to post it here, but WordPress doesn’t support it.

29th of April 2010

This session consisted of:

• investigating sources of case studies about online courses
  • looking at several examples of online courses which are considered “good” examples
• looking at tools to evaluate online courses

Case Studies

I am not so sure about what to write here, as most of this class was based on looking at some examples of online courses. There was much discussion about various points which were raised, however it is diffiicult to summarise these in any really cohesive way… Also, as I don’t teach a 100% online unit, some of these points dont (yet!) directly relate to my current experiences. Some key points though are:

• It’s best to look at local examples of online courses, even better if you can use the course
• It’s really important to keep important information “above the line” i.e. so users don’t have to scroll to see important things (as discussed in my Week 9 post)
• Introduce yourself with a photo, and include contact details clearly – knowing that a real person is at the other end is a key factor for online success
• Include a Frequently Asked Questions section – initially based on Frequently Asked Questions!
• Clearly elaborate the expectations of the student, especially in terms of participation and any assessment associated with it
  • Think about if marks are associated with teacher-graded participation, or if it is encouraged by designing in inter-dependence between students
• Consider using technology like Echo360 to provide “live” lecture content online, and to link the lecture theatre to the course (especially in mixed face to face/online units)
  • consider the technology that students have access to – can they all equitably access high-bandwidth dependent technology like this?
  • extra features, like subtitling, can improve accesibility of this type of content
• Use quizzes as an efficient way to assess, and automate it to give formative and summative feedback
  • takes a lot of work to set up – much easier if SCORM compliant  systems are used
    • companies like Easy Authoring have a range of products which turn text in to quizzes, and other useful e-learning creation tools.
  • ensure rigor of assesment in quizzes
    • consider cultural attitudes to plagiarism
    • consider invigilated online quizzes, but issues for distance students
    • use technology to reduce cheating – some security settings on Moodle to reduce opportunity for this

Sites which give access to online courses to be examined as case studies include:

Contemporary online teaching cases from Deakin University

Welcome to our Contemporary online teaching case site. It features the work of over 70 Deakin University staff in developing and using new media and online technologies to foster student learning. The site was developed through University strategic teaching and learning innovation funding. It has been designed to help teachers work creatively and productively in their online teaching.

Each of the cases locate new media and online technologies in the context of broader views of what it means to teach and learn effectively in different disciplines and professional fields in tertiary education.

Effective Practice Case Studies from JISC (which must stand for something but I can’t figure it out!)

JISC inspires UK colleges and universities in the innovative use of digital technologies, helping to maintain the UK’s position as a global leader in education.

The case studies can be disseminated as required in your institution. They have been identified here by the generic learning activities to which they are linked in the publication Effective Practice with e-Learning and on its accompanying CD-ROM. Five of the ten case studies have supporting video clips available in Windows Media Player and QuickTime™ formats.

Case studies of E-learning from the UK Centre for Bioscience

The following case studies are examples of effective e-learning, teaching and assessment practice written by bioscience teachers. Each case study provides an outline of something that has been tried and found to worked well with students.

The case studies were compiled by the Centre for Bioscience as part of the Higher Education Academy’s/JISC Distributed E-learning Programme. (there they are again..)

E-learning Case studies from the Higher Education Academy – English Subject Centre

Welcome to the website of The English Subject Centre. The English Subject Centre is part of the Higher Education Academy and supports the teaching of English Literature, English Language and Creative Writing across UK Higher Education. This website offers a range of activities, information and ideas to help lecturers enhance the student experience. We hope you can take a moment to explore!

Tools to Evaluate Online Courses

A number of evaluation tools for online courses were presented. They are mostly (only?) rubrics which ask about the inclusion and quality of various parts of the online course.

A quantitative audit just looks to see if certain things are present in the course, and a qualitative audit judges how good they are. UC doesn’t have a formal evaluation process at the moment, however as there is almost 100% uptake of Moodle across the university, this is an important consideration. As with many things IT, poor use of the tools is likely to be detrimental to the intended outcome.

Two of the evaluation tools presented in the class are Rubric_online_courses and Rubric4eLearningDesign, with a completed one Diverse_Curriculum_evaluation_Rubric_July22.

They are selfexplanatory, and our homework for this class as to complete one for our own teaching sites. I haven’t done this as it really looks like it is to be done by someone other than the creator of the site, and I really don’t have the expertise to make the qualitative judgements they ask for. But, I have kept them easily accessible (here!) so that I can refer to them as my experience grows. I might also forward them to a few of my colleagues…

There is discussion of using a “% complete” measure for Moodle sites at UC, which tells you what activities and tools you haven’t included in your site. This seems quite a blunt tool for measuring quality, as the context of the usage is important. Just having something present doesn’t mean it is done well.

Students are potentially becoming overloaded with online content, as this saturation of Moodle continues. There is a suspicion that a degree of overkill might be reached if the whole university experience is “Moodleised”. There’s nothing on Google about it yet though…

Finally…

Probably the one document I will print and put up on my office pinboard is Seven Principles of Effective Teaching: A Practical Lens for Evaluating Online Courses. I can’t be sure why, perhaps it is because  this is the end of the course and my head is spinning a bit with possibilities and challenges, but this seems to distill everything I have learnt into a useful list of tips. If you don’t want to read the article, the main points are:

• Principle 1: Good Practice Encourages Student-Faculty Contact
• Principle 2: Good Practice Encourages Cooperation Among Students
• Principle 3: Good Practice Encourages Active Learning
• Principle 4: Good Practice Gives Prompt Feedback
• Principle 5: Good Practice Emphasizes Time on Task
• Principle 6: Good Practice Communicates High Expectations
• Principle 7: Good Practice Respects Diverse Talents and Ways of Learning

So, that’s it!

22nd of April 2010

This session consisted of:

• discussion of the user’s perspective of online resources
• identifying design and visual standards for online resources
• locating ways to gather data about the user’s experience
  • Crazy Egg
  • Kampyle
  • bit.ly

The User’s Perspective

In the end, all of this discussion about online teaching and learning boils down to one idea – how can the learner achieve the best outcome?

This is where seeing online teaching from the user’s perspective matters – if the user doesn’t get out of the online teaching the same thing that the teacher puts in, there is a problem. A useful website which lists a large number of links to websites which discuss this topic is Instructional Design for Online Learning. It is a bit old, having been last updated in December 2008, but does have a good range of resources. The first entry contains the authors criteria for success in designing course for online teaching. They are:

Clearly articulated objectives and expectations

An easily navigable web site

A course structure that facilitates collaborative learning

Assignments and activities that facilitate participation and communication among students

Timely feedback for students from the Instructor

An appropriate use of technologies to enhance learning

A discussion space for learners to talk openly about the course (expectations, uncertainty, what they like, dislike, their participation, progress etc.)

So, it is apparent that a balance between the use of technology and content is the hardest to strike, summed up nicely as:

“How do you merge clean, accessible design with sound pedagogical principles?”

There is an online course you can take, Designing Kick Butt Quality Online Courses, to answer this exact question (you do need to log in: the user name and password is bbworld07, which logs you in as someone called Kevin World o7 – thanks Kevin).

The first thing I noticed is that the login page colour scheme is terrible, and the navigation icons  are hard to find ((the little green arrows hiding in the top right corner – although later on the course points out that large icons are a feature of bad design…) After a little while I found the Course Tools pane on the left (it is hidden by default) which allows an overview of the whole course – there are a lot of  “dead ends” if you use the arrows to navigate, and the overview map is necessary to get back to the main index page to look at the next module – the Course Tools pane closes itself every time you switch to a different module; a bit irritating really, and ironic for a course like this!

There is useful info there, like Eye Candy – it’s got to look good too and ideas on structuring folders. I especially like the way they promote a institution-wide approach to layout and organisation – this appeals to me and creates a strong identity and consistency between courses. This is more an administrative decision to be made by the institution than the individual teacher though.

Even in my own discipline, the different units Moodle sites look quite different, with some obviously being assembled with little attention to this kind of detail. Although these are not online courses, and we have never asked the students about this, I suspect that a disorganised site, with spelling errors, inconsistent layout and no thought given to navigation impairs its usefulness.

The Sloan C Effective Practices Site represents A Consortium of Institutions and Organizations Committed to Quality Online Education, promoting five pillars of quality in online education: student satisfaction, access, learning effectiveness, faculty satisfaction and institutional cost effectiveness. Very usefully, and in a generous collaborative way exemplifying their philosophy, they provide access that “shares techniques, strategies, and practices in online education that have worked for them. All effective practices are peer reviewed to insure quality and to give submitters some documentation for tenure and promotion files.” They are obviously a pragmatic group, and the focus on the teacher’s needs is refreshing.

The Reluctant Online Professor gives an encouraging example of a new online course, with quite well detailed descriptions of the things that worked. Interestingly, one of the authors main mentors is highly regarded for their work in online pharmacy education in the US. Although not everyone agrees this is a good development.

Jesse James Garrett’s  book, The Elements of User Experience is a well regarded guide to creating a website that “…fulfills your strategic objectives while meeting the needs of your users.” It is based on an apparently famous diagram he created, which describes the ideas and relationships upon which websites are built. He also has an engaging writing style, as exemplified in the introduction below:

From the Introduction:

This is not a how-to book. There are many, many books out there that explain how Web sites get made. This is not one of them.

This is not a book about technology. There is not a single line of code to be found between these covers.

This is not a book of answers. Instead, this book is about asking the right questions.

This book will tell you what you need to know before you go read those other books. If you need the big picture, if you need to understand the context for the decisions that user experience practitioners make, this book is for you.

This book is designed to be read easily in just a few hours. If you’re a newcomer to the world of user experience — maybe you’re an executive responsible for hiring a user experience team, or maybe you’re a writer or designer just finding your way into this field — this book will give you the foundation you need. If you’re already familiar with the methods and concerns of the field of user experience, this book will help you communicate them more effectively to the people you work with.

Design and Visual Standards for Online Resources

In an effort to improve the user’s experience, there are guidelines and standards for the way online resources look and work. Moodle takes care of this automatically, by limiting the number of ways things can look and standardising the way things work by using a core set of tools which a teacher can choose from. But, as discussed above, there are still some rather dysfunctional Moodle sites around  (I was going to put up a screen shot but it is too hard to deidentify it…).

Standards discussed previously, like SCORM and Common Cartridge all help with this standardisation.  Websites like webusability have checklist tools to measure the  Success Criteria and Sufficient Techniques of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Version 2.0 (WCAG 2.0). On this same page is an apology which has a sense of fatalistic irony about it: ” I apologise for the lack of an accessible equivalent alternative and hope to make a HTML version available in the future.”

The WCAG standard is produced by W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, and described on their Web Accesibility Initiative page. The homepage for WCAG 2.0 is here.

This checklist allows a website to be rated in terms of the level of accessibility to users – it looks at elements of websites being:

• Principle 1: Perceivable – Information and user interface components must be presentable to users in ways they can perceive.
• Principle 2: Operable – User interface components and navigation must be operable.
• Principle 3: Understandable – Information and the operation of user interface must be understandable.
• Principle 4: Robust – Content must be robust enough that it can interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies.

with increasingly wide criteria to achieve A, AA or AAA ratings. Moodle complies with these, as do other content creation applications like Dreamweaver.

Total Validator “is a free one-stop all-in-one validator comprising a HTML validator, an accessibility validator, a spelling validator, a broken links validator, and the ability to take screenshots with different browsers to see what your web pages really look like”. It produces a compliance report about all of this, which is comprehensive but completely meaningless to me. I am exceptionally grateful that all this is taken care of by the Moodle people . I tried to validate one of my Moodle sites, but the validator got stuck at the login page – the report is below and really appears to be intended for someone other than me…

validator

How can we gather data about the user’s experience?

All of this discussion relies on actually knowing how users experience an online resource. Short of actually asking them, there are many ways to gather this type of information.

I did actually ask my students in 2 units I convene what they thought of some changes I had made to their Moodle sites – namely reversing the order of the weekly fields so that the most recent was at th e top, rather than at the bottom (a real pain to navigate when Week 18 comes around), using a “widescreen” version of the default Moodle page to reduce the need to scroll, and relocating several of the “blocks” which appear on the left and right side of the main content. The screen shot in my Week 2 post shows the final look and the link to the survey I used to do this – a very quick “choice” survey which is a Moodle activity. The introduction to the survey is below:

survey

I did this for 2 sites, with results below. I would really love to know what those 2 “haters” didn’t like but it was just a quick poll…

like it hate it

One of the main issues identified in class is reducing the need to scroll to access content – people just don’t scroll it seems. Even with these changes on my Moodle sites, there is still the need to scroll a bit. This is not unique to my Moodle sites, and I have recently had a very fruitful time with the UC library staff reorganising the Pharmacy and Clinical Trials library subject guide to reduce this. All of the key information is now visible when you open the page with well placed tabs to move to different sections -there are still some things I would like changed, like the large amount of space filled in the top half by banners and repeats of the same information, but apparently that is a university wide standard which I will probably have to accept.

library

There are many other applications which let you see what users are doing on your site – this can give you an idea of what works well and what to change. Some of these are:

Crazy Egg’s Confetti and Heatmap features are simple and affordable heat mapping tools that allow you to visually understand user behavior. It’s a commercial program, so I haven’t used it but it looks useful – there was an example shown in class which highlighted common problems on a web page, especially people clicking on things that looked like, but weren’t, hyperlinks.

Kampyle Feedback Analytics offer to Turn Insight Into Action with Feedback Form Analytics Solutions. Again, it is a commercial program so I haven’t used it. Pity about the spelling mistake in their main tag line too…

bit.ly is The easiest way to make long links short, share and track them. The idea is that you convert links on your website to a “short” version which routes the link through bit.ly, where it is able to be counted. This can let you know which links on your site are the most popular.

15th of April 2010

This session consisted of:

• discussion of digital portfolios
• examination of digital portfolio resources
• setup and experimentation with the Mahara open source electronic portfolio within Moodle

Digital Portfolios/ePortfolios

The Queensland Government Smart Clasroom defines a digital portfolio as:

” a purposeful collection of learnings over time that documents personal, academic and professional development. It is a visual guide that maps where you have been, where you are going and how you plan to get there. In this context, a digital portfolio is a tool to communicate what you know and can do.”

They are described as:

“a time capsule for condensing learning over time, demonstrating the efforts applied and progress achieved for specific goals. They also provide a platform for presenting capabilities to teachers, accrediting bodies and potential employers.”

So, they have a use for everyone in the education system, and outside of the system for collating and presenting the “evidence” of an education.

Portfolios are by no means a new concept, however the use of digital technology allows them to contain an essentially infinite array of material – the creativity and ability of the student and the teacher are really the only limitation (if we ignore cost, time and other humdrum things).

There are (were) some arguments that “old fashioned” portfolios are preferred to digital portfolios. Not every environment will suit them, but more and more commonly it is the expected way to present yourself to the world. Two of my friends (BC and BH) who work in the digital animation and cartoon industries rely on these heavily. (hey, this looks like one of those public/private overlaps…). They previously had this type of content on CDs which they distributed, but the web based portfolio is far more effective.

There are different conceptions of the role of digital portfolios and thier role in education, as presented in the diagram below.

eportfolio

The simplest conception is that it is just a place to archive the things that are created in the course of learning – just like a folder on your computer; a “digital scrapbook” which can be accessed later on. Other conceptions  include:

• the portfolio as the vehicle for assessment – things placed within the portfolio over a period of time are assessed. The improvements over time in the content are a record of achievement
  • student achievement can be linked to learning outcomes at the unit and university levels, but this serves quality assurance purposes of the institution more than the student
  • these are usually controlled by the institution and can be “lost” to the owner when leaving
• the portfolio as a “showcase” representing the best achievements of the owner – the owner selects those things which best demonstrate their abilities; this can be different for different audiences
  • this could comprise a range of material and be “stored” as a blog or website which is controlled by the owner
  • this is more commonly used for employment purposes (e.g. BC and BH above)
• the portfolio as a space for learning – containing the objects as above, but with other spaces for collating ideas, works in progress, resources and tools and for collaborating with others

This last idea is formalised nicely by EDUCAUSE:

“Rather than a static repository, an electronic portfolio is a dynamic and interactive tool of a learners’ digital collections of their own learning artifacts, supporting interaction with other learners, employers, counselors, mentors, teachers, and others for lifelong learning and professional development.”

They offer a range of resources (127 at last check) to support the use of digital portfolios.

With the range of purposes that a digital portfolio could be used for, many students maintain several for different purposes. A digital portfolio which allows all of these in the one platform is the “holy grail” – Mahara could be the answer?

Mahara

Mahara “is an open source e-portfolio system with a flexible display framework. Mahara, meaning ‘think’ or ‘thought’ in Te Reo Māori, is user centred environment with a permissions framework that enables different views of an e-portfolio to be easily managed. Mahara also features a weblog, resume builder and social networking system, connecting users and creating online learner communities.”

University of Canberra is currently rolling out Mahara as a component of Moodle. I have just trialled it briefly, but it looks and works really nicely – the link from the unit Moodle site logs you in automatically – a very nice touch that reinforces the link with Moodle.

mahara

Mahara has several features which address the various conceptions described above, especially in terms of owner control over the portfolio:

• It has features of a social networking site, with various ways of finding and managing “friends” and groups – they can all have different levels of access to your content.
• It has a place for writing a resume, listing goals and skills and then places to store the finished documents.
• It uses a concept called “views” to allow the owner to organise the content in the portfolio – different views are set up by the owner to address particular requirements, and those views are then made available publicly or to specific friends or groups.
  • Views also have a “secret URL” which can be distributed and used as a hyperlink to that view for anyone who isn’t a Mahara user or group member (i.e. potential employers) when you don’t want it to be easily found by the public.
  • The owner can even set the dates for which access is available.
• Selscted or all content/views can be exported as stand alone websites or as LEAP2A standard format. “You can later use this to import your data into other LEAP2A compliant systems, although the export is hard for humans to read.”
  • I am a bit nervous about this as it seems to be a completely separate standard to the SCORM or IMS discussed in my previous post.These type of things will only work if they are universally adopted – remember VHS and Betamax???

An upcoming development is the expected addition of a “submit” button in Mahara which submits a view as an assessment item in Moodle. The opportunities here are great, with assessment tasks potentially being comprised of the student presenting work which they believe meets the assessment criteria selected from their portfolio. That work could then be also used in a different view to advertise their skills to potential employers or share their ideas with other students. I am not sure how portfolio items could be used in multiple submissions, as university policy doesn’t allow the same work to be submitted for more than one assessment – that’s one for the policy people I think.

It looks like the Mahara/Moodle connection is in good hands, with the Moodleman = Maharaman.

8th of April 2010

This session consisted of:

• defining learning objects, and investigating their utility
  • SCORM – Sharable Content Object Reference Model
    • SCORM in Moodle
  • IMS Global Learning Consortium
    • IMS in Moodle
    • Common Cartridge
    • Common Cartridge in Moodle
• exploring and using learning object repositories
  • MIT
  • MERLOT
  • EDNA
  • PELD
• exporting a learning object from a repositiry and deploying it within the Moodle Playpen for this unit
• exploring applications and tools used in creating learning objects
  • Creative Commons
  • Hot Potatoes

Learning Objects

Learning objects have been defined on the Learning about Learning Objects website as

“digital, re-usable pieces of content that can be used to accomplish a learning objective”

or as David Wiley states

“any digital resource that can be reused to support learning”.

So, the basic idea is that an object, an activity, or any “thing” that forms part of teaching and learning can be a learning object. In the context of digital use, it is stand alone, able to be reused and adapted for specific needs, able to be aggregated in a modular way to build into a larger object, and, importantly, tagged with metadata so that it can be stored, searched and retrieved easily. The idea of learning object repositories is discussed below. Learning objetcs can be imported into platforms such as Moodle to organise and operate them.

The primary intention of learning objects is that they should be able to be used in any environment, requiring them to have standard characteristics so that this works nicely. There are many aspects of learning objects that are subject to this “standardisation” , an example being the way that metadata is associated with learning objects.

“Metadata is information about an object, be it physical or digital. As the number of objects grows exponentially and our needs for learning expand equally dramatically, the lack of information or metadata about objects places a critical and fundamental constraint on our ability to discover, manage, and use objects. This Standard addresses this problem by defining a structure for interoperable descriptions of learning objects.” http://ltsc.ieee.org/wg12/files/LOM_1484_12_1_v1_Final_Draft.pdf (from 2002, so quite old now)

In a seemingly remarkable occurence, in 1997 the US Department of Defence decide to develop a way to “to harness the power of learning and information technologies to standardize and modernize education and training…”

The specific goals were to:

• Identify and recommend standards for training software and associated services purchased by Federal agencies and contractors.
• Facilitate and accelerate the development of key technical training standards in industry and in standards-development organizations.
• Establish guidelines on the use of standards and provide a mechanism to assist DoD and other Federal agencies in the large-scale development, implementation, and assessment of interoperable and reusable learning systems.

From this initiative came SCORM – Sharable Content Object Reference Model, which:

“integrates a set of related technical standards, specifications, and guidelines designed to meet SCORM’s high-level requirements—accessible, interoperable, durable, and reusable content and systems. SCORM content can be delivered to your learners via any SCORM-compliant Learning Management System (LMS) using the same version of SCORM.”

SCORM allows the ideal of complete compatibility across all digital systems.Moodle complies with most of the SCORM standards to allow compatibility  with content from other systems.

The IMS Global Learning Consortium “is a non-profit collaboration among the world’s leading educational technology suppliers, content providers, educational institutions, school districts, and government organizations dedicated to improving education and learning through the strategic application of technology.”

The IMSGLC seem to be the “go to” group for all things to do with learning object standardisation currently, especially according to their home page… “If you are looking for the future of education and purposeful innovation to improve access, affordability, and quality of education – you have come to the right place.”

They are currently developing Common Cartridges which are intended to  “define a commonly supported content format, able to run on any compliant LMS platform.”  Look here for (a lot) more information on Common Cartridge, including exactly what the difference between SCORM and Common Cartridge is. My take on it is that SCORM was developed for use in stand alone, self contained learning objects designed for self-paced learning, where Common Cartridges primarily act as an organiser of content from other sources, and contains assessment opportunities not available in SCORM. Well, something like that…

Moodle 2.0 will use  Common Cartridges which seems like a good thing. It is experimental in version 1.9.7.

Several of my students have asked the easiest way to have access to material on my Moodle sites when they finish the unit – Common Cartridge sounds like the answer.

Learning Object Repositories

There are a huge number of learning object repositories, and so there are repository repositories like NMC Learning Object Repositories, Resourcing the Curriculum, and Smart Teaching.org to organise them. So, I guess that makes that last sentence a repository repository repository.

Have a look back at the screen shot from Week 4. You can see that in the Moodle Playpen there are a number of links to things like “MIT Anthropology” and “incomprehensible linguistics stuff”. These are IMS content packages that we imported into Moodle from the MIT Open CourseWare learning object repository. “MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity.” So, anyone in the world (with web access) can use MIT course content for essentially any purpose. There is the caveat given that :

• OCW is not an MIT education.
• OCW does not grant degrees or certificates.
• OCW does not provide access to MIT faculty.
• Materials may not reflect entire content of the course.

but it does seem like a very generous and useful service, especially as they claim that “Each course we publish requires an investment of $10,000 to $15,000 to compile course materials from faculty, ensure proper licensing for open sharing, and format materials for global distribution.”

So, lets have a look at one. This is a screenshot of the course  The Lexicon and Its Features (as taught in: Spring 2007), as imported and viewed (deployed?) through our Moodle Playpen.

linguistics

It seems to work quite nicely (the content, as I have noted, is incomprehensible to me but if I wanted to study it, this would be a good start). It is controlled by the summary pane on the left, and the content is displayed in the main pane on the right. Quite a few of the files are .pdf so are viewed outside Moodle. There are a few gaps (no title for most of the lecture notes) and advertising does appear, but otherwise a smooth running Learning Object. As discussed in the SCORM versus Common Cartridge discussion above, this content does seem a bit isolated from anything in the real worls  -there is no scope for any interaction with it other than reading it, there is no assessment, and it is a bit cruel to read about all the exciting things “real” students of this course did. I think the ideas proposed by the Common Cartridge group are aimed at addressing this, and I hope they are succesful as it has huge potential for students and teachers.

The MIT Open CourseWare learning objects are all IMS compliant. This compliance is based around the imsmanifest.xml file which describes the content in the learning object.

The  Learning Object Repository Network (LORN) is an Australian site that “is for teachers and trainers, it is your gateway to online training resources – discover, download and use learning resources in your teaching and learning!” and “provides access to learning resources from a variety of learning material collections. The collections contain a variety of learning material types, from interactive digital learning material which can be incorporated into your learning management system to learner guides which can be printed.” It is for the VEt sector, and so does not contain any material really useful to my teaching. The Discipline of Pharmacy is investigating opportunities for training pharmacy assistants (a VET activity), however there are no resources specifically for this in LORN 9although there are some nice looking general retail modules). Maybe in the future…or we could produce them???

Here is a link to the standards which LORN sets for its packages.

Not all repositories list IMS compliant objects solely. Some of these are:

Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching  (MERLOT) “is a leading edge, user-centered, collection of peer reviewed higher education, online learning materials, catalogued by registered members and a set of faculty development support services.” They offer a category of pharmacy resources, which sounds promising; however a large number of the resources are just links to other websites – useful in part but not really what I would call a Learning Object. (e.g. the Clinical Pharmacology object is just a link to the related online Merck Manual chapter. Other things look interesting, but I will have to explore those at another time).

The Education Network Australia (EDNA) has a catalogue of resources – but the pharmacy related ones just appear to be links to pharmacy school home pages and various slightly dubious looking “online pharmacist” sites.

The Pharmacy Experiential Learning Database (PELD) (which requires registration so you won’t be able to see much unless you are a member) is a repository of activities for pharmacy students during placements and externships, to provides access to materials developed for the national Experiential Placements in Pharmacy project funded through the Australian Learning and Teaching Council . They are peer reviewed, but they are not packaged as digital learning objects and so are really quite cumbersome to use. I have used one of them previously, and it required me using cut-and-paste from the screen to a text document to “create” a usable activity – not really up to speed when compared with the objects avaialable elsewhere.  I suspect the fact that the project began in 2007 contributes to the lack of any digital aspect, as the SCORM/IMS/Common Cartridge movement seems to be newer than that (in the mainstream anyway).

Creative Commons

All of this activity raises the spectre of copyright – who owns what and what can you do with it? So, Creative Commons have created various copyright licenses which address the unique issues in creating, sharing and using digital material. You can read all about them on their website, but it seems to be working quite well so far.

Hot Potatoes

Hot Potatoes was discussed as just one example of an application that can be use to create learning objects.

“The Hot Potatoes suite includes six applications, enabling you to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises for the World Wide Web. Hot Potatoes is freeware, and you may use it for any purpose or project you like. It is not open-source.”

So there you go!

Moodle

Moodle, of course, can be used to create learning objects – in fact Moodle sites are learning objects themselves. You can “backup” (poor semantics for this function) the site, or elements of it, as a zipped IMS package and do what you will with them. The most useful aspect for my teaching is the ability to reuse things in different units, and perhaps to provide the whole unit as a learning object to students when they have finished the unit and no longer access the Moodle site (which Coomon Cartridge promises to do even better). I will offer this to the current classes I teach when they finish next week.

25th of March 2010

This session consisted of:

• discussion and examination of tools we use and the networks we belong to in:
  • the public and private domains
  • our professional and social identities
  • use of Twitter as a case study
• mapping these using MindMeister
• some further discussion from previous weeks on moderating forums (Votapedia)

Public versus Private

“Working online increases in complexity with each iteration of software and arrival of new technology and communication protocol. Staying afloat in this saturated workplace can be very demanding and often causes a disorientation for both teacher and student.”

Very true words – especially in light of the multitude of new applications which are available evdery day. Go2Web20 catalogues them, but it is completely out of control. I counted 70 pages each with 50 applications on them – there is no sensible way to sort through them all and see what benefits they might have. So, I take the opposite approach and search for the benefits I want i.e. “how can I make a mind map of my bookmarks?” But of course, I might not know what I want until I see it…

So, the upshot of this is that we use a large number of diffeent applications, many of which require us to disclose some degree of personal information, and which connect us to other people to some degree. The important question is how we choose to draw boundaries around our various lives, and who we permit to see what within those boundaries.

As you can see in the map of My_Personal_Network, I have very little crossover between my public and private worlds in terms of technology. About the only one I can see is my mobile phone, which is used in both areas. Otherwise I have different email addresses and access different applications and websites between them. I have never used my private email address for public purposes, and none of the people in my public life are my friends on Facebook (unless they are friends in my private life). I participate in just one forum, in my public life, and that identity remains public only.

This blog is in fact about the only real link between them, and I have just relaised I forgot to include it! But really, this blog is quite strongly located in my public life as it is based upon my professional work which is open for all to see.

Mapping my Personal Network

As introuduced in previous posts, Mindmeister is a nice, free web application for creating mind maps. See the map I created of my My_Personal_Network.

I haven’t decided the best way to represent this – after a while it felt like I was just replicating my browser bookmarks in a mind map – seems a bit cumbersome really. I searched for an automated way to do this and only came up with this lame effort… Seems you can do it with Delicious, but I don’t use it so no good.

I like it like that and will have to be careful to maintain it.

Twitter

In this session, the conversation also turned to Twitter (in Plain English) which claim to allow you to “Discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world”. It can be considered a synchronous and asynchronous communication tool depending on the environment and way in which it is used.

I haven’t used Twitter very much at all as I don’t have a smartphone, and it really seems to be more suited to mobile use rather than computer based use. However, I can see the potential and Danny described how he uses it to store ideas and share interesting things with groups of people, and to collaboratively solve questions amongst groups of people interested in the same things – but he uses it only for work.

Twitter is similar to a forum, but less rich in direct content. The real advantage is that it is quick and easy to use, and is highly compatible with mobile use.

It is also a bit like Facebook and other “friends” based applications, but allows different types of relationships. SteffanAntonos describes it very nicely here. The main difference is that you can choose the depth of the “relationship” you have with people on Twitter whereas “friending” someone implies a close bond from the beginning. The interesting part is copied below:

Twitter Relationships:

- Type A: I follow you, but you don’t follow me and anyone can see both of our updates. (Public one-way “Follower” = weak relationship)

- Type B (A reversed): You follow me, but I don’t follow you and anyone can see both of our updates (Public one-way “Follower” = weak relationship)

-Type C: I’m Private, You’re Public: I follow you, but you don’t follow me AND my updates are protected so that you can’t see them (Private one-way Follower = Weakest relationship)

- Type D (C reversed) You’re Private, I’m Public: You follow me, but I don’t follow you and you’ve protected your updates so I can’t see them (Private one-way Follower = Weakest relationship)

- Type E: We follow each other publicly, and anyone can see our updates/conversations (Public Friends = Stronger relationship)

- Type F: We follow each other privately, and only we and the people we explicitly approve can see our updates/conversations (Private Friends = Stronger relationship)

FacebookRelationships:

- Type F: We follow each other privately, and only we and the people we explicitly approve can see our updates/conversations (Private Friends = Stronger relationship)

Of course, you can always embed Twitter in Facebook…

Applications associated with Twitter include:

• TweetDeck “TweetDeck is your personal real-time browser, connecting you with your contacts across Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Google Buzz and more.”
• Echofon (previosuly known as Twitterfox) “Keep up with Twitter while you browse the web using Firefox.”

A corporate-ish version of Twitter is Yammer, which alows you to “Exchange frequent short messages with people at work. You ask a question, share news, ideas, documents, and post status updates, and other people within your private network can reply. Unlike email, you choose whose messages you’ll receive by “following” specific people and joining groups – creating a custom feed tailored to you.”

They call this Enterprise Microblogging, and it claims to be the “leading real-time communication platform for companies, groups and organizations.” There are many different claims to this crown, and they are quite well discussed and compared here.

Votapedia

Votapedia offers a “Free Audience Response By Mobile Phone Service” which was developed by the CSIRO with the aim of providing a platform for audience response in education without the need for infrastructure such as “clickers” which are required in other systems. Essentially everyone has a mobile phone already, and these are used to vote in surveys by calling unique numbers for each response  It is even set up to work for no cost to the voter as it does not answer the call, and no call charges are accrued. A bit different to the commercial phone based voting systems used on TV.

18th of March 2010

This session consisted of:

• discussion of the relative merits of synchronous and asynchronous communication and collaboration, focusing on:
  • wikis
  • podcasting
  • video streaming
    • Echo360
  • content sharing
    • YouTube
    • iTunesU

Asynchronous versus synchronous communication and collaboration

According to Stefan Hrastinski in EDUCAUSE Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 4 (October–December 2008):

“two basic types of e-learning are commonly compared, asynchronous and synchronous. Until recently, e-learning initiatives mainly relied on asynchronous means for teaching and learning. However, recent improvements in technology and increasing bandwidth capabilities have led to the growing popularity of synchronous e-learning”

He also provides useful definitions of these concepts and the relative advantages of each, which can be summarised as:

Asynchronous:

• Asynchronous e-learning makes it possible for learners to log on to an e-learning environment at any time and download documents or send messages to teachers or peers.
• Students may spend more time refining their contributions, which are generally considered more thoughtful compared to synchronous communication.
• Almost every sentence in the asynchronous discussions…were classified as content-related (rather then planning or social support).
  • …students might feel isolated and not part of learning communities, which is essential for collaboration and learning.
• …it seems difficult to get asynchronous discussions going with few participants…

Synchronous:

• Learners and teachers experience synchronous e-learning as more social and avoid frustration by asking and answering questions in real time.
• Synchronous sessions help e-learners feel like participants rather than isolates.
• …synchronous e-learning supports other types of communication more often than does asynchronous e-learning.
• …synchronous communication increases psychological arousal.
• …synchronous communication increases motivation.
• …synchronous communication was “more like talking” compared with asynchronous communication.
• …the focus is often on quantity rather than quality—that is, trying to write something quickly because “someone else will say what I was going to say.”

There does not appear to be a consensus about which is “better”, and it seems that both are useful in specific circumstances. These are clearly described in Hrastinski’s table reproduced below.

sync vs async

A synchronous chat in our class using the Moodle chat tool…

13:59:  has just entered this chat

13:59:  has just entered this chat

13:59: Ben Gilbert has just entered this chat

13:59:  has just entered this chat

13:59:  has just entered this chat

13:59 : afternoon everyone

13:59 : hii everyone i’m here

13:59:  has just entered this chat

13:59:  has just entered this chat

14:00:  has just entered this chat

14:00 : just write int he bos at the bottom of the screen and hit entre

14:00 : sowe can all chat at once!

14:00 : Hi – i’m in too!

14:00:  has just entered this chat

14:00 : no editing

14:00 : not you can’t take it back

14:00 : Hello? Anyone there?

14:00 : d’oh

14:00 : So no editing = bad typing & spelling1

14:00 : my lomg finger nails get in the way when I type so I make lots of typos

14:01 : can we kill the computer system? Time starts now!

14:01 : ready set go!

14:04 : sorry have been listening to danny

14:05 : Ben Gilbert – hard to write and listen

14:05 : Ben Gilbert – feels a bit rude!

14:06 : im listening I promise

14:06 : LOL

14:11:  has left this chat

14:11:  has left this chat

14:12:  has left this chat

14:15 : Elvis has left the building

14:15:  has left this chat

Pretty awkward and really only of use to point out some of the problems with synchronous communications online. The good points but they didn’t reveal themselves in this chat!

(perfect example: on reading this again I think that my comment of  “feels a bit rude!” was misinterpreted by Danny – I was actually saying that it felt rude for me to be writing while he was talk ing! – sorry for that…)

The comment about “killing the system” was based upon the inability of the class to collaborate simultaneously on Google Docs for a previous activity (collating forum tips). It advertises the capacity to “Share changes in real time”, which I have experienced succesfully in the past; however it was not possible to achieve this fully in this class due to the IT capacity not being up to the task.

Wikis

See Wikis in Plain English to explain all about them.

Wikis can be synchronous (PBWorks offer synchronous collaboration tools), but the majority are asynchronous (Wikipedia and the Wiki tool in Moodle). To demonstrate this, the class attempted to work synchronously on a Moodle Wiki – it was never going to work with the warning frequently being displayed that “another user is currently editing this page” or similar. If this was not encountered, then the users view of the Wiki was frequently not the most recent update.

Podcasting

See Podcasting in Plain English to explain all about them.

Podcasting is the epitome of asynchronous communication. I think it is a lot like the invention of the VCR and the changes to television viewing that it allowed. You didn’t have to be in front of the TV to watch shows that you wanted to see (as long as you could program the timer properly…).

Another advantage of podcasting is that anyone can create content to broadcast; amateurs using desktop computers are easily able to do a comparable job to television and radio producers (technically at least, content can be a different quality altogether). Apple advertise the capacity of their products to podcast nicely on this page.

Echo360

Echo360 promises the ability to “Rewind, relive and reconnect with the classroom experience through campus-wide lecture capture from Echo360.” See here for some more advertising.

This is immediately recognisable as a tool for asynchronous communication, and supports the ethos of flexible access to material. University of Canberra has recently updated its lecture capture system to Echo 360 with the intention of :

• Allowing greater flexibility for students with timetable clashes or work/family commitments.
• Providing foundation content outside of class time, allowing improved quality of student-staff contact during class time.
• Viewing in conjunction with other learning resources through LearnOnline (Moodle).
• Providing opportunities for students to revise difficult concepts.
• Providing the opportunity for revision before examinations.
• (being able to) support…new technologies, such as automatic downloading of lectures via podcasting.

These capabilities are seen as especially important for the succesful introduction of the Winter Intensive Term at UC, which condenses 13 weeks of classes into 7 weeks. The capacity to allow asynchronous access to lecture material is essential for this intensive teaching model to be successful. It allows lecturers to create content either in the lecture theatre, or using their desktop or portable computers – so it canbe created anywhere at any time giving academic staff a similar level of “asynchronicity” as that of those accessing their material.

Content Sharing

YouTube EDU and iTunesU are sub-branches of YouTube and iTunes set up to focus on online sources of educational material. The familiarity of many students with these sites for other uses is considered a major advantage in their use as mediums for distribution of educational content. They also promote the philosophy of open access to educational resources which is seen as the desired evolution of education, as promoted by Wikiversity.

More on content sharing next week…

11th of March 2010

This session involved:

• setting up and trialling a test forum on the ‘playpen’ Moodle page for this unit
• setting up and moderating a ‘real’ forum on the same page over the following week
• identifying and sharing tips on forums using a Google docs page
  • ranking those tips using SurveyGizmo

The Moodle Playpen

These are Moodle sites which are available for use to practice and experiment with. (They are also called Moodle Sandpits). I like the analogy of having somewhere safe to practice Moodling before making sites available to students and/or the wider world.

Moodle Playpen

There is a website called The Moodle Playpen which describes these in more detail – I can’t work out if it is an official Moodle site or just some guys blog… I think that is the nature of Moodle, it is the sum of a whole range of contributors.

Forums or fora???

Fora is a plural of forum,  but it does sound like a bit of a w#$k…

The ABC, for a brief time, had a radio segment called Fora, but it has been changed to Big Ideas (there was a TV version too, which is also now called Big Ideas which links to Fora.tv – I am glad the people of Tuvalu are making some money out of their unique domain name!) So, maybe the ABC realised it was a bit of a wobbly word to use too.

Forums appears to be an equivalent word. This is much discussed in all sorts of forums…

I will call them forums.

Moodle Forums

Moodle has a nice forum function, which allows discussion of topics to be contributed to and viewed by site users (the administrator can decide who does and doesn’t see specific forums if there are subgroups within the class).

The pedagogical basis of forums is based on the need to replicate the benefits of face to face contact in distance education. Some of the disadvantages of distance learning are considered to be :

“We can’t see each other and talk with each other back and forth with the same immediate level of interaction. We can’t glance at students during a lecture to determine how well they understand the material. We also lose a degree of the students’ level of commitment to the course by showing up to the classroom.”

“Communication affects student engagement…when students are actively engaged in the course, they will keep participating in the course activities and communicating with you and other students. “

To make up for this, online forums can be used to maintain communication between students and teachers. They also allow opinions and thoughts to be shared without the time and performance pressures that exist in a face to face environment. This can lead to more carefully considered opinions, but at the price of spontaneity.

Sychronous and asynchronous forums, and other means of communication, are discussed next week.

The test forum was a simple exercise to learnt the mechanics of the forum tool. I had used this previously in my teaching, and set up the forum below:

test forum

Good fun, and a nice way to get to know the class a bit better (even though we were sitting next to each other whilst doing this!) Each class member set up their own forum (see the Playpen screen shot above) and we spent a bit of time experimenting with the features of the tool. It quickly became clear that there were some important setup and structural points that needed to be considerd to have an effective forum (described below).

The next task, and our homework for the week, was to create and moderate a “more formal” forum, to be discussed in next weeks class. I chose a topic related to my teaching, and posed it to the class;  there was a good amount of activity over the week. 18 replies are listed on my log, but half of them are me replying to others replies!

There was much discussion about the time and energy needed to keep up with moderating this type of activity. I made the following post in response to the general discussion on this topic:

“Yes, we are all very keen and so the forum gains a life of its own, growing exponentially.
I am procrastinating today… With the 10 of us (including Danny):

• 1 post each = 10 posts
  • 1 response to each post by each of us = 100 posts
    • 1 response to each of those posts by each of us = 1000 posts
      • you get the idea…

      My head really does hurt now.”

I use forums in my teaching, especially for the students to keep in touch with each other , and me, when they are on clinical placements. The log below shows the overall forum posting activity for one of my units – note the numbers on the y axis! (there are 45 students in this class)

The activity level of students shadows my activity (about a weeks lag) with an initial peak during the  placements (1 day per week), and subsequently around the due date for the assessment for those placements. Interestingly, after the 4th April, when the students all left Canberra for a 1 week externship, there was a large peak of self-sustained forum posting activity by students, and another peak 2 weeks after when the assesment for the externship was due. The volume, range and quality of student postings, and the general cameraderie that was evident, strongly supports the use of forums as an effective way for students and teachers to keep in touch over distance, and as a useful tool for reflection after the experience.

all posts

There was assessment associated with this forum use, consisting of minor marks for “engagement with the forum” and more substantial marks for “quality of reflection and discusssion based upon the exercises set for the externship”. I consider this to be a succesful inducement for students to use the forums, and to ensure that they participate at an acceptable level. This same unit had a similar structure in the previous year,;however no marks were associated with the forum- it was not accessed once during the semester.

There were academc and social aspects to this forum, and they complemented each other well – students took great pride in sharing the things they had seen and done and how they were solving the issues presented to them in the assessment pieces set for the externship. For many of the students it was their first time in that environment, and many of the posts were made to support peers and share solutions to these common problems and challenges.

Maintaining this forum in the initial stages required a large amount of time, which became impossible to continue as the semester progressed and other commitments took priority. The real art in forum moderating is to “light the spark” so that the forum members then give it a life of its own independent of the moderator’s input.

This is supported by the list of “Forum Tips” below which the class compiled after the forum exercise (initially using Google docs, then ranked on SurveyGizmo).

Moodle Forum – Tips and Recommendations

// 1. Rank the following tips

1]	Have a clear, interesting, open question.
2]	Respond to all posts in an interested and engaged way.
3]	Identify themes from posts and use these to generate new threads.
4]	Clarify the question if the discussion is going off track or allow the discussion to take tangents if that is the intention.
5]	Sum up the discussion at the end.
6]	Put the headings and actual question in the right spot. i.e. Forum Name, Forum Introduction etc
7]	Make the first post is a good leaping off point for the forum with an engaging statment or question.
8]	Make sure that the question is a real question rather than a statement or is written in such a way as to provoke a response.
9]	Maintain correct grammar and spelling. It’s good manners.
10]	Make it fun or add an element of fun to improve engagement.
11]	Avoid abbreviations and jargon.
12]	Be very clear what is expected from students in terms of number of posts, length of posts and level of academic writing.
13]	If moderating, create strategies to enable you to return to the forum at regular intervals.
14]	Politely move the discussion back on topic if it starts to stray, unless it has relevence or promotes learning.
15]	Ensure all students/participants have access to the forum and the technological knowledge necessary for engagement.
16]	Have a practice with students in class if it is a new learning tool for them.
17]	Put your name and photo on your discussion board to create a personal e-relationship.
18]	Don’t start too many threads as learners will be put off replying to any of them.
19]	Put up your discussion in a timely manner so that participants have plenty of time to respond.
20]	Prompt engagement half way through the allocated time to try to keep momentum going throughout the forum.
21]	Mix a serious question with a fun question to mix academic learning with social networking.
22]	Don’t engage in an on line discussion forum with too many people (max of 10).

I think that sums it up very nicely!

4th of March 2010

This session consisted of:

• examination of the MindMeister mind map from the previous session, which compared the features of a PLE_versus_LMS.
• an introduction to the world of Common Craft and the fantastic explanations which they provide of all things tech.
• exploring RSS feeds and looking at how XML makes it work and various ways of reading these.
  • Wordle was introduced as a way to visualise the contents of an RSS feed.
• a bit of a sidetrack to look at ways to collate and share web bookmarks.
• this is where the class schedule started to slide a bit – forums, blogs and wikis are covered at the next session. Never fear, it all sorts itself out by week nine!

Common Craft

How can you go past an organisation who states that “our product is explanation“?

They have wonderful short, clear, and precise explanations of a range of topics that we have explored in this course so far. The ones which I have found especially useful are Blogs in Plain English, Wikis in Plain Englishand RSS in Plain English. The whole range is available on the Common Craft website or YouTube , starring the enigmatic Lee LeFever.

Their business is based upon creating explanations of complex topics for educators and influencers. All of their products are available to be viewed at no charge however they do offer ” high quality” versions for sale-I’m sure they have thought this through however I cannot see how this could be a moneymaker. Tihey have previously been contracted to create custom videos for organisations, however this no longer appears to be part of ther business plan and their website directs customers interested in this to other providers of that type of product.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS)

I have always wondered what those orange square buttons are on the website that I visit every day.

I can’t explain what RSS is any more clearly than the Common Craft team - RSS in Plain English really is as good as it gets.

The real advantage of RSS is the ability to collate information from all of the web the sites that you visit. Moodle contains the option to incorporate an RSS reader pane into sites; Danny has used RSS to collate all the blogs that this class is creating for this assessment to allows a quick scan of the blogs to see if there are any new posts which are interesting. You can see this on the right-hand side of the screen shot of the unit Moodle site in my post for Session 1.

Pharmacy students in the course in which I teach all have access to a central homepage on Moodle. This page is used for announcements and as a central repository for information which the students will need to access throughout the duration of the course.one of the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia Competency Standards for Pharmacists in Australia 2003 is:

Unit 1.3 Pursue life-long professional learning and contribute to the development of others

A way to encourage this amongst pharmacy students is to expose them to the information sources which are available to them and will form part of their professional information network. There are also many pharmacy specific news services which provide current information about issues of relevance to the profession. To promote this I have included an RSS feed of suitable websites as part of the pharmacy students home page. You can see this in the screenshot below:

Pharmacy Students screenshot

There were a few technical challenges in setting it up, and it is a very basic way to collate RSS feeds. One of the main difficulties is that there is no way to order the feeds as they are displayed-there appears to be no logic to this order. The reader also collects the channel logo for the site which is providing the feed and displays it at the top of the feeds. This looks great and helps to delineate the different feeds however not every site has this logo. In the screen shot above you can see that the Medscape logo is prominent however the feed from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) above it does not have the same visual appeal or prominence.

There is currently no way to log the usage statistics of this feature in Moodle, however one of my students asked me the other day if it was possible to take the feed with them when they graduated. I’ll take this as confirmation that is being used!

Unfortunately this request does not seem to be currently possible, however I have included a link to the Common Craft video RSS in Plain English on the page to allow students to set up their own using one of the freely available RSS feed readers such as Google reader.

This is a good example of the issues of PLE_versus_LMS. It seems redundant that students must duplicate this resource and I am looking for a way for students to be able to access the page after their graduation as it also contains many other useful pieces of information. I haven’t tried it yet but I will attempt to export this Moodle page as a Common Cartridge or similar. Watch this space, probably in Session 6 or 7. I understand that the issue of alumni access is currently being discussed by the University…

Wordle

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.

I have seen quite a few of these word cloudsand am intrigued by them. Whilst appearing simple, there is an extraordinary amount of information which is conveyed by them.

(30 minutes later) Unfortunately I can’t get Wordle to work on my home computer – something about a problem with Java but all the updates are installed and everyhing alse seems to work just fine…

So, I have used a similar application, Word It Out to create a word cloud of the RSS feed for this blog so far, driven by the RSS widget which I have added to the right-hand column. Have a look at it here. It’s quite a good representation of what I have been writing about!

Collating and sharing bookmarks

This was just a brief discussion which sprang from a question from one of the class members about the best way to keep track of all of these new websites which we have been exploring. For the purposes of this blog I will just document their use here-they don’t warrant in themselves a reflection upon their pedagogical utility, but are rather just useful tools to keep things organised and share them (perhaps that is worth a bit more exploration…)

• Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) asks you to “Install Xmarks on each computer you use, and it seamlessly integrates with your web browser and keeps your bookmarks safely backed up and in sync”
  • (30 minutes later) Well, I have installed Xmarks on my home computer and performed the requisite restart of Firefox which then froze the system... so, after I restarted my computer and logged back onto all of the websites I was workinh in (including this one) I was keen to see how Xmarks would perform. The idea of being able to keep my bookmarks synchronised between my home computer and work computer is highly appealing. Unfortunately it looks like I’ll have to wait a little longer …

Xmarks unavailable

• Delicious (formerly del.icio.us) “is a social bookmarking service that allows you to tag, save, manage and share Web pages all in one place. With emphasis on the power of the community, Delicious greatly improves how people discover, remember and share on the Internet.” Unfortunately, it is owned by Yahoo, which required me to create a new account – of course my preferred login has already been taken and I had to use one of those awful suggested logins with a number at the end. I am very protective of my logins as I am the proud owner of one of the original Hotmail logins which is actually based on my name, when they proudly boasted to have over 80,000 members worldwide (1999 I think). Anyway it’s done now…
  • I haven’t quite decided how I will use this just yet, as I don’t really want or need to share my bookmarks openly. I will wait and see how the Xmarks application works and see if delicious has anything more to offer.

• The end (for today)

Update 5th June 2010 – Xmarks works beautifully and I am very happy! Work and home bookmarks are now synchronised. I was a little wary of divulging my favourite sites to a 3rd party, but have since decided I don’t really care as it is a small price to pay for the convenience it offers.