[imogenbertin]

Actually, I’m going to winge about BBForum. Each post I have to spend about 5-10 minutes sorting out line break issues. Often I can’t because it won’t let me edit them. Bullet points don’t work. Grrrr! Pain in the ass… Can’t post pictures… 🙁

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Hi Sancha

Very interesting! I learned design “on the job” 25 years ago and there was a lot of magpie and monkey involved – magpie, find something glittering and hoard it for later. Monkey – see something clever someone else did, copy it. I think that’s not just true of design but many skills and professions but we like to dress these activities up in suitable terminology…

Mobile allows us to make the things we want to hoard or copy so much easier and faster… if you know how to find it again… Do you find it hard to get across why tagging with search terms is important to students? If there is an “aha!” moment in what I teach, I think it’s probably tagging/refinding but I don’t really believe in those moments…

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Ali I’m so sorry!

I had not noticed that my post had got any replies until today!

You are MORE than welcome to use or adapt any questions from my survey. What I would suggest is working backwards from whatever general population digital/information literacy work is done in the UK (are there surveys carried out by the ONS on this at all?) and see if you can include some of these usefully because then your students can get a feel for where their habits lie compared to “joe public”.  I used some questions from surveys that had been carried out for semi-state bodies by commercial marketing companies which were in the public domain (both the question and the results).

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I’m not typical. I worked producing educational books for a good few years and I am very comfortable with the intellectual and creative effort of producing my own materials but… this also means I guard my time very closely because there are an awful lot of tools out there that aren’t particularly productive and take a long time to learn… Creating resources is time consuming of itself without the overhead of cumbersome tools…

I’m doing this course to “join the dots”. Despite doing a PGCert, I didn’t really understand why I do some of the things I do with technology in classes (except that some of them seemed to work…) and I wasn’t quite sure how to try to fix some of the things that don’t work (mainly around group-work which I think is much harder online). So I’m finding great value both in looking again at what resources and tools are available, and understanding more from the experience of others who teach with technology.

I have used most of the tools, but I am taking a gander at GloMaker and Xerte which I haven’t used this week, and am currently discouraged by the learning curve there. I think I am more likely to put effort into learning Articulate (there’s a JISC online workshop on Instructional Design using the demo version of Articulate on 21 May cost £140  http://www.netskills.ac.uk/content/products/workshops/event/online-may13-onidelr-r1/index.html ) because it’s more mainstream. I’ve also been doing the iTunesU Course Manager webinars ( http://euro.edu.apple.kuluvalley.com/event?eid=event3&lc=EN&cc=UK – don’t be put off by the “marketing” intro as there is lots of good stuff from the OU there… )

Minor quibble. I’m not sure that most people can distinguish between mindmaps and concept maps. Does anyone have a concise way of explaining it?

Best wishes all

Imogen

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Hi Rachel, Graham and everyone

I’m so happy I’ve done something useful at last on this course! I was beginning to feel my only role was to carp about not being able to use/find things!

This presentation by Terese Bird is great about iTunesU and OER: http://www.slideshare.net/tbirdcymru/i-tunesu-successfuloer11

I did post elsewhere something which I think can often be used with iTunes search which may be a workaround, in some situations, for Graham’s wish to edit courseware (which I totally support – I’m with Chris Peglar, when I’m learning I really get peeved if my time is wasted with “padding” introductions or irrelevant content). However, it does also add to the time taken in reviewing resources, which again I agree with Graham is vital, but a burden too.

[I’ve seen posted on the ALT lists estimates of 8 hours per 1 hour of teaching preparation time for TEL compared to the traditional 2 hours for 1… what do y’all think about that? Anyway…]

1. If it’s on iTunes it’s probably on YouTube somewhere as well or as an individual resource on an institution’s own website. Use the search facilities on YouTube to find it (or Google for it  – and thanks Rachel for the tip about Piwik analytics, which I’ll check out).

2. The license thing. https://itunesu.itunes.apple.com/help/#ituF804D079-FF35-422A-A284-A1990BB3751C explains that an iTunesU license covers the course-related elements (the structure, essentially). The individual resources retain their original licensing. This is kinda obvious but also confusing, and is why you probably need to do step 1. Good institutions like Oxford University actually create collections of all their cc: material, but there is no easy way I’ve found to search for “all cc” on iTunesU if an institution didn’t tag the material as such.

3. You can create links to specific points in YouTube video or audio. Bernie Goldbach explains it here: https://www.facebook.com/notes/bern-ie-goldbach/jumping-directly-to-a-youtube-segment/10150329266227228 but bottom line, add the t parameter such as #t=3m45s to the end of the YouTube URL. Obviously you still have to instruct the learners what duration they might like to watch…

Another NB After a file has been uploaded into iTunes U, its meta-data cannot be edited.

OR… you could just tell the learners which bits of the iTunes course to watch… 🙂

Imogen

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Just one caveat. I generally get them to use the dropbox website but make clear they do not have to download the app (or can remove it from their startup/login items after it insists on downloading) because if they have dodgy Internet or creaky laptops, dropbox can cause quite hefty performance degradation. All fine if all your students have A1 IT, but in the real world… and by the way I love dropbox, I’m not dissing it, just mentioning practicalities… the website does the same job without the performance overheads…

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I am really enjoying what I am learning, David, please don’t get me wrong! Just want to report I cannot access  the Rheingold video at work (I’m behind a firewall) so another 45 minute learning opportunity crashes… All videos should be on YouTube for access reasons where possible (I know it often isn’t)… down with Elluminate! down with Vimeo…! down with Blip…!

but I am actually sort of gestating a digital literacies online course for adults so everything I am finding out is fascinating and deeply appreciated…

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Confused by the length of the week 2 activities. I did something about surveys – maybe I posted it in the wrong place. I watched the webinar (frustrated again by the delay in the recording being put up…) then I discovered there were a massive bunch of other readings and some extremely complex cognitive questions about those readings that were “below the fold” on the web page which I’d missed.

 

At which point I was put off and depressed and thought feck it, nice weather, let’s try and get the garden under control. I find the webinars very inefficient for time spent versus information acquired though I thought Helen’s interactivity using Elluminate was great.

I think the week’s activities should fit on the equivalent of one A4 page and really be even MORE signposted for relevance/action than they are!

You did ask… Imogen

[imogenbertin]

I think really most are checklists…?

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Even more sorry that the bullet point formatting doesn’t appear to work on this forum!

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Really interesting post about encouraging reflection.

Just getting people to start contributing online can be a challenge, let alone starting thinking “in what way…?”, and especially if they are mature students.

I found a closed facebook group which could feed into extra participation and peer assessment marks worked well with adult learners. It encouraged people to contribute ideas and comment on resources their peers introduced but using a forum most were already familiar with.

However, it is hard to avoid excluding people unless you provide a variety of ways they can gain the marks – this Forrester survey http://venturebeat.com/2010/11/11/forrester-privacy-concerns-faceboo/ indicates about a third of people are really concerned about their privacy in using facebook. About a tenth of my students did not want to interact using facebook if they could avoid it despite it being fairly key to their subject (digital marketing).

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In fairness Kim, I think all the volunteers involved in creating OcTEL have done a great job and are very aware of what’s working and what’s not… a learning experience for all.

I know one of the weaknesses of WordPress is forums – both BBPress and Vanilla, which are widely used to add forums, are rather clunky and high-maintenance… not sure I can think of a good example of a WordPress site with a great forum. Anyone else got suggestions?

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Sorry posted in the wrong part of the thread and no delete option. <embarrassed and frustrated by this forum software…>

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Hi Ridly

I’m a big fan of Flip cameras too because the quality is not bad at all and they are SOOO simple to use. Shame they are now obsolete… As you say, learners get a real reward for effort using them to create material. That’s what we need – technology that engages and facilitates learning, rather than bamboozles!

This is my “best” MOOC so far – wait and see! I was wondering if it might be helpful to have a thread on “five star” technologies like the Flip? I found this today which looks like a great way to annotate videos. I have a bit of an obsession about teaching people how to “re-find” things easily…

http://video.unishared.com/

Best wishes

Imogen

[imogenbertin]

Here’s the My course bit – not sure what if anything it has added…
My course
at what points of your course are there opportunities to express opinions and instincts?

Introductory orientation and general classroom atmosphere is that anyone can raise anything at any point.

at what point do you have to absorb information and how?

During lectures, exercises and to complete some assessments.

at what points do you work with fellow learners?

Lab hours (Friday afternoons) where they can come and get help with any issue in the computer lab

what percentage of the course is assessed individually or as a group?

Of the whole course 50% was group assessed but they were not my modules. My modules had about 15% “digitally enhanced patchwork text assessment”, which is kinda group work… http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/ltig/depta.aspx – otherwise it was individual.

What do you think this says about your teaching approach, and what would you like to do about it?

I think I’m bad at group work because I’m nervous about it going wrong and about interpersonal dynamics and about students getting appropriate credit for their efforts and about the sheer time burden of designing the group work well. Having said that, the exercise where they made their own short videos (groupwork) was probably the most successful of the whole course last year.

How might technology help, or hinder, you in this.

Technology generally gets in the way as it is a barrier to some students in completing their group work, unless helping other group members with their technology is made part of the assessment. I did this last year by offering bonus points for evidence of peer assistance, but one student objected vociferously that this was unfair on her as a non-techiie despite the bonus points being available for non -technical assistance too e.g. help with writing skills, design etc.

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