In the last fortnight I have been to two events focusing on mobile technologies, one here at the department run by the Forum Oxford people and the Seriously Mobile Summit in London (cue being blown away by Canary Wharf -we’re not in Oxford any more Toto). The former was by telecoms people for telecoms people and after a day in a room with them even someone who has only just mastered predictive text starts thinking the future is mobile phones….yes they will be doing EVERYTHING for us in 10 years time…but that is a whole other story.
What does this all mean for learning? The second event focused on this by way of social software and immersive worlds. What is clear is that getting content on mobile devices is getting easier an easier – to the point where this will be just another way students assume they can access your stuff in a few years time – but will they want to?
Going back the telecoms guys, who stress that the point about mobiles is that they are always with you…what aspects of your learning do you want all the time?
At the moment, I would think it will be forums blogs wikis…the places where the conversation is taking place, much more than the “content” of our courses, but I guess the best way to find out is to ask our students, something we’ll be doing as part of the Isthmus project over the next few months.
Yearly Archives: 2007
Hopefully the first of many…
One of the customisations we make to our Moodle installations has kindly been checked-in by Petr Škoda – thanks Petr!
Hopefully, we in TALL will be able to make lots of useful contributions to Moodle, giving a little back to this great project 🙂
Phoebe at CAL ’07
Liz Masterman is presenting Phoebe at CAL 07 – ‘Development, Disruption and Debate’ today, as part of a symposium, on Designing for Learning – revolution or evolution. Our paper is “Disrupt or co-opt? The role of a pedagogic planning tool in promoting effective design for learning.”
ContEd website Revamp
TALL have been working with everyone in the department to develop a new and improved website for the Department for Continuing Education, our parent organisation at the University of Oxford.
The new site went live on 19th March 2007, and features:
- improved course catalogue integration,
- online enrolments,
- a new visual design,
- improved organisation,
- lots of behind the scenes improvements.
Thanks to everyone in the department who made this possible.
Visit the new website at: http://www.conted.ox.ac.uk/.
Some real data on Web 2.0 use
As part of the JISC funded ‘SPIRE’ project we ran a survey to try to discover which online services people were using and in what manner. We were interested to find out which services were popular and if they were being used for work, for study or socially / for fun. The SPIRE project was originally looking into the possibility of using peer-to-peer technologies in UK HE and FE for informal sharing but switched to a more Web 2.0 focus as it became clear that these types of services were already having an impact on the tertiary education sector. They also appear to be where most of the informal sharing and collaboration is currently taking place online.
The survey was advertised to the Department for Continuing Education’s online students and on the online courses marketing pages. We received circa 1400 responses which left us with a lot of data to analyse. I have processed this data in to a number of colorful charts which are in the PDF below.
I have already drawn a number of conclusions from these charts but have not included these thoughts in the PDF as I would be interested to know what others think the data might mean.
Results of the survey undertaken by the JISC funded SPIRE project (PDF)
For the full analysis of this data please download the final report here:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/digitalrepositories/spiresurvey.pdf
Pedagogy Experts Group
I have just got back from JISCs latest pedagogy experts meeting. Always a good place to find out more about things that are going on in eLearning (from a pedagogy perspective) either JISC funded or otherwise.
Had a very interesting discussion about the future of (e)assessment – I am looking forward to seeing some of the stuff coming out of this area, as whatever about massed mcq question banks I think that social software is going to completely change this space, but this presents a lot of challenges for the institution.
Also an interesting update on the SIMPLE project which looks like a really interesting example of simulations for learning.
So many services, so little time…
At TALL we’re particularly interested in how the many forms of online collaboration might be used in education and educational institutions such as our own, and currently have a couple of projects touching the subject: SPIRE and Isthmus.
There has been something of an explosion of these services over the last few years, producing photo hosting, calendaring, bookmarking, mapping, and blogging sites just for starters. With so many of these various services to consider, we need a list of what they all are, and how they compare, complement, and compete with each other… and which ones should I use!?
Here are a couple of sites listing these services:
- http://www.allthingsweb2.com/
- http://www.econsultant.com/web2/ (less comprehensive, but easier to read)
Here’s a quick selection of those that easily come to mind…
Identity/authentication/login
- OpenID
- LID
- Yadis
Reputation/profile
- ClaimID
- Mugshot
- Last.fm
- jyte
- myspace
- http://twitter.com/
Photo hosting
- Flickr
- Zoomr
Blogging/journals
- Blogger
- WordPress
- LiveJournal
News/aggregation
- Digg
- Bloglines
- Google feeds
Bookmarking
- del.icio.us
- Ma.gnolia
- Stumbleupon
Meeting/calendaring
- iCal
- Renkoo
- planyp.us
Some provide multiple services, e.g. many profile services such as myspace provide some form of journal facility.
Phoebe – Phase 2
We have just heard from JISC that we definitely have funding for Phase 2 of the Phoebe pedagogic planner project which will involve a lot more evaluation of what we have done up to now and development of additional functionality. There will also be a big evaluation of new developments in the autumn so if you are interested in taking part, do get in touch with the team now, through the project wiki.
Isthmus: Linking the personal and institutional in learning technologies
TALL have been awarded funding by JISC for the two year Isthmus project looking at integrating user owned technologies with formal learning environments.
This is something we are all very excited about as it will give us a chance to implement some of the things we have been talking about in TALL, especially giving students an online presence between and beyond courses, with the time to make sure we do what really works for our students.
New online courses
TALL is continually developing its range of online courses for the Department. Visit the online course directory for further information about our courses.