Yarn and Glue

2010-07-16T16:44:00.001+01:00

Got the train reservations and not a day too soon!

2010-07-16T16:43:00.001+01:00

Got the train reservations and not a day too late!

"Heading To Follow"

2010-03-17T10:26:00.002Z

CDoTL's seasonal teaching and learning publication Teaching Matters went out here at the University of Reading today. I wrote an article on Twitter for it, which ended up being too long and which, consequently, I had to cut in half. The cuts were pretty gory and I'm not sure the article makes as much sense as it did (however much that was). So I've put the full, uncut version here so you can see for yourself.

The article is titled "Heading to Follow", which is supposed to be a pun that looks like a printer's mistake. I laughed anyway. Disagree with anything in the likely inaccurate and unjustifiably opininated rambling below? — Do let me know through the comments at the bottom.

If, as Marshall McLuhan once said, "the medium is the message" what is Twitter saying to us? And for those of us that use it — still in the minority, despite all the hype — what does it say about us?

Those who aren't familiar with Twitter probably won't be surprised to hear that it's the latest popular something-or-other to hit the "Interweb". It was bound to be, what with all the press it's been getting. Turns out even the kids aren't down with this one. What distinguishes Twitter from other social websites, like Facebook or MySpace, is its simplicity. Virtually all it consists of is a box in which you can put what's called a "status update". This update is normally a record of what you're doing, or thinking, though it's equally likely to be a link to a website you've been looking at. The catch is that the box only allows up to 140 characters — essentially then, no longer than a single text message sent from a mobile phone, which is sort of the point as it turns out. If you've got a mobile you can tell Twitter what you're doing from anywhere with a decent signal.

The updates are recorded on your profile, which otherwise merely consists of a picture, a short description and all the other updates you ever put out. This might be why it doesn't seem to have caught on with people under twenty, according to some demographic studies. You can change what the profile looks like to an extent but there isn't much opportunity to create a strong identity. Also "Friends" aren't a big feature of Twitter like they are on other social networking sites. You can choose to "follow" other users instead, so that whenever they update their status, you see it on the home page. Others, likewise, can choose to follow you, but it hardly mirrors or fosters the kind of relationships younger users of the Web relish.

It's almost too simple really. So simple that people who don't use it don't understand the reason for its existence, let alone its gradually increasing presence in the news and subsequent popularity.

Having said that, you might have a similar problem trying to explain to a hunter-gatherer why you'd want to spend 3.9 hours a day on average (last time I checked) sitting in front of a box of moving pictures. But most of us don't think about television in those bare objective terms, perhaps because we're too busy watching it. The only reason people question the point of Twitter is either because they haven't used it or because the concept is too novel. So perhaps before we can say what Twitter says to and about us and the age we live in, we need to ask the same question of other concepts - for example two that we take for granted.

One could argue that, pace McLuhan, a lecturer in front of class is never merely lecturing on a certain topic. He or she is also, by virtue of the lecture itself, telling the class something simple — that what they say is of importance somehow and that you should listen. Powerpoint as a technology emerged to service that idea, to reinforce it lest our attentions should wander; to emphasise that what the person at the front says goes, for now.

Television, similarly, talks at us. However, it's a little easier for us to change channels, if we fail to switch off altogether. So television ups the stakes a little and tries to make what it tells us entertaining, which might seem hard to believe these days. It's still talking at us but increasingly resorts to either emotional manipulation or irony, in order to keep us engaged. The emotional manipulation is like the equivalent of saying "you'd be a cold-hearted bastard to turn off now". And the irony is saying "Okay so I'm talking at you but we both know this is a one-way conversation and we both know you wouldn't be watching if you didn't want that so let's just wink at each other and get on with it". The most entertaining television manages to combine these opposite poles to great effect. Aside from these two of course there are always last resorts, namely titillation or outright sexual explicitness.

It's possible, of course, for a lecturer to employ televisual-like techniques in a lecture but at a certain point it stops being a lecture. Pull on those heart-strings too much and you've got yourself a "speech". Employ irony and you may have yourself a "routine". Opt for those aforementioned last resorts and you'll have yourself a "burlesque show", or something. The very point of the lecture is to impart information to a preferably large audience. Start doing something else and there's probably another word for it.

With Twitter of course there isn't a one-way conversation; there are several. What Twitter says to us, implicitly like blog tools in general, is that the things you do or think or say as an individual are important. But on Twitter, it's on one forum and there are no distinctions between "posts" and "comments" as you get with blogs. As a result, everyone talks at each other. While it's possible to send messages to one another, either in public or privately, this isn't the point of Twitter. It's designed so that you can announce what you're doing. There's a big give-away to this effect above the box where you enter your updates — it says there: "What are you doing?"

Twitter isn't really built for dialogue therefore. Dialogue might be a side-effect of using it, in the same way that two people might talk to each other while watching Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

In its simplicity, there is at least an honesty to the design of Twitter that one doesn't find with for example Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, or any other social networking site you might care to think of. On Twitter at least, the word "followers" instead of "friends" or "fans" keeps the "voyeuristic" aspect that seems to have become part-and-parcel of the social networking game upfront and intentional. Although as David Foster Wallace once said of television, true voyeurism depends upon the voyuee being unaware of their being watched. The main purpose of Twitter, it seems, is to encourage a kind of exhibitionism or performance art. At least, those that use Twitter best seem to manage to make what they're doing or saying or thinking sound entertaining, even when it may be the most mundane thing — they therefore get larger numbers of followers.

I suspect this is why some people have said they didn't understand Twitter before they used it and now they've started they can't stop. It can be entertaining, especially when you can take part in putting on your own text-based show, replete with hyperbole, self-depracation and post-ironic witticism. That isn't to say Twitter can't be useful. If you sign-up and follow the right people, you give yourself access to a wealth of resources, not to mention potential contacts. I personally use it as a way of sharing bookmarks and occasionally commenting on what I've been doing or will do (but never while I'm doing it).

Other ways of using Twitter in teaching and learning include 'backfeeding'. This has been done at a few of the conferences I've been to lately, where the speaker will load Twitter on a screen behind them and all the tweets relevant to the talk will appear for everyone to see. This seems useful when it comes to the "questions and answers" section of the talk but there might even be scope, in the future, for such feeds to change the direction of a presentation — depending on how brave presenters feel in the future. But it hardly feels like the solution to concerns about disengaged and disconnected learners. To find out what that is we're going to have to stop talking at each other first, no matter how much it sounds like we're having a conversation.

2010-03-06T13:56:00.001Z

Can hear normally again! Music is beautiful; traffic too loud...

2009-09-27T09:44:00.001+01:00

was told (w/o provocation) by someone at the pool this morning to read Marx's Das Kapital; will shortly be checking forehead for writing...

"Getting Started": A New Approach

2009-09-26T18:45:00.017+01:00

The short version: I haven't previously blogged much about the training we do but I thought this was mention-worthy, and the patient reader (or impetuous scroller) will be rewarded with a link to some resources at the end.

The less short one (in two parts):

My workload seems to have gone beyond crazy this week (and it was already twitchy, drooling and rabid).

One of my colleagues, Robyn, has been getting ready to leave our Team recently, and Richard (the other guy on the e-Learning Team) has been on leave. That's left just me to deal with all the email queries about courses on Blackboard that have been pouring in. Next week it's Freshers' Week and everyone has obviously either just got back from holiday or has just woken up to the fact that things need preparing.

Meanwhile, I've also had two workshops to deliver with my colleague Paul Janota from IT Services. They were both "Getting Started with Blackboard" training sessions. We tend to run perhaps five or six times of these a term and they're internal, so the first one at least didn't involve too much preparation. But the second...

Normally, Paul takes everyone through their first steps in Blackboard with the aid of the Netskills guides produced by the Newcastle University. Once he has spent half an hour doing this from the front, he then gives them the same amount of time to follow the guides themselves while we go around giving individual help to anyone that needs it. Then about an hour into the session, once they've got a good idea about the basic functionality and limitations of the system, I talk about our Good Practice courses. These are example courses, copied from actual courses that were selected on the basis of their demonstrating good course design and making innovative use of tools within Blackboard (or the Web generally) for teaching and learning purposes. Once I've spent about ten minutes presenting some of these and showing people how they can access them in their own time, they all resume following the guides, while I go around asking if anyone needs specific courses setting up (though Richard sometimes does this bit).

And that's what we did on Monday. As usual.

However, yesterday, in our second session, we decided to take a different approach.

Over the summer, Robyn and I have been working on a new online Help system. The new help information is presented on a wiki within Blackboard (we use the Learning Objects Expo LX tool). Preparing this has been a long and painstaking task: detailing every step needed to, for example, post an Announcement or Assignment, ensuring the information is thorough but not too dry or boring, and trying to keep the pages from being too technical despite all this. We've tried to put each tool in a teaching and learning context but at the same time keep the pages concise. We don't know if we've succeeded (we're pretty sure in some areas we haven't had the time to) but the idea of putting this information on a wiki was to make it easy to change and not just for one member of the Team but all of us and, if need be, people from other areas too. So we're not really expecting it to be "finished" as such - ever, let alone by next week.

As long as the information is comprehensible, relatively accessible and easy to navigate, we'll be happy (and relieved). And it very nearly is.

Except a couple of weeks ago, having returned from foreign climes and possibly still a little affected by the sun, I thought it'd be great if we could make these online guides print-friendly too. That way, we could use them in place of our Netskills guides during workshops, thereby cutting out some of the what we'd always thought to be unnecessary stuff and also making them more specific to Reading.

So on top of all the firefighting, I spent a sizeable chunk of time this week, perhaps even a clock's worth, going through the guides, making sure they followed on from each other, and changing links so they were not just user-friendly but paper-friendly too. I met with Paul halfway through the week and we agreed on what other changes should be made.

Then Friday came. After a punch-up with the photocopier, I arrived at the workshop and rather apprehensively distributed the new guides. I basically had to run through the whole session with a new outline because the order in which tasks were done had changed slightly. I was a little nervous because I wasn't sure the new guides would compare and, although Paul had brought the old Netskills guides as back-up, it would've been embarassing for us and confusing for the attendees, switching halfway through.

Thankfully, it all seemed to go well. There were, unfortunately, a couple of steps missing from the guides and a couple of spelling errors (for which I apologised) but the participants seemed able to follow the guides just as well as previous participants had the old ones. I shouldn't have worried I suppose; Paul and I were breaking a pattern that we were used to, but the attendees had by design never come to a "Getting Started" session before, so they weren't about to make comparisons, favourable or otherwise.

The feedback we received was very positive so I'm glad I put the time in. Now I just have make all the more advanced-level pages print-friendly and we'll have a whole set of new resources to use.

We've started to promote our new Help System yet: we have a few changes to make to the tab in Blackboard before we're ready. Hopefully these will done by Monday evening and I'll get my weekends back and live a peaceful life once more. However, the wiki pages are already available publically at this address - https://www.bb.reading.ac.uk/webapps/lobj-expo-bb_bb60/user/DA5D5C46DDBDE6A9/HowTo_QAs/Index

If you're using Blackboard and you're struggling for help guides, then you might want to use these. Feel free to copy and modify as you see fit, though some credit would be nice where possible! And let us know how it goes, if you have time.

In summary: (1) We've made some new resources, (2) we're very nearly proud, and (3) I should write shorter blog posts (but see point 2).

Catching Up

2009-09-16T17:50:00.004+01:00

It's Wednesday, my fourth proper day back after returning from my travels, and I have a big pile of to-do on my desk. Not that I got to do any of it today as I had some meetings which produced their own to-do, which I then had to do first in order to clear my desk (and mind) for the original pile of to-do...

The main tasks at the moment seem to be:

Finishing our new online Help System which uses Expo in Blackboard
Changing the iLearn e-portfolio enhancement tool in response to the feedback we received from students

I'm now really appreciating the fact that we decided not upgrade to Blackboard version 9 this year.

When I get time I also intend to write up my remaining notes from ALT-C which I'll then back-post here and advertise up-front.

Learning Technologists on Twitter

2009-09-15T12:08:00.003+01:00

I just used a tool on a site called TweepML, where Steve Wheeler (timbuckteeth on Twitter) has arranged a list of learning technology professionals. The tool enables me to follow all of them on Twitter with one click. Which is to say I will now be able to see every time they tweet something.

If you have a Twitter account and want to be be updated yourself you can do the same here.

I don't really know if I will be able to keep with all these tweets - I've gone from following a manageable 36 'twits' (that is the term apparently) to a sudden 103. That's 67 people all of whom I imagine are Twitter enthusiasts and who therefore will be tweeting on a regular (e.g. maybe four times an hour? more?) basis.

Still, it's a neat tool and I can always opt out if I find certain people aren't tweeting stuff I want to read.

I've signed up to be on the list myself. It asked me to give a justification as to why I should be on the list - my three reasons:

I work in an HE e-Learning team
I did quite a bit of fiddling with e-portfolios last year
I'm generally neurotic about technology and the way it might be shaping our lives, for better (eg. instant connection and communication) or worse (eg. increasing "alienation", connection only in a voyeuristic sense)

So that last reason might disqualify me from the list! And also, I'm not really sure I tweet enough, especially w/r/t work. Still, if you would like to follow me, I can be found @guypursey

2009-09-11T17:22:00.001+01:00

had the first full day in the office in over a month and the desk is mess again already... http://ping.fm/xecuG

ALT-C 2009 Day One Round-up

2009-09-08T23:50:00.006+01:00

As this is my first post-holiday post I'll try and keep it brief. I'm in Manchester for the next couple of days for ALT-C. ALT is the Association for Learning Technology and the C bit stands for Conference. It's a chance to spend a few days feeling confused about which of the ten parallel sessions you want to attend and more generally hobnobbing with other learning technologists and professionals in the education sectors.

This year's conference got off to a good start, thanks to a keynote from Michael Wesch, which covered identity, the search for authentic self, the history of "whatever", and how this is all looking in our new age of digital media. If you haven't heard of Michael Wesch before I strongly recommend having a look at his short and informative videos on YouTube - specifically The Machine Is Us/ing Us and A Vision of Students Today.

Wesch was funny, knowledgable and sometimes just plain endearing. He began by talking about his experiences in Papua New Guinea, living with people who have no (or perhaps next to no) experience in the way of exposure to digital media, the Internet, or any of the devices that conspire to keep us constantly "connected". According to Wesch, the people he stayed with don't even have names (that they can remember), their village and community are so tight-knit. It made an interesting contrast to his following description of mass civilisation, in which the search for recognition and desire to escape from anonymity have become so crucial that flocks of consumers become hell-bent on winning the next American Idol contest.

I don't think Wesch actually used the word 'alienation' but for me it would have summarised this feeling perfectly. The feeling that creates this desire, that is. And I was glad that he said, despite our need to engage with digital media (as educators, technologists, and citizens, I suppose), the Papua New Guineans seemed just fine the way they were - "disconnected", which sounds perjorative perhaps because it comes from our own homogenising value system with regards to "progress".

I'd like to write about this more - it's an area that fascinates me - but I should mention some of the other sessions I've been to.

Josie Fraser hosted a symposium called "The VLE is Dead" in which a group of four panelists got to put forward their views before opening up to the floor. The panelists themselves were lively and entertaining in their responses to the audience but some expressed frustration that the debate wasn't focussing on the real issues - which when they were brought up seemed to imply that the whole factory-based education system and perhaps even the socio-political organisation of educational institutions needed to be radically changed before something like the VLE (which may only be symptomatic of these larger issues) would die.

One of the panelists Nick Sharratt made a good play on words with the headline "VLE not finished" - meaning that's it's not so much vanquished as incomplete and it's our responsibility as technologists to keep working on it.

James Clay, one of the panelists has posted a video of the whole talk on his blog here. You could try watching the first twenty-odd minutes for a summary of the views as I don't think the panelists really shifted positions on anything fundamental. You can also leave comments there and take part in the general discussion on Twitter using the hashtag #vle.

The final "highlight" of the day was Steve Wheeler's session on Twitter which was kind of chaotic and may have left some newcomers to the tool feeling confused, but raised some interesting questions about its possible applications in teaching and learning contexts. I'll perhaps blog again sometime on the Infinite Summer project I mentioned previously, as an example of this.

All in all, an interesting if tiring first day. It doesn't help that I still have jetlag...

(For once, all the photos are my own! Ie. I pressed the button on my camera and they're not just pilfered from somewhere like usual...)

2009-08-08T05:00:00.001+01:00

will be w/o a real Internet connection for a few weeks now probably.

2009-07-31T19:53:00.001+01:00

wrote a list of things that need doing this evening and it's worrying long. Ergo, I am online.

New iPhone?

2009-07-30T11:45:00.005+01:00

July so far has been a busy month and there are only two days left for it to prove otherwise. Consequently, between sessions of preparing our new help system, I've time for the occasional visit to Twitter and that's about it. (Hence the lack of recent updates on this here blog.)

Since my last post about Twitter (in which I said I'd be taking part in a new social media experiment called Infinite Summer), I've been on it quite a lot. And unlike my other forays into social networking this hasn't been one of these read- or write-only things.

In fact, I've been getting into it so much, I've been tempted to get myself an iPhone so I can play with it on the go (which lately is where I've been finding myself).

Of course, these toys and gadgets are changing so fast nowadays, I find myself resorting back to my old "deferred entry" excuses, excuses which follow this line of reasoning: if something is going to be better and/or cheaper in a few months time, might as well put your pennies in a piggy bank and wait 'til then. Which reasoning means of course that I will never ever buy any new toy or gadget, unless we hit that sometime-anticipated technological singularity while my money is still worth something. (Some have placed bets on 2012.)

All of which is one way of directing you to a report from America's Finest News Source about the new iPhone, which I must say even I am tempted to buy into.

Some more stuff about Twitter and the #infsum thing is waiting in my blogpost drafts area and it'll be there I guess until I've decided the grammar is sufficiently anal enough for all to see. Hopefully sometime in the next few days.

Bb 9 Upgrade Notes (LSBU)

2009-07-02T14:01:00.006+01:00

Last Friday, my colleague Robyn and I went to the University of Westminster for the London BbUG (Blackboard Users' Group). It was, as usual, a nice way of catching up with friends and colleagues in other institutions and a healthy outlet for our frustrations with, ahem, certain bits of software. We also got to see a couple of presentations - one of which was given by three people from London South Bank University (LSBU).

LSBU recently upgraded to version 9 of Blackboard and it was very interesting to hear about the issues they had and were, in some cases, still experiencing.

They have a large and diverse student body; 23,500 students, half of whom are of ethnic minority. The decision to upgrade came apparently from their Vice Chancellor, and was related to recognition of the need for a student portal. Coming from the top down as it did, the upgrade was thoroughly planned; Jim Nottingham gave a glimpse of their schedule as laid out in a finely-detailed spreadsheet. This tight schedule was crucial for them, I gather, as use of the VLE continued heavily through the summer months and they were upgrading from version 7.2 (which e-portfolio users will remember had some pretty dire bugs).

Sarah Bell, who's on the e-learning team there, listed some of the bugs they are now encountering in the upgraded software, among which were (from my scribbled notes):

Problems with course copying (something to do with admin settings and existing courses)
Language pack issues
Availability of courses for the TA role
Issues with announcements
Ample time to make cup of tea while waiting for Grade Center to load
File exchange issues
Problems with lists and re-ordering items in courses
Changing colour of item titles
Browsing received e-portfolios still limited

I wasn't really surprised by the last of those points. The interface may've changed but the functionality of the e-portfolios is much the same. In fact, that's one of the main reasons we at Reading have decided not to opt for the upgrade this summer. The biggest challenge we imagined facing, before we even hit any bugs, would be re-training staff in the new Web 2.0 "look-and-feel" with its lack of control panel, etc. The new interfaces are better, and kudos to Blackboard for finally trying to catch up with the kids, but they do leave staff who are used to clunky workarounds and web-based forms with receipts in need of some support, guidance, and general TLC.

If you see this as a problem (which we did, in terms of resourcing) then it's one more to the list, as Version 9 doesn't actually have enough change in functionality to solve any of our existing problems! Ergo, automatically, the cons outweigh the pros.

I did speak to a few of people from Blackboard at the Bb World Europe conference this year about their plans for e-portfolios. All they could tell me was that big things were on the way (which, in retrospect, sounds kind of ominous). I have not-so-secretly been hoping that they don't change e-portfolios too much as we've adjusted to the pitfalls and built our enhanced iLearn features on the back of it. If they do, it would be nice just to include some extra functions that don't interfere with the current operations (like they did with the Received Portfolios organisation): things like an ability to import e-portfolios back into Blackboard, an option to give 'write' permissions to others and an improved WYSIWYG text-editor (like the LX one). Simple additions like that would go a long way to improving the tool, whether the interface is 'clunky' or not.

The same probably goes for the rest of Blackboard - which might explain why, with the exception of LSBU and one other person I spoke to, no-one else at the Users Group is going ahead with an upgrade this year.

#infsum

2009-06-26T18:07:00.010+01:00

This week I have decided to participate in a sort-of-new social media experiment.

Depending on which way you look at it, Infinite Summer was set up either as a challenge to or a support base for those who have had David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest on their shelves for too long and hadn't until now mustered the strength to lug it off. The "challenge" (for those that see it that way) is to read the book in three months... Well 91 days to be exact; most people began on June 21st and are set to end on September same, thus encompassing all of the summer-official, and hence the name of the experiment.

The reason this is a challenge, and the reason one might also see it as a support base or network or group, is because the book contains over 1,000 pages, a not insignificant chunk of which are endnotes. The length (or heft) of the book is often commented upon but, just in case it's not clear, it is a novel. This is a fictional book to be read for pleasure.

DFW has for a few years now been one of my favourite writers and Infinite Jest has been taking up a wedge of space on my bookshelf for about the same amount of time. I avoided reading it by absorbing everything else he'd written that I could get my hands on, thinking I'd never have the time to commit to his magnum opus. I was shocked by his suicide last year and was going to post something on this blog but didn't think what I had written was appropriate at the time.

Many others were upset too. Some like the founders of Infinite Summer were obviously more productive in their response to his passing.

The official website (http://infinitesummer.org/) is set to feature regular blog postings from writers who are reading the book alongside everyone else, commenting on their experiences with the books and making people feel perhaps a little less alone in the challenge. (As well as being long and containing endnotes, the general preconception of the book is that it's difficult.)

Meanwhile, a Twitter hashtag (#infsum) has been set up so that twitterers can comment on the book and then see each others' comments by doing a quick search.

For those who have ever participated in a book club, this may not seem that original or experimental. The first obvious difference from a 'real' book club that meets in a physical location, is that, as with most online groups, distance is no issue; people from all over the globe can alert and update each other as to their progress and interpretations. Twitter also seems to eradicate time issues; it's not exactly asynchronous as it's possible to simulate live chat via Twitter but it's also possible to (dis)engage at any moment. This has its advantages and inevitable its disadvantages.

One criticism, that could also be levelled at Twitter as a whole, is that people don't necessarily communicate but just key others into their own updates via the hashtag. This means the tool sometimes seems to facilitate something more like a support group for addicts ("It's been 7 days. I've read 63 pages. Every day is struggle" &c.) than an actual discussion, but then perhaps that's appropriate given the alleged subject matter of the book. There might also be a parallel to the upcoming "bookaholic" publicity campaign, which Jean Hannah Edelstein reported on earlier this month.

Another disadvantage might be that it encourages instantaneous judgement of the section just read every time the book is put down. Obviously people continuously form and change opinions as they read something but I wonder if Twitter will encourage people to cement those opinions without giving them more than 140 characters to reflect on them.

Having said that, Twitter is only one outlet for those taking part and many are keeping blogs on their progress. You can follow all this yourself by checking out the website (link above) or the hashtag.

I have decided to back-post my tribute for DFW written at the time of his death - you can find it here. I'll let you know if anything interesting in the way of social media experimentation comes up.

2009-06-22T18:24:00.001+01:00

started on #infsum last night. Progress so far: pg12.

2009-06-18T07:48:00.001+01:00

got into the office bright and early to catch up on work before the #pdprdg event. (Coffee, for once, may be required.)

2009-06-14T09:48:00.001+01:00

might be forced to concede to the 21st century and buy a new phone. The Nokia 3410 barely survives a text now, despite frequent recharging.

2009-06-03T12:11:00.001+01:00

Could be up for an Infinite Summer http://ping.fm/nNO9R #infsum Anyone else game?

2009-05-29T13:41:00.001+01:00

finished Catch 22 and declared it a masterpiece (but then realised that many other people have already done just that...) Next: Barthelme!

Facebook Status Update Update

2009-05-29T11:48:00.008+01:00

May has been a quiet month for me blog-wise. I've been using Ping.fm as mentioned previously to update my Twitter, Facebook and Blogger accounts simultaneously and it's either made me a more frequent micro-blogger or... just a very lazy blogger.

Anyway, I'm back here because I realised it's been a month since I posted anything properly and because Language Log seem to have picked up on status update pronoun issues similar to the annoyances I'd found myself getting unduly worked up about back in the frantic days of April.

Eric Baković, who wrote the post, also noted the increasing prevalence, since Twitter, of users' tendency to "brain-dump" on Facebook. (I thought that was a nice phrase for it.) He puts this down to the Facebook facelift which changed the status area from a "Username is" style format to the present and more evocative question: "What's on your mind?"

So perhaps I missed the point of this status update feature or perhaps I've just failed to keep up with the times... It's not so much what you're doing but what you're thinking that counts. This gives my friend's admission that he feels all this Tweeting and FBing and blogging feels more like group therapy than communication some credence. It also makes sense as there are surely only a limited number of things you can do while updating your status.

I digress. Point is, that status updates in Facebook are still preceded by your username.

Eric goes on to explore the grammatical implications of this:

Among those who conceive of the username prefix as part of the status update, a couple of patterns are distinguishable. (Again, this may have been true before the facelift, but it's certainly more noticeable now.) On the one hand, there are those who consistently refer to themselves in the third person; e.g., "Username can't wait for the weekend so that she can sit on the couch and watch TV." On the other hand, there are those who start out in the third person but then switch to the first; e.g., "Username is ecstatic that it's the weekend. I'm going to sit on the couch and watch TV!"

If this is something that people do frequently without stopping to consider the grammatical inconsistencies I wonder what it means for self-perception, identity, narrative, etc... I'm not losing sleep over this (yet) but I do wonder if and how it's reshaping our culture and our perceptions of ourselves and what we do or think. To be switched on and constantly reporting on your actions/thoughts, announcing what you do, to a world full of people doing/thinking much the same...

As with my previous post, this may all seem trivial to some but I wonder what someone like Orwell would have thought about this technology and the kind of mangling of language that seems inherent to its use...

2009-05-21T16:56:00.001+01:00

got tired and would like a beer and burrito.

2009-05-20T09:56:00.001+01:00

probably should've read Catch 22 years ago but only started at the weekend.

2009-05-17T21:43:00.001+01:00

could get used to the weekend.

2009-05-14T22:14:00.001+01:00

will be playing an acoustic set with Galapagos tomorrow night, at Deja Vu. Please no jokes about the venue; I've heard them all before...

2009-05-11T10:24:00.001+01:00

so very nearly finished reading Promethea this weekend but didn't realise the final issue would be so trippy...

2009-05-08T19:26:00.002+01:00

will be seeing the new Star Trek film shortly... Expecting dodgy revisionist plotholes, healthy explosions and some cheese thrown in for good measure.

2009-05-08T15:54:00.001+01:00

would like to wish Thomas Pynchon a happy birthday but can't seem to find out where he lives or what he looks like... Strange that.

A Short (But True) Story...

2009-05-05T15:40:00.005+01:00

...about one man's attempts to defy apathy and slightly improve the tools he uses every day.

2009-05-05T11:22:00.001+01:00

got stuff done this weekend. Finally.

Bb World Europe (Back-Posts #2)

2009-05-01T13:34:00.006+01:00

I promised I'd be staggering the release of my notes from the the Bb World Europe Conference - today, I've finally uploaded a couple more after being reminded that I hadn't yet made all the notes available.

First up (ie. oldest) is a talk on The Google Generation, Podcasting and Peer Review which I saw on Tuesday 8th. It was a very interesting talk, I made lots of notes and consequently the post is quite long! If you're keen on reading (and I hope the post itself is interesting) it might be best to make yourself a coffee, tea or cocktail of some sort before you begin.

The second post to be uploaded today is much shorter, mainly as the session was a demonstration of a nice toolkit that the University of Nottingham have developed linking into WebCT. I say mainly because I was also feeling very ill that day and had my own talk to plan, so note-taking was much more minimal to say the least. However, I'm contact with the people who gave the talk and will post more details as, if and when I get them!

Also, any corrections or amendments need making? Let me know. More about some other talks I saw, plus the one I delivered myself, coming up soon!

2009-04-28T16:49:00.002+01:00

uploaded new Campiranha demo tracks to http://ping.fm/4tzQ8 last weekend but forgot to mention it to anyone.

Wired Launch in the UK

2009-04-24T10:39:00.006+01:00

Walking into the shop on campus this week, I noticed that the magazine Wired have now launched a UK edition. So I picked up a copy and though I've yet to read through it properly, it looks like it might be interesting. You can see a sample of the magazine here.

The sampler will give you an idea of how many adverts the magazine contains (perhaps not as many as some) and contains some nice interactive features, like Page 10 & 11 for instance, which allows you to see London before and after huge sea-level rise.

A quick skim of the magazine itself though reveals the usual tid-bits, factoids and design frills that I eventually found so annoying right before I stopped buying magazines a few years back. The only magazines that have really interested me lately are Private Eye, The Wire (soberly designed avant-garde music magazine; no relation to this one or the television series) and McSweeney's (each one a different and beautiful format, containing little else but carefully short stories by both professional and amateur writers). What I was (and am) hoping for from the UK Wired are some more critical articles on technology and its increasing (or already ubiquitous) presence in our lives and in society.

I've blogged previously about my tendency towards analogue snobbery - ie. finding enjoyment in getting away from the technology, preferably by going somewhere at least reminiscent of the feral... It would be good to see this reflected more often in technological publications. Like Bill Joy's doubts and worries about where technology is taking our civilisation and what we can do about it (one fasincating section even cites the Unabomber manifesto as a way of drawing attention to these issues) or Steve Silberman's look at the rise of autism in Silicon Valley in which he wonders if "math-and-tech genes are to blame". Both of these articles appeared in U.S. issues of Wired. While the U.K.'s edition has a centre-spread section titled "Fetish" in which readers are invited to drool over pictures and stats of new gadgets and laptops...

While there might be an irony in an e-Learning Development Officer (a job title which is often used interchangeably with the word "technologist") pointing to almost uncritical worship of technology and wearing an expression of vague concern, I think it's important to consider not only how technology can be used to enhance learning but also what impact it's having on students - from their expectations of the education system to their views on social interactions and participation, right down to their lifestyles in general.

Status Updates and Digital Identity

2009-04-23T17:34:00.010+01:00

I have often blogged about language here and its uses on the Web and in e-Learning. While I have always been to some extent self-conscious about the kind of language I use on this blog (ie. what voice I project, what kind of identity this entails) my uses of Twitter, Facebook and Ping.fm have forced me to re-think what appears here.

Since using Ping.fm (which I blogged about previously) to update my status on Facebook, Twitter and this blog simultaneously, I have had to think a lot more about what status actually means.

Traditionally of course, status referred to something like class or one's ranking in society and I'm sure that definition still holds. In the new Web 2.0 sense of the word though, status refers to one's present state of activity, either in-the-world or on-the-web, and as such tends to give a microscropic view of the person's condition:

Rob is looking forward to a glass of Montepulciano

as opposed to traditional status which would be macroscopic:

Rob works at a bank and earns over £100,000 a year

The first example given above isn't necessarily typical however. That might have been typed in Facebook once but since the advent of Twitter, I've noticed status updates getting much messier. Now, we're more likely to see:

Rob That new AFX tune = tuuuuuuuune :-o

It's not about bad spelling, which has always been a pre-requisite of text-size updates due to the 140 character limit, but bad grammar.

I've become aware of this using Ping.fm because the same status update I send to Facebook also comes to this blog. It's not a professionalism thing; it's a case of my status updates making sense, whether or not they are prefixed by my name or not.

Whereas on Facebook, an update might read:

Guy is hungry.

the same update coming to this blog would read:

is hungry

Which just wouldn't make sense (to me, anyway) in the context of a blog. I suppose "am hungry" would make sense as this implies a truncated first person but then my status update on Facebook would read "Guy am hungry"...

So I've worked out that using an application like Ping.fm, I'm limited to using verbs in the simple past tense or with modal auxiliary verbs tacked on the front. I can get away with a Ping.fm status like:

got hooked on The Wire over the last four days.

because it still makes sense over on social networking sites where my name is shoved in front of it. Likewise, I could update with:

would watch more of The Wire tonight but might go to see Che: Part One instead.

and get away with it for exactly the same reasons. I say "get away with" but of course no-one's going to punish me or even frown on me for not sticking to these rules. The only explanation I can give is that I prefer to construct my digitial identity in this way. It might seem trivial but status updates are the most prevalent indicators of digital identity, especially as they appear both on social networking sites and on blogs.

With a few tweaks to the stylesheet of my blog I've arranged for my status updates to be capitalised (that is the first letter to be in uppercase) just to make those decapitated sentences look that little bit neater, rather than have my Facebook and Twitter statuses look messier as a trade-off. It took a few seconds to write the following bit of code, which takes care of this tidy-up job for me:

div:first-letter { text-transform: uppercase; }

The only "problem" I might have left is the kind of restriction this approach places on my status. What all the above means is my status updates are always about what I have already done or about what I might do under certain conditions and never about what I am actually doing at this very moment. Right now though, I intend to go home.

2009-04-23T13:41:00.001+01:00

got hooked on The Wire over the last four days.

Bb World Europe 2009 (Back-Posts #1)

2009-04-21T16:07:00.006+01:00

Partly because I've been ill and partly because, until my return to the office, my internet access has been at best sporadic I was unable to blog while in Barcelona for Blackboard's World Europe Conference a couple of weeks ago. However, I did make quite a few notes and had my blog in mind as I always do at these sort of events.

So, because it's easier than posting it all up in one go, I've decided to stagger the release of the notes and also back-post them so they sit under the dates under which the notes were actually taken.

My first post is about the conference covers Michael Chasen's keynote on the Monday and my second is a brief account of Martha Cooley's talk on Tuesday morning, in which she talked Version 9.

More to come shortly...

2009-04-19T18:11:00.001+01:00

finished Homage to Catalonia and would recommend everyone at least read the last line.

2009-04-18T00:00:00.001+01:00

saw In The Loop and was amused and depressed in equal measure.

2009-04-16T16:58:00.001+01:00

had a cold, which soon became a flu, which then became sinusitis, or something like it... To be continued.

BbWorld Europe (Day Two) - Xerte Toolkits

2009-04-08T11:30:00.001+01:00

Again, I missed the keynote this morning due to my cold/flu having gotten worse but I did make it to a talk by Pat Lockley and Gil Fourte on their use of Xerte Toolkits at Nottingham. I did make some notes on this but TechDis provide a good explanation which I've pilfered to save myself some typing:

The information services team at the University of Nottingham have developed a free learning object editor – Xerte - that produces interactive, rich media learning objects that run in a Flash player.

Xerte is an XML editor and run time engine that makes it easy to create and deploy interactive learning objects that are highly accessible and SCORM compliant. Xerte helps you focus on interactive design by providing tools that are fit for purpose and easy to use.

You can see examples of the kinds of materials you can create at this site here.

There's more information on the software as well as the option to download it free here.

Pat has developed a Powerlink¹ between Xerte and Web CT², which makes it very easy for Course Instructors to create and add interactive learning objects direct without leaving their course.

Much of the talk was a demonstration of these tools which looked very impressive. Pat made mention of how accessible they were with keyboard shortcuts and concessions to screen readers all taken into account. Hence the TechDis description given above.

The toolkit itself is used by 250 to 300 users the world over and is certainly worth a look if you're looking for learning object creation solutions.

FOOTNOTES:

1. Like a Building Block in Blackboard Classic

2. Now rebranded as one of the various Blackboard editions; Nottingham have kept the old name to save confusion

2009-04-07T19:27:00.001+01:00

went to a good talk on Generation Google this afternoon, but was annoyed to find copyright laws still obstructing creative clip culture...

BbWorld Europe (Day One, PM) - The Google Generation, Podcasting and Peer Review

2009-04-07T18:00:00.004+01:00

At 4pm, I went to a fascinating talk by Dr. Chris Stokes who works in the School of Clinical Dentistry at the University of Sheffield. Apparently his talk was a continuation from one he gave last year though I must have missed him at last year's conference in Manchester. However, he gave a clear outline of what it was he was following on from...

Last academic year, instead of asking his students to give presentations, Dr Stokes decided to ask his students for podcasts as a form of assessment. They were asked to produce 5 minute mp3 files that would critically evaluate two pieces of scientific literature and then be peer-reviewed on paper.

Dr Stokes played some examples of these in the presentation and you could really hear how students used the creative freedom they'd been given while still meeting the academic criteria. Some podcasts began with a group introduction, some revolved around use of music (there were some copyright issues with this) while others took on more diverse forms, ie. a news broadcast or radio show being transmitted from a zoo. We were told that audio was chosen because there was a feeling that video would tend to make students as nervous as a presentation might - in both cases, body language is on show.

I would've add that audio is far easier to create and edit, and where mistakes and time restrictions are involved good editing is crucial. According to the presentation, students dealt with technical aspects easily but found it difficult to condense the subjects they'd been assigned for podcasting purposes.

But Dr Stokes then went on to discuss what he has been doing this year. The peer-review aspect of the project has been moved online and focus is primarily on getting students to use Web 2.0 tools they are familiar with to develop relevant academic skills. Whereas, before last year's podcast trials students were asked to give a traditional lecture or presentation as part of their assessment, Dr Stokes wanted to move away from the "lecturers' domain" and into the "students' domain", seeing as lecturing is not a necessarily a key skill for the field of dentistry. To move further into this domain, Dr Stokes allowed students to choose what format they decided to submit their work in.

Given the previous assumptions about video and presentations, the results were surprising. At the end of the project, Dr. Stokes got:

5 videos,
14 Powerpoint presentations,
2 wikis, and
9 web documents.

There were also over twenty "described weblinks" (presumably reviews of the sources students used but also included YouTube videos) and more importantly no purely audio podcasts!

The peer-review aspect of the project also required students to write blog entries on their contribution to the group in Sheffield's Blackboard system and also, potentially, reviewing the blog entries of others. This reviewing involved giving the blog entries a star rating and leaving a comment. Dr Stokes said giving the star-rating option however had been a mistake as students would rate the presentation but then use the comment to justify the numbers of stars they had given, leaving those being reviewed with little to no constructive criticism. Consequently the star-rating is something he intends to leave out in future peer-review projects.

Students were also given the option to work in Connect, which is Sheffield's branded version of the social networking software ELGG but this was merely a provision for those who would prefer not to use Facebook or some other site they might already be using. Apparently, some students used this but others didn't even sign up.

He talked a little about taking into account the demographic of his students, all of which (I think he said this) were part of Generation Z - alternatively known as Millennials, Generation @, and the Internet Generation. Typically this demographic consists of people living in Western or "First World" cultures, born between the years of 1995 and 2010. I've also seen this called Generation C (where C is close to the U.S. pronunciation of Z and stands for "connect", "click", "computer" or any other web-related word you might think of). Dr Stokes admitted to his preference for the term Millennials, which he said was "growing on" him.

It seemed to me that he'd made a real effort to understand where his students were coming from and, in doing so, had hit upon some surprising conclusions. For one, some students want to write essays, as evidenced by the Word documents in the pot at the end of the project. Nevertheless, he recognised that online spaces for learning "seem important". And finally, students don't seem all that interested in audio podcasts - except, perhaps as part of enhanced podcasts (that is, with simple visuals like still images of Powerpoint slides).

This last point is an interesting one. I personally think this could be for two reasons. Perhaps students are trying to meet what they perceive as traditional expectations by producing something like the presentation they would've been previously tasked with, with the exception that it's digital and online.

Or perhaps students don't feel the same constraints that we ourselves feel and expect. As I mentioned, audio is easier to create and edit and therefore time-saving but perhaps, for students who have been given the creative freedom to make their project really unique, convenience isn't as much of a priority as it is for people in full-time work. Perhaps it's about students being given the opportunity to take pride in their work, to fulfil the set criteria while making the project something of their own.

BbWorld Europe 2009 (Day One, AM) - Version 9

2009-04-07T12:08:00.000+01:00

Due to my worsening flu-like illness, I wasn't able to make the keynote first thing in the morning so spent the time trying to regain my sense of taste over breakfast instead. Still nasal, I did make it to Martha Cooley's talk at 10.45, enabling me to get a good look at the room I myself was placed to deliver in, as well as Version 9.

Cooley is the Senior Director for Product Management at Blackboard and said she's only been in the job a little while. She was a good presenter though, down-to-earth and tried to answer everyone's questions. Much of the talk seemed to be aimed at appeasing (or perhaps just helping) WebCT customers ('Vista clients' in the official lingo).

She had some good news:

Blackboard (Classic) Version 8 would be supported until October 2012.
An English (UK) Language Pack is available in Version 9. Meaning the word "Organisation" will now be spelt "correctly"!
There is a Portfolio Roadmap for future versions - meaning we could be seeing improvements to the tool soon (at least two words in that sentence may be overly optimistic).

I noticed so many people Twittering on their mobile phones while the talk was going on - am I missing out on something by sticking to this retrospective-account-of-the-event thing? I think they used to call it blogging. I am (in many ways) so past tense...

2009-04-07T08:00:00.001+01:00

woke up to find this cold/flu/illness-type thing isn't going without a fight and, apparently, beats you up in your sleep. Sorry, keynote :-(

BbWorld Europe 2009 (Day Zero!) - Keynote

2009-04-06T20:30:00.012+01:00

Day Zero? Strangely this year, Blackboard decided to schedule Michael Chasen's keynote the day before the main conference. Chasen is Blackboard's CEO and last year his talk was in the afternoon, sandwiched between other talks but nevertheless a very energetic performance in which Chasen gave a demonstration of the then-unseen Blackboard Version 9 with its new "Web 2.0 look and feel".

This year's talk, which one might've expected to be more motivational in order to kickstart the conference, seemed a lot more subdued and in places felt as though it was an attempt at being more reflective than inspiring. Whether or not this has anything to do with the new administration in Washington isn't clear though Chasen didn't hesitate to use clips of President Obama talking about education to break up his delivery.

The focus was on what's being called (by Chasen at least) the 'global education imperative' - this imperative itself comes from Obama's urge for education reform, in particular a line from his speech to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in which he says 'Education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity and success, it is a prerequisite'. To be honest, it took me a while to work out just what Obama was saying here, let alone Chasen.

A pathway and a prerequisite can be the same thing, surely - or at least that's what I thought. But, I suppose Obama is saying that to be educated is no longer a sufficient condition for success but a necessary one. Hence the imperative.

However, some of things Chasen said I have yet to get a grasp on. For example, one of the keynote's recurrent phrases was 'leveraging the community'. I struggled to understand what this meant in practical terms. 'Leverage' is not the most eloquent of words even in its proper context, which I believe is that of financial markets. There it's a noun; Chasen used it as a verb. I wasn't sure if he meant 'promote', 'lift up' or simply 'use'. Not that Chasen would have said 'use', preferring the longer and not entirely necessary 'utilise' instead.

In the end, it seemed to be a reference to the new Blackboard Connections site, which as a tool seems to be designed to listen in on the gossip and complaints of the user community and gather more feedback. Perhaps 'leverage' is meant to imply that they are trying to stick the oar in, lift us out of our group huddle. But these huddles are important if we're to work out what it is we want, what our strategy is going to be. A simpler phrase like 'listening to the community' would have won me over.

'Expanding openness' was another refrain of the speech, showing that even if the software is moving away from clunkiness, the corporate language isn't. In practical terms, this primarily referred to the new, more inclusive API so that students being asked to access modules on various systems and VLEs now need know only one login to get to the materials (presumably the Blackboard one).

However, it also seemed to be vague enough to encompass other things like Facebook Sync, Blackboard for the iPhone, and, most interesting of all, the use of Blackboard outside America. Tim Collin, Vice President of Blackboard's EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Asia) Division, gave us some interesting information on the government initiated roll-out of Blackboard to the whole of Columbia (that's the Columbian government doing the initiating by the way, in case there was any doubt) and said that, globally, so many institutions had opted for the Blackboard hosting option, their servers now contain more data than on the whole of Facebook.

All in all, I don't think Chasen or Collin succeeded in joining all the elements from the bigger picture to the elements in the smaller but the talk was an interesting way of trying to frame both so that they were at least occupying the same gallery space. I was glad that the talk was different from last year's delivery which, while more enthused, was closer to what I'd expect from a shrill salespitch than from a keynote.

2009-04-06T10:57:00.001+01:00

never learned a word of Spanish, let alone Catalan.

Multiple, simultaneous... status updates!

2009-03-27T16:39:00.007Z

You might have noticed, among some of the posts below and in the archives, some uncharacteristically short posts that look like status updates - specifically here and here, for example.

These have come from a site called Ping.fm which you can use as a way of updating your status on all of your accounts at once. I say all as it seems to cover most sites.

I use my Ping.fm account to update my status on Facebook and Twitter (about which more soon) and of course to micro-blog here. A handy tool if you're signed up to multiple social networking sites and like me don't want to have to login to every one individually.

I suppose it would be interesting to think about this in terms of digital identity - whether it "flattens" your online presence (for want of a better word) by making it less rich or simply makes managing your identity much easier. But it's Friday afternoon and that's about all I can manage at the moment!

Technology vs. horse!

2009-03-26T18:14:00.004Z

I'm back! Actually I've been back a little while now but didn't feel like blogging until today.

My week in the New Forest was largely spent walking around, taking photos of deer and horses and trying to write. I didn't have t'Internet and I didn't miss it one bit... And if you believe that, then I'm a better liar than I thought.

The first things I did after unpacking were open up my laptop and flick the wireless switch on and off to see if it would work. It didn't. I was marooned without access to e-mail or Wikipedia or Facebook for a seven days. Which was partly the point because if I was going to get some writing done and relax, something had to give.

By the end of the week though, I'd almost forgotten about the Internet and felt sad to be leaving my new of world of streams and bogs and wandering ponies for one of choked roads, dazed shoppers and screen-induced headaches. Having Internet access again hardly seemed compensation enough.

I have to come clean about my usage here though: I use Wikipedia and Google and I do a lot of reading online. I get my news online, I do a lot of research online and, because I don't watch television that much and only have three of the terrestrial channels, I use things like BBC iPlayer to watch programmes I couldn't otherwise see.

However, I don't use MSN, I try not to login to Facebook too much and never send an e-mail if a phone call is possible. So I'd say my use isn't typical perhaps for someone my age and while I missed being able to immediately look something up, that passed quickly and I found myself simply getting more involved in the non-fiction books I'd taken along.

I'm also someone who owns a very old phone (Nokia 3410), doesn't have a portable music player and prefers to read and look out of the window when on a train, both of which are dying pastimes according to this BBC article.

Coming back to "all this" has left me feeling a little as though the Web and perhaps technology-in-general erodes the possibility of narrative or an awareness of narrative time. I feel that putting some headphones in and creating my own bubble not only cuts me off from my surroundings but time as well. If I commuted everyday it might be a different matter. This is also the reason I'm an analogue snob when it comes to fiction - even hardbacks are too hi-tech for me.

And here I leave you with a not entirely unrelated clip from Adaptation - a great film and worth seeing in its entirety if you can. Don't let Meryl Streep climbing atop Nicholas Cage put you off...

2009-03-14T09:18:00.001Z

is off to the New Forest for a week.

Teaching Matters article

2009-03-13T18:05:00.000Z

I'm off to the New Forest to take a break for the next seven days - after I play a gig at Ascot tonight that is. Before I go, I wanted to post an article that I wrote for Teaching Matters (which was distributed today). That way, if anyone should drop by looking for direct links to the sites I talk about they can find them here.

The article is posted in full below (or click here for quick access).

Word clouds versus tag clouds

2009-03-13T17:59:00.006Z

The word ‘cloud’ is increasingly used in the context of Web 2.0, perhaps because so much of it seems ‘blue sky’ to a lot of people. However, a cloud in the context of tagging has nothing to do with cloud computing. It refers to a visual representation of terms weighted by frequency – in most cases this weighting is indicated by size, as in the images provided.

Take http://chir.ag/projects/preztags/ for a timely example; the site of a U.S. Presidential rhetoric project. When the page loads, you are presented with a cloud displaying the words most frequently used in the 2007 State of the Union speech. Obama’s inaugural speech has not yet been loaded there, but you can pull the slider back through time from the pyrocumulus of Bush’s address, hell-bent on the themes of ‘Iraq’ and ‘terrorists’, to the noctilucent beginnings of the United States with John Adams’ ‘Foundation of Government’ speech, in which only the hopeful words ‘assembly’ and ‘constitution’ loom large.

The site calls itself a ‘tag cloud’ but it’s more accurately a bunch of ‘word clouds’ and a timeline. Tags are a form of metadata and as such used to describe the content of text, not necessarily act as a representative sample of that content. For example, you might upload the Bush speech to a blog, tag it with all the words featured in the word cloud we have seen and thereby have your tag cloud and the word cloud coincide. But you could also, if you wanted, add the tags ‘warmongering’, ‘incompetent’ or even the multi-word ‘worst president in history’, which to my knowledge don’t appear in the speech at all.

Word clouds also tend to be static – you input the text and get your cloud – whereas tag clouds tend to be dynamic, checking how many items (be they blog posts or bookmarks) have a particular tag and then sizing them accordingly. The more you use a tag across several blog postings for example, the larger that term will grow in your tag cloud, giving visitors an easy overview of what the blog is about.

You can create your own word clouds (for free) perhaps as a resource for your students or for use in slideshow presentations by going to http://www.wordle.net/. To see a tag cloud in action, go to my blog (http://yarnandglue.blogspot.com) where you can also find links to the resources listed here and more.

2009-03-13T16:30:00.001Z

will be playing with Galapagos in Ascot tonight. The venue opposite the train station for those that enjoy uncomplicated adventures. On @ 9.

E-mail prevents potential blogging...

2009-03-06T12:21:00.001Z

I often feel like I have lots that I could blog about here but part of the reason I never get round to it is because I'm trying to deal with the onslaught of e-mails that come my way every day.

So it was nice to receive this article from Gerry Leonidas, a Typography lecturer here at Reading, on dealing with your inbox. I intend to start implementing this next week - if not today... With 483 follow-ups I'm going to have to soon!

Perhaps then I can start blogging more frequently.

2009-03-06T12:19:00.001Z

is looking into places to stay in Barcelona - any advice appreciated!

Facebook commenting could get you fired

2009-02-27T16:21:00.004Z

Yep, over on the BBC News website I happened across the headline "Facebook remark teenager is fired". 16-year-old Kimberly Swann from Essex described her job as "boring" on her Facebook page - it's not clear from the article there whether or not this was a status update or something she had added to her profile.

In any case, the remark got her fired. You can read the article yourself of course; what I thought was interesting about it was the contrast in attitudes towards Swann's comment and towards social networking in general.

The report gives two points of view. Steve Ivell of Ivell Marketing & Logistics in Clacton justifies the company's decision to sack Swann with this:

Had Miss Swann put up a poster on the staff notice board making the same comments and invited other staff to read it there would have been the same result.

While TUC general secretary Brendan Barber had a different attitude:

Most employers wouldn't dream of following their staff down the pub to see if they were sounding off about work to their friends.

Note the contrasting metaphors. The boss sees the social networking site as a noticeboard - note that his problem is not even that the site is online and the comment potentially a public one. While the union secretary sees the site as providing something akin to a chat down the pub, a facilitator for the comraderie colleagues may feel when complaining about work.

So, would the boss object to his employees complaining about work down the pub? Probably. But it's out of his ability to control this and it would be unreasonable for him to fire someone on the basis of something overheard outside of the work environment. His choice of metaphor - the noticeboard within the workplace - makes the action seem more justifiable since he makes it sound as though something within the workplace has been disrupted.

So which metaphor is closer? And were the company right in sacking her?

2009-02-27T15:20:00.001Z

is trying out ping.fm (for work).

TDA Project Climax

2009-02-26T10:31:00.008Z

On Tuesday morning, my colleague Robyn and I went over to Bulmershe campus to run a focus group with a PGCE course convenor, Judith Davies. This was the climax to a project Robyn and I have been working on with Judith since before September.

Robyn and I had been asked to look at the wealth of Web 2.0 tools out there, select a bunch of them and match them up against criteria which we had drawn up previously. The idea being to find at least one Web 2.0 tool that would fulfil a newly qualified teacher's portfolio needs.

Throughout the project, we kept a wiki within Blackboard (using the Learning Objects tool) to analyse tools and compare them with one another. When the New Year began we looked at all the information we collected and we picked two tools (and a spare) that we were going to focus on. We also prepared a slideshow (embedded below) and several handouts to make the day run more smoothly.

TDA Focus Group

View more presentations from readingcdotl. (tags: wikis e-learning)

The idea of the presentation was to present these findings to a group of teachers who Judith had paid with funding to take a day's leave and give them a lunch while we were at it.

We took what I thought was a fairly "radical" approach to the slideshow - that is, there's hardly any text and the focus is more in images and making an impact with these to mark different parts of the morning. This was inspired by talks I've seen given at conferences recently and was an attempt to remedy the Powerpoint fatigue I've been afflicted by recently. When it came to the tools themselves, we simply logged in and did a live demo, showing some examples that we'd prepared earlier to inform them further. You can see the examples we created below:

http://tdaportfolioexample.pbwiki.com
http://tdaportfolio.edublogs.org

And while we were eating lunch we recorded the discussion that we had around the table - about e-portfolios, their shortcomings, or rather the current lack of an adequate tool, and what they thought of the tools we'd picked out.

Robyn and I have yet to go through the feedback but as we do, I will try and post some of our findings here and perhaps some of the wiki notes we made in early on in the project too. All in all, it was a successful morning - so much so, that I'm now trying to take the same "radical" slideshow approach with the workshops that we run here and with future presentations.

Clouds obscuring the stars...

2009-02-20T14:33:00.004Z

... or revealing them?

I've not had time to update my blog of late but I saw this and had to post it up as it relates so much to my last post. These, if you didn't realise already are word clouds, not tag clouds. If you're a mainstream-movie-buff or simply a lover of celebrity fluff, you'll probably enjoy guessing who's is who's... I didn't get any of them right.

Not one for my del.icio.us account then but definitely something for the blog - a distinction I'll maybe talk about sometime (if I find any). Where to put resources, items, links, etc...

So tired. Be back soon.

TinyURL, Tagging and yet more Obama

2009-02-02T17:53:00.005Z

I used TinyURL for the first time today. I'd known about it for a while (of course!) but I'd never had to use it, what with del.icio.us and Facebook and everything else making things easier in that respect. However, writing an article for our Centre's publication Teaching Matters this evening, I came across a webpage I simply had to share with my readers. The URL being way too long, I popped over to TinyURL, put it in and got a much shorter one out. As demonstrated below:

Original URL: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/tag_clouds_of_obamas_in
augural_speech_compared_to_bushs.php

Tiny URL: http://tinyurl.com/8wcz6c

And the article? Well it's on tagging and I'm just finishing it up as I write this post. It has to be short-short: around 350 words, which is a real struggle for me (as evidenced in most, say all, of the posts below). And there are also some sardonic references to U.S. Presidents Bush and a kinder mention of Obama (yes, he is President of the United States; it's still weird for me too).

Anyway, I'll keep this uncharacteristically short and leave you with the teaser of my upcoming article, generated on Wordle (another useful site!), in the form of... a meta-tag cloud?

My First Slideshare

2009-01-23T14:37:00.008Z

I've uploaded the slideshow I presented at Durham to a site called Slideshare. It's free to sign up for an account there and, in doing so, you get some space to upload Powerpoint presentations to. This enables you to share your slideshow with people and receive feedback.

The Promise and Practicalities of e-Portfolios: Getting Blackboard to Deliver

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: durham conference)

I've been a visitor to the site for a while and found it particularly useful for looking over slideshows from conference presenters I found particularly interesting. I signed up so I could "give something back" to the site by contributing my own presentations to the .

If you upload a Powerpoint file to the site, you can then embed the resulting slideshow into a blog, a wiki, a standard webpage... or even a Blackboard course, with relative ease. As I've done above. Aesthetically, this could be a nicer way of giving students access to your lecture materials.

Animations don't upload well, as you'll notice on a few of my slides. But I like the easy integration with the page.

I read the Terms and Conditions before uploading my presentation and IPR remains in the hands of the author, so far as I can tell. However, be aware that anyone can grab the code for embedding and put your presentation on their webpage -you can see I did this in previous posts with keynotes for the Durham Conference (here and here). This means the site is useful for viral publicity so long as you make sure you have your name on the front page!

Blog of the Week: The White House

2009-01-21T12:15:00.001Z

Given yesterday's historic occasion, it seems only appropriate to make mention of The White House blog where you can read all about the inauguration, Obama's economic agenda, his plans regarding energy and the environment and the ways in which he intends to address other issues of the day. It's also a very nicely designed site.

When the time allowed, I had been following the blog at Change, the Obama Team's previous site. Obama may not only have been the first Presidential candidate to embrace the web but also the first to embrace Web 2.0. At Change, Visitors were able to submit ideas via the Citizen's Briefing Book - these ideas were published on pages where others could vote to move them up or down a scale and leave comments.

They also use plenty of discussion and video to liven up the site. Can you imagine such a thing happening if McCain had gotten in? Even if it had, can you imagine people engaging with it? It will be interesting to see how much of a difference it'll make. The Change site has officially closed now but you still see the previous postings by going to this site.

In the meantime, I've been thinking about a change as well - albeit of a smaller kind. Some people have been saying they can't see my blog so I'm thinking of moving from Blogger over to Edublogs where all the other learning technologists seem to be. Still, if I decide to move, I'll post a notice here. So, for now, keep watching this space.

Grace

2009-01-13T16:05:00.006Z

In an effort to get back into blogging, I've backposted up some notes from the Durham Conference. Day One is here and Day Two is here.

And for a more personal touch, here are some pictures of my niece Grace - born on 1st December and about the size of an egg - in varying states of wobbliness with different members of my family. Anyone who wants to hazard a guess as to who's who can leave comments below...

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Durham 2009, Day Two

2009-01-09T16:39:00.007Z

Click here for Durham 2009: Day One

No doubt some sore heads in the first presentation this morning after a three-course meal in Durham Castle, with lots of wine, followed by a trip to the nearby Undercroft bar... Still as this presentation was the usual Roadmap spiel from Blackboard it barely mattered. We still don't have a definite date for the release of Version 9 and while I'm sure the information they gave about Project NG was useful for some, I'm also sure I wasn't the only one who'd heard all this before.

They did mention that Blackboard was being re-branded and that three themes would be evident in upcoming versions: Blackboard Learn, Blackboard Transact and Blackboard Connect.

Following that, a forward-thinking talk from Sophie Paluch (College of Law), Kate Reader (Bristol) and Zak Mensah (TASI - soon changing it's name to JISC Digital Media) about mobile technologies in Higher Education. One thing I took away from this presentation was how much mobile technology has moved since it first came about - and how quicky. Sophie showed an advert on YouTube, and while I haven't been able to find the same one, this clip should give you an idea of the kind of progress that's been made.

Later I saw a presentation from Ralph Holland (Tyneside) and Merv Stapleton (City of Sunderland) on their comparison of e-portfolio tools and their usage in different (and sometimes novel) situations. One example Ralph gave of marines trying to maintain e-portfolios out at sea but being unable to due to lack of proper Internet access was particularly vivid. I would have liked to have seen more examples here but I spoke to Merv after the presentation and we're going to keep in touch and share experiences.

Lastly, we were treated to an inspiring final keynote from Paul Lowe; a very energetic speaker who runs an MA Photojournalism and Documentary course at the London College of Communication and has his own blog here. He talked about the course he runs, which recruits mid-career professionals and requires them to keep their own blogs for purposes of reflection. The talk itself was very inspiring and, as you'll probably notice from the slideshow I've embedded here, very visual - but the main thing I took away from it was that it didn't matter so much which tool his students practitioners were using but that how they used the tools to interact with one another that counted more.

Blogs and educating the eflective practitioner

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: elearning professional)

Paul uses Blackboard but he barely mentioned it in his talk. And people on the course were allowed to use whatever blogging application they preferred. It seemed more important that they were paired up or put in groups so as to support each other during the reflective process (especially given that they were subject to a lot of criticism). Feedback was the crucial element here, I think.

Together with Andy's presentation the previous day, I came away determined to make more of an effort with my blog!

Durham 2009, Day One

2009-01-08T17:32:00.006Z

So another year, another conference at Durham for Blackboard Users... Except this year, one of the keynotes is a user of Moodle! If that doesn't give Blackboard cause for concern...

The title of this year's conference is "e-Learning: A Reality Check - Do We Practice What We Preach?" and Andy Ramsden from Bath kicked the official proceedings off with a really stimulating and entertaining talk on whether or not e-learning has lived up to its early promise. A lot of his slideshow was made interactive by the use of PRS, which turned out to be an effective way of passing the main question on to us.

After letting the audience decide which way he should steer the talk, he went on to give us an outline of Collis and Moonen's 4-E model. As I understand it the model looks at the drivers behind the adoption of a new technology or approach at an institution and then compares these with factors in the institutional environment to determine a threshold, past which those drivers must push if adoption is to be successful. The drivers looked at include Educational Effectiveness, Ease of Use, and Personal Engagement, while institutional factors are all clumped together in the Environmental category - and there we have our four E's!

e-learning Reality Check: Keynote Durham University 2009

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: bbuk2009 eatbath-present)

Andy went on to explain what practical steps they are taking to make sure these drivers are in place and strong enough - such as doing fewer case studies, and working more with a project blog. I also liked the suggestion that members of the e-Learning Team sit in on actual lectures and get a sense of teaching styles in place as well as what technologies are being used! And his tip to make the time to blog is something I'm following up at this very moment...

This was a good start to an interesting day. There were quite a few presentations on e-portfolios (my own included) a couple of which sought to readdress the definition of an e-portfolio, presumably because the lack of tools that actually meet the requirements mean learning technologists are now seeking Web 2.0 solutions. (My colleague Robyn and I have done some work on this too.) Peninsula Medical College are using Learning Objects' Expo wiki tool on their Emily Blackboard system for example.

Tim Neumann from the Institute of Education outlined some scenarios in which the requirements of an e-portfolio were very different and the work he has done provided some kind of explanation as to why there isn't yet a killer app when it comes to e-portfolios.

One final handy tip from Andy Cree who teaches Business Ethics at Teesside Business School. He talked about his course and about he used video podcasts to direct students on his course to areas of the reading list that might normally be overlooked. The short infomercial type videos he produced seemed to be a simple but innovative way of getting students to engage with other points of view.

The tip here is how he provided visuals to his audio commentary on the books - by using a site called morgueFile (I think he called it PhotoMorgue but I couldn't find that so I'm assuming he was mistaken). It's a site where artists, professionals and amateur photographers and upload their photos for anyone to use for free -so if you're looking for some images to enhance a presentation, be sure to have a look!

Obamamania

2008-11-06T10:14:00.007Z

Tuesday's voting was bound to lead to an historic election - the US would either have gotten its first African-American president or its first female vice-president. So I stayed up to see some of the results trickle in, which for the UK happened during the small hours of Wednesday morning.

The BBC's coverage seemed particularly shambolic, consisting of David Dimbleby trying to interview an ever-shifting panel of experts, insiders or opiniated wafflers but constantly interrupting what might have been interesting answers by updating those who had just joined the table as to what they were talking about and updating us with pointless commentary mostly on pictures of a sparse crowd of Republicans miserably shuffling around as if someone had just done something in their hat...

I didn't see it at the time having drifted well-off into sleep before the results were annouced but this botched interview with Gore Vidal was actually a highlight of this otherwise ridiculous coverage.

And what was particularly irksome was that they continually focused on the fact that then-Senator (now President-Elect) Obama is black. Dimbleby couldn't seem to get enough of this word, and most of his questions seemed to centre on this one fact, while the rest of the time was spent mocking Republicans they'd managed to timetable into their barely orchestrated game of musical chairs.

Sure, Obama's being black is a first but the BBC's unsubtle emphasis on this single fact overlooked the far more important fact that his campaign was for the most-part co-ordinated as a post-racial affair. More importantly still, this may be the first genuinely intelligent President that the U.S. have elected in at least eight years. Is the BBC's seeming inability to address these points down to the limits of televisual media, which can only ever hope to address what it thinks are populist questions in the time given?

Also a first, and here we get to why I'm ranting about it on this blog, is that Obama used the web as a crucial part of his campaign to appeal to a younger and potentially more diverse spectrum of voters. There's a podcast over at The Guardian - direct link here - which addresses this issue specifically. They talk to Andy Carvin, the NPR's social media expert who talks about how the use of the Web had practical applications beyond simple appeal to voters, namely:

Using social networking for politically like-minded people to meet up - resulting in an historic coalition of support for the Democrats
Ways of getting donations from all over - meaning that Obama was able to turn down public funding, so confident was he of getting enough donations from the electorate at large

Andy also talks about the way people have used sites like YouTube to keep up-to-date (I know I have) - and the ways sites like these have a way of catching people out. Someone says something untoward and it can go viral and be seen world-over. And yet that's the thing that's made Obama truly remarkable throughout this campaign - is that he has been potentially subject to more media scrutiny than any other presidential candidate in history and, save a few slip-ups (his comment about certain voters clinging to "religions and guns" for example), has still managed to get most of the popular vote and an electoral college landslide.

And how? There's been much use of words like "grassroots" and "movement" in trying to describe the support behind Obama in the past year, which I think conceals the fact that what we've actually seen has been a highly-organised, controlled campaign. There may have been elements of the Democratic support that could be described as "grassroots" but this was still largely a top-down affair, remarkable because it managed to involve so many young volunteers.

What remains to be seen is whether the people that met using these tools will maintain their connections and keep politically engaged. This will be crucial over the next 100 days or so as Obama attempts to face down a worsening economic situation and meets with pressure from corporate interests to break or ease up on some of his campaign promises. If Obama's "grassroots" supporters can stay in touch and, more crucially, organise then we might see what can be properly called a movement.

Blog of the Week: Five Thirty Eight

2008-10-15T12:34:00.001+01:00

Anyone been following the US elections? As a serial drama, it's been fascinating and I wouldn't be surprised if a few weeks after the inauguration, someone options a film of the whole thing.

So, if you're interested, here's Five Thirty Eight - a blog which compiles multiple poll findings from the States and tracks each of the candidate's popularity. The site gets it's name from the number of electors in the electoral college. It's frequently updated and should make interesting reading over the next couple of weeks.

At the time of writing, Democrats should have a lot to be happy about but of course there's only one poll that really counts - and that one's taking place on November 4th.

(I should prob'ly stop calling this feature "blog of the week" if I can't actually keep the blog up-to-date. Perhaps, I'll just refer to it as Recommended Blog in future...)

A view of the clouds

2008-10-01T13:37:00.009+01:00

Another article, again from The Guardian, in which Richard Stallman - the founder of GNU - warns readers that "cloud computing" is a trap.

Cloud computing is where users decide to store their mail or files (such as images, documents, spreadsheets, slideshows, etc) online instead on their hard drive or on a memory stick that belongs to them.

I guess cloud computing and its downsides as they are argued in the article are the flip-side to Web 2.0.

If I'm being honest (and I do try) I haven't come across this phrase before - it sounds like another fashionable buzz-term to me. But even though I've not heard the saying, I've thought about this kind of thing. If we define Web 2.0 as online sites that allow the users to generate its content, thus creating new open spaces for users to congregate, share and store information then inevitably, with the increase in Web 2.0 use we're going to see more users moving their content online - and therefore off their own machines.

I suppose there's a certain naïveté about total Web 2.0 advocates in that while these spaces are public-domain, they're not publically-owned.

However, Stallman says: "If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're defenceless." Perhaps, the following question will suggest a little naïveté on my part but where are we going to store and share this stuff if we can't afford our own web server?

Freshers on Facebook

2008-09-30T17:32:00.001+01:00

The Guardian has this timely article on how Facebook is used by students before they arrive at university. It's Freshers' Week now, here at the University of Reading and so all the students who have been meeting online in preparation for their arrival at university will now be meeting face to face. I wonder how many surprises they'll be, how different students come across from the identities they present in their profiles.

There are a number of interesting points in the article - which you can read for yourself - mainly from research done by the University of Leicester. Among them is the issue raised again and again here at Reading regarding the distinction between academic and social areas online.

I don't think students necessarily want lecturers to use Facebook (which they see as their space for socialising). At the most, I'd say they want their lecturers to use tools like it to make communicating and accessing course materials more efficient - and even that is debatable. The issue really boils down to whether these new technologies are good for teaching and learning - an obvious point but one that can be easily forgotten in the anxiety of keeping up with the times or in the hot pursuit of new toys.

When it comes to the social side - well, I've already blogged about the nature of friendship on Facebook and the different policies users might adopt when interacting on Facebook or social networking sites in general. I'm sure a lot stockpiling of friends goes on, partly so's there's a readymade support network in place by the time students arrive, partly so's the numbers for everyone are higher.

That may sound cynical but I'm increasingly beginning to think the nature of the site itself is cynical. Having friends counts and newsfeeds of what everyone is up to all the time can't be good for a healthy perception of life. Lecturers should be looking into tools like Facebook when they can, not so they can use them but so they can know what it is that shapes their students' worldview.

R.I.P. D.F.W.

2008-09-15T11:36:00.004+01:00

One of my favourite writers died at the weekend. The news shocked me more than any other news I can think of.

David Foster Wallace was only 46. His short stories and essays are all very personal so, although I never met him, I felt like I knew him.

More shocking is that it looks as though it was a suicide. This is especially upsetting given that he was not only extremely talented but that suicide, depression, isolation, alienation, loneliness, were all themes in his work; I always assumed that his ability to riff on these difficult topics and make them personal and funny and moving was merely another facet of his genius, not that he was writing from personal thoughts and experiences.

I haven't even mentioned the effect he has had on contemporary fiction and literature. His writing inspired many to reassess literature's purpose in a world increasingly filled with distractions. His death no doubt will lead to further reassessments. Hopefully, it won't overshadow his work.

Anyway, there are a lot of tributes and memoirs being posted on the web - among which, the following:

@ The New York Times
@ The Times Online
@ guardian.co.uk

and, more personal than the above:

McSweeney's Internet Tendency

BACK-POSTED: 27/06/2009

Blog of the Week: Orwell's Diaries

2008-08-13T10:10:00.003+01:00

I'm technically in the States as this is being published but am writing it before I go for scheduled release. So it seems appropriate that I should mention this blog, which is similarly delayed (albeit by much longer)...

‘When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page’, wrote George Orwell, in his 1939 essay on Charles Dickens.

From 9^th August 2008, you will be able to gather your own impression of Orwell’s face from reading his most strongly individual piece of writing: his diaries. The Orwell Prize is delighted to announce that, to mark the 70^th anniversary of the diaries, each diary entry will be published on this blog exactly seventy years after it was written, allowing you to follow Orwell’s recuperation in Morocco, his return to the UK, and his opinions on the descent of Europe into war in real time. The diaries end in 1942, three years into the conflict.

So: one of our greatest political writers is "blogging" seventy years after he first wrote his the content. Enough said, I think.

Physics Rap, Anyone?

2008-08-05T19:41:00.002+01:00

Found this video courtesy of the Pynchon-List today (yes, that's a mailing list dedicated to Pynchon).

e-Learning at its best or worst? I found it educational anyway. And it's like old-school hip-hop. What's not to love?

New Look del.icio.us

2008-08-04T19:33:00.001+01:00

Anyone seen the new look del.icio.us? It's very sexy...

I only spotted it today! Not sure when it happened...

I wonder if this'll make it harder to explain for "social bookmarking for beginners" sessions...

You can get to my bookmarks, if you're interested, by going to delicious.com/catabolickid

ILP Walkthrough

2008-07-31T18:58:00.006+01:00

Continued from previous set of screenshots... (As ever, click to enlarge/expand images.)

'ILP' stands for 'Individual Learner Profile'...

... a document which students are encouraged to fill out to aid them in the reflective process.

It was designed by Caroline Jacobs at the University of Portsmouth and adapted for the University of Reading by my colleague, Sarah Morey. The version we're seeing here has been further adapted (by me) from a paper-based form to a slightly more interactive web-form.

The idea of it being like this is that it fits seamlessly with the portfolio course-integration that I developed to making using e-portfolios in Blackboard easier.

If the user clicks the ILP option accidentally, they can always back out by clicking the familiar-looking 'Cancel' button at the bottom. As you can see in this screenshot, they're asked to confirm that this is what they want to do and warned they will lose any answers if they click 'OK'.

If the student clicks 'Submit' but hasn't answered every question, a little alert box tells which ones they need to go back and do.

This way, the students can't miss anything; they have to complete all questions before they continue.

When they finally do click 'Submit', the answers are automatically stored in their portfolio.

More on Step Four soon.

Blog of the Week: Greta Christina's Blog

2008-07-30T16:59:00.000+01:00

Does 'blog of the week' sound patronising? I hope not. All I mean by it is that I've been looking at a particular blog this week and think it worthy of mention here. I don't mean to suggest that I've looked at all the blogs on the web and that this is the best out there, this week. It might not even be the best of what I have read in any given week.

But the blog I've been revisiting this week must surely be up there. Here's a nod in the direction of Greta Christina. As she herself says, she uses her blog to riff on "sex, atheism, politics, dreams, and whatever". She's been blogging, or better yet "thinking out loud", since 2005.

I found her site some months back after I'd read Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. Despite being an atheist myself (albeit with an interest in religion), I wasn't very impressed with some of its arguments (especially with regards to moral philosophy). So I was on the look-out for other arguments from different viewpoints. And my search for the term "atheism" brought up this surely now-famous posting about anger at religious views in America and the world today. I recommend reading it, no matter what your views are concerning religion as I think it makes some very good points and passionately too.

More generally, I like the presentation of her site. She breaks up the text with little pictures, some of them purely decorative, some illustrative of some point and others poignant or disturbing. Check out the simple image of a coathanger in the "Atheists and Anger" post, for example.

Of what I've read, I think I can safely say that Greta Christina is always opinionated but never patronising, always well-informed but never digressive, and always engaging but always on equal terms with her readers.

What I've Been Doing Today

2008-07-29T18:04:00.008+01:00

It's not perfect by any means...

... but it will hopefully help ...

... by providing specific instructions ...

... as the user actually goes through the process ...

... of creating their portfolio.

Click any of the images to enlarge/expand.

Check back on Thursday...

for screenshots of the ILP feature so far.

Reading On/Off The Screen

2008-07-28T13:22:00.002+01:00

A quick glance at the Guardian website today reveals a few separate but related articles, here, here and here. The common theme: reading from a screen.

It interests me because my last two posts have been fairly long and opinionated; perhaps not ideal for the computer screen. I wonder if I've really got the hang of writing for the Web.

I read and write a lot in my spare time; so far that's been the strongest influence on my blogging here. I've included pictures and blocktext in recent posts but a more radical approach might be in order...

The idea of the blog of the week I suppose is that I can look at what kinds of blogs are out there and what makes them successful in my (so far long-winded and prose-y) opinion. To date, we've only had three but two of them have been webcomics.

There's something about the comic strip form seems to lend itself really easily to the screen. It's visual, it usually gets to the point quickly and that point is normally funny. It'd be interesting to see if something like a longer narrative could be pulled off in this medium though.

Currently, I can't imagine trying to read a novel on one of the new e-readers coming onto the market - I'm too fond of paperbacks. What about you?

Facebook, Identity and Friends

2008-07-25T16:00:00.004+01:00

Went out for lunch today and picked up a copy of The Independent, to later find the following inside...

The first I knew about it was a phone call. My girlfriend admonished me for succumbing to the temptations of Facebook, a website whose poisoned fruits I had previously said I found unappealing. I stood accused of two crimes: a lack of willpower and a failure to confess.

Not guilty on both counts, I pleaded. Alas, I was the victim of a fraud. Somebody, somewhere – and believe me, I'm pretty sure I know who you are – had launched a vendetta. They hated me. And what a visceral, calculating and malicious hate it was.

(More here.)

It might sound a little brain-dead of me to say so but I never thought about the possibility of this kind of fraud occuring before. I already have a Facebook profile and so the idea of someone setting one up for me with the intention of defaming me hadn't crossed my mind.

A significant proportion of people - most of them students - probably do a pretty good job of defaming themselves on the site anyway, via drunken photos and carelessly filled-out profiles. It's interesting the way some people casually put up (or at least put up with) their bad pictures in what is arguably a public forum - as the article says:

Online networking [...] destroys the boundary between public and private. My public identity becomes not so much a consequence of my achievements as of your dodgy snaps from last Friday.

In many cases those 'dodgy snaps' become a matter of pride - how many of them do you have? How many comments are there for each one? More recently, I've noticed via my own newsfeed a tendency for comment-trading. People commenting on others' pictures - often making only short remarks, in order to start up conversations around the images and how they look. It seems to border on obsessional in some cases. It's not just comments which are quantified in this way...

Online social networking is having a profound effect on the way in which people communicate, chiefly by substituting virtual association for real friendship. In so doing, it is also redefining friendship, giving it more porous boundaries and relaxing the rules by which two people, or a group, interact.

This, I think, is the largest consequence. I've had conversations with friends about this (I mean actual conversations with real friends - in a physical place where you can hear yourself talk - remember those? Or am I getting old-fashioned here?). Different people I know have different policies toward it. Some accept friend requests from everyone (even if it's the kid they hated at school), some only accept requests from people they like(d) and for others only the people they're currently in touch with will do.

I think there are three main "policies", each with their own argument:

Stockpile "friends". Why not? Your number goes up which means you look more popular and you get to play the voyeur by checking out what these people are up to, what kind of online conversations they have and even what their weekends and holidays look like. The more you accept, the broader a view of humanity you have!
"Friends" reunite. You may not know them now but that doesn't mean you won't ever know them again. Why not maintain a connection with the people you liked from your past? It could lead to some interesting places or offers... and even if it doesn't you still get to spy on them.
What are "friends" for? If you accept or add anyone, then your "friend" count on Facebook isn't really a truly reflection of your actual circle of friends. After all, friendship by definition should be about quality and not quantity and you shouldn't let social networking re-define that for you.

Perhaps someone can think of other approaches or arguments like this... What are your thoughts?

Anyway, I could go on. But I'll round up here: I have friends (again, actual friends) who, like the author of the Independent article, would follow that last argument. The difference between them and the author is that they actually have set up Facebook profiles. They say they're nearly always on the verge of deleting their accounts but then as long as they dictate the terms by which they use it, I don't see why they should.

Especially, if someone's going to go and set one up for them otherwise.

Blog of the Week: Very Small Array

2008-07-22T11:12:00.006+01:00

Okay, I missed one last week. I was busy tidying my room, washing my hair, going on dates... (Yeah right; it was work as usual).

Here's Very Small Array. Brought to us by Dorothy Gambrell of Cat and Girl fame (which'll one day be a blog of the week here too, probably), this one is updated pretty irregularly.

As with the previous blog of the week (yes, two weeks ago now...) only the newest post ever shows on the front page, normally featuring an interesting visualisation of some obscure data. Somehow, most entries manage to be both quirkly funny and bizarrely poignant at the same time...

Check out this one, for example (as ever click to enlarge/expand):

And for the confused or bored, let me elaborate.

Craigslist is a site featuring free classified ads and discussion forums. The most well-known (or notorious) section of Craigslist is the "Missed Connections" area which features posts from people who thought they had some kind of brief but unarticulated spark with someone, usually a stranger, usually in a public place. For example:

You were on the Central line and I got on and we made eye contact a few times. You seemed very tired, but you still looked cute. You had on a brown knit sweater on top of a plaid undershirt, and some cute loafers.

The ads are written in the hope that that stranger (or whoever) will read it and recognise themselves described in the post and reply and then that something will happen...

The site is used all over the world, though it was started in America, and the locations where "connections" are missed are, as you'd expect, very varied.

So the above image shows the names of places where connections were most frequently missed by State, displayed in the actual States themselves. While I have no idea what the black patches mean, there's something poignant about the data being presented in this way with the stark white-on-black. Instead of being given their proper names, States are labelled with the names of corporate coffee houses (like Starbucks) or popular shopping destinations (Wal Mart) and I can't help but picture lonely people wandering around with shopping trolleys or sitting quietly desperate with coffees, surrounded by so much stuff but still hoping for something as simple as a "connection"...

I'm not sure if this counts as webcomic or not but it's pretty powerful stuff and I can't imagine it existing in any form quite so potent and far-reaching as a blog.

Portfolio Update

2008-07-21T17:36:00.003+01:00

The new developments I've been working on for Blackboard's e-portfolio system are now being shown to staff at Reading in the context of our iLearn project:

This is just a screenshot of the entry point to the tool, which sits inside a standard Blackboard course. This is pretty much the final version as we're going to be copying this for anyone who's requested an iLearn course this week. It's quite clean and simple and I like it that way :-)

The tool itself has changed a lot. What went from being a simple help system (which I presented at conferences in Manchester and Wolverhampton) following your movements around the portfolio help area in Blackboard is now an attempted enhancement of the tool - with Preview functions built in and additional quizzes which students take to populate their portfolio with information. The "help" itself has shrunk, however, from being a full explanation of what each area of the portfolio tool does to simple snippets of text that basically tell the user where to go next. The idea being that users wanting to do more advanced things will usually disregard help anyway...

I have been trying to work on a system that will assist the user in uploading documents to the Content System though this has proved more difficult and we're running out of time... More on this soon.

Blog of the Week: xkcd

2008-07-09T15:02:00.001+01:00

Well, why not one a week? Assuming I read enough blogs that I consider worthy of attention, it shouldn't be any trouble. I suppose, if I run out of ideas, I can just go all self-referentially postmodern and link to this one.

But this week I want to mention a different kind. Normally, when I'm explaining what a blog is, either to an individual or during a talk, I use the analogy of a diary where the newest entry is at the top. I don't know that that's a good explanation really but it gets people started - they understand that the blogging tool does the dating and sorting for you and I think that's the crucial difference from ye olde "Web 1.0 "websites.

Only blogs don't have to be in journal or diary form at all. They can be webcomics like xkcd:

One I thought might appeal to academics - click to expand/enlarge. Although my recent favourite, which contains some swears and is therefore mildly NSFW, is here.

Which is why I think it's worth a mention here. When you visit the website, the newest strips always appear on the front page and then there's a "Prev" and "Next" button for you to navigate your way through other comics. It's updated every Monday, Wednesday and Friday and you subscribe to a feed as with other blogs.

Also, it's funny. Which should've been reason enough really.

Tip: Hover your mouseover each strip for a follow-up punchline. It means misinformed screenreaders but they were never very good with webcomics anyway.

Recovering from e-Learning Week

2008-07-07T11:48:00.006+01:00

Not that we have much time! Tomorrow marks the beginning of Reading's annual Learning and Teaching Conference (programme here); for the first time it'll be running over two days. I'll be chairing a session and, along with my colleague Maria, giving an overview of Blackboard Academic Suite and how we've piloted it this past two years. I wouldn't want to give the illusion that we've prepared though...

Last week's run of sessions on e-Learning went well though. Just to explain: e-Learning Week also runs annually - whereas we repeat a number of talks and workshops on various e-Learning topics throughout the year, dedicating five days to the lot means we can make a concentrated effort and join some of the themes and strands up. Our "Good Practice" session for example is two hours long and, this time round, allowed for about half an hour talking about general tips on e-accessibility and course design, as well as showcasing some "good practice" examples of courses, before going to a "hands-on" and letting the attendees try things out with practice areas while we go round and help those that need it.

I delivered Friday's penultimate session which was more of a lecture and was called "Keeping Up With Your Students: Changes in Technology". It generated lots of discussion as usual, not least the title which could be deemed controversial depending on how it's interpreted. More on that another time, perhaps...

Feedback for the week overall was very positive and I think only one of the sessions was in any way weak. But it was one we'd never run before so we'll re-arrange it before next time. When the responses have been compiled, I'll post some of them here.

Interview with me

2008-07-01T17:54:00.000+01:00

To my surprise, I've discovered that someone has uploaded a podcast interview with me. Actually, there's input here from other people, most of whom manage to say far more interesting things. The title suggests it's just between me and Alan Carr though.

It also implies that we sat down in a room together and he asked me questions to which I had considered and worthwhile responses when in actual fact Andrew Middleton, microphone in hand, caught me during a coffee break at April's PPPSIG while I was trying to get my teeth into an enormous cake. That not only explains the noise in the background but also how I manage to talk a lot without really saying anything...

Perhaps it goes to show: you really can't have your cake and eat it :-)

Blog of the Week: Language Log

2008-06-30T14:46:00.012+01:00

Not that I'll be picking a blog every week or anything... But thought I'd point to Language Log here, a site I visit fairly regularly, which always has something interesting to say about the state or nuances of our (or, for that matter, any other) language...

Three highlights from the past week:

Beware of "Nerdview"! This is particularly aimed at e-Learning people I suppose (or perhaps just me?) and is especially timely as it's e-Learning Week here at Reading, where we run a number of workshops over five days in which staff can receive training, help and advice on using our VLE (Blackboard) and other tools out on the web (for the purposes of teaching and learning). This post (and this one too) should emphasise the need for those who spend a lot of time with the technical to take a step back when talking to those who don't.
A lot of students use Facebook and anyone who has an account and checks in regularly will already be aware that it's constantly being updated. This posting at Language Log details a subtle change for the better, which, though small, I'm quite pleased about. And the end of the post is reassuring; it's good to know Facebook are taking the complexities of identity, both real-world and digital, into consideration...
And, finally, a cartoon... The original post is about "talkativeness" and mentions gender but I don't think I need to explain how it might also illustrate generational differences concerning communication and technology... Shame it won't fit into my squashed blog; click to expand/enlarge...

About this blog

2008-06-27T15:32:00.006+01:00

I finally got around to sorting this blog out! Well, sort of... It still needs work.

Basically, I've been stockpiling stuff to go up for a while but rather put it all up with today's date, I've decided to back-date it. So for notes on meetings/conferences/etc I attended before today , I'll date it around the actual date of the event itself. Every post dated before this one will have a footnote formatted a bit like this:

[This post is back-dated. dd-mm-yyyy]

That date at the end being the date of the actual posting. Whenever I back-date posts, I'll create a new post to explain there's something new to the blog up with links. A bit like this one:

18-04-2008: PPPSIG Meeting at University of Hertfordshire
19-06-2008: "Enchancing the Student Experience"
26-06-2008: Preview of Previews...

I can't really think of any other way of doing this at the moment. What do you think? Feel free to use the comments link below to leave me some advice! It's open to all...

Preview of Previews...

2008-06-26T12:18:00.004+01:00

One thing that's always annoyed me about the Blackboard Basic Portfolio is the fact that if you want to see your portfolio you have to go right out of it back to your list and then click on the title to open it. I suppose you could leave it open in a different window and then modify and refresh...

Not good enough for me though. I've decided to add a "Preview" button to the main portfolio menu. It's written in from the left hand panel (which I control) using a bit of Javascript. This is what it looks like:

See the difference?

The whole lack of preview for templates when you go to add an Item annoyed me too - it's like you're going into a new page blind, with no support when you get there. So I've added a "Preview" button to that too:

When you click the button it detects which item you've selected from the drop-down list and then opens another window with a Preview HTML file in it. I'm still working on how to get some sort of div in there that warns users that they are in fact looking at a preview but I think it's a small step towards making the interface more user friendly.

[This post is back-dated. 27-06-2008]

"Enhancing the Student Experience"

2008-06-19T05:20:00.002+01:00

Eggh, up before 5.30am this morning and on my way to London by 7.15 but all for a good cause: to go to the BLU Conference at the University of Hertfordshire. My colleague Maria was presenting on behalf of Reading there and is no doubt getting smashed at the dinner tonight. I only went for the day though, staggering home this evening so I could blog on the following delightful topics...

A presentation on vlogging by a student at Hertfordshire called Miles Dyer, aka "blade376", who talked about his experiences, both learning and personal, on YouTube. Considering he'd never presented at a conference before he came across as very cool and engaging - but then he has appeared on More4 News, not to mention the millions of views his videos have got on YouTube itself, so he's experienced at appearing in the public eye. Here he is, giving a quick summary of the conference last night:

His talk generated a lot questions in the after-session, mostly about the specifics of fitting Miles' experience into an educational environment. Could it work within the "enclosed" setting of the university? Would asking students to vlog sterilise the process; make it unexciting? Miles himself said that he tended to post videos when he was inspired by something - which is presumably why his vlogs are so popular, as they're never forced. Essentially, I think successful vlogging (and I'm guessing, having never vlogged myself) would be opportunistic and spontaneous - but, of course, the opportunity has to be there in the first place...
The keynote delivered by Betty Collis looked at how the company Shell have developed a learning vision and strategy within their workforce and she also looked at the similarities and differences between learning in Higher Education and the corporate sector. She and her husband produced a booklet subtitled "Technology as a Learning Workbench" which is available from their website here.
I saw a talk in the afternoon from Trevor Barker (also of Hertfordshire) who explained that we needed a new student modelling techniques to map onto the skills inventory emerging from use of Web 2.0 technologies. I couldn't possibly summarise the talk here but it left me with the feeling that I've still got a lot reading to do around pedagogy in general and, furthermore, that there's still a lot of work to be done by everybody in exploring the relationship between technology and skills.

Now I need to eat and sleep!

[This post is back-dated. 27-06-2008]

PPPSIG Meeting at University of Hertfordshire

2008-04-18T23:14:00.001+01:00

This meeting was for the Special Interest Group concerned with Podcasting for Pedagogic Purposes (hence PPPSIG) and was the second dissemination event of its kind. The whole day was interesting so this is just a summary of what happened:

The most useful presentation of the day came from Andrew Middleton and Alan Hillier, who basically went through and talked around a series of samples from actual podcast files delegates had sent in. This was a really good way of demonstrating the various forms podcasting can take:

monologue or lecture form
recorded discussion
video guidance in real-time
edited/produced video

Each of the examples also represented different gradients of formality. My favourite examples were a short video spoof of a legal claims advert which was used to teach science and an example of a help guide to Blackboard which was done really informally (there was a phone ringing in the background, for example, and as the support officers navigated their way around the site there was more informal chat about the tool and some general banter). The former was professionally done but also very informal while the latter was obviously recorded on the fly but still remained informative.

Of all the examples I saw, the “rough-edge” approach seemed to work the best and I imagine would be most effective in creating or strengthening staff-student connections. The presenters seemed to think this was true too; the student feedback revealed that they liked it when they could hear, for example, their lecturer turning pages while they gave feedback on essays or the sound of another glass of wine being poured… One could make the argument that podcasts provide the potential for more intimacy than even the face-to-face setting of a huge lecture hall.

We got a chance to make our own podcast too. In about forty-five minutes, a group of four of us put together a script, recorded it using free software and then published it online. It’s only about two minutes long and you can tell it’s a bit on-the-spot, as opposed to hitting one, but the results are here. (The obligatory out-of-the-office photo is above.) At this workshop we were also given a step-by-step booklet and a CD of resources.

The other workshop I went to was run by Andy Ramsden and focussed on designing and planning podcasts. This was more of a brainstorming session and some useful experiences were shared. One of the ideas I came up with there was for getting students to make podcasts for tours of the campus so prospective students can chose to walk around themselves with the file to guide them around. The idea of the workshop was to take everyone’s ideas and see if and how the finer details would work: in this example, iPods would need to be available to borrow for those that don’t have them, for instance.

We also had an overview of the IMPALA (Informal Mobile Podcasting And Learning Adaptation) project, funded by JISC, which had some interesting ideas and approaches to podcasting.

The day ended with a panel-led discussion on what we’d all learned and how useful the day had been, complete with a real-life student who had herself recorded podcasts. She warned that the process was very time-consuming though she conceded that the professional magazine-format approach she had chosen to take required a lot of recording and editing.

Lastly, some of the panel seemed particularly concerned with the idea of “sustainability”; how one can keep an effective community of practice going after funding has ended. Along with actually acknowledging and addressing the issue throughout the day, the group keeps a PPPSIG wiki which anyone can visit and anyone involved in the SIG can contribute to.

Further thoughts from the panel:

Do students change note-taking technique if recorded lectures are available? Allows students to be more attentive as they could flesh out notes later on?
Would students stop attending lectures if recordings were available?
Does it matter if students don’t attend lectures?

As long as they learn it doesn’t matter.
But lectures can give student-life structure. In fact some students complain if they don’t have enough since this is what they’ve paid fees for.
There is, however, a difference between attending and learning.
The temptation to unpick podcasts might lead to unnecessary time being spent on listening to recordings repeatedly?
Interestingly, the student on the panel added that podcasting would probably tend to dissuade only the disruptive or disinterested students from attending lectures, meaning better learning for everyone

So if you're interested in podcasting I'd recommend getting in touch with someone via the wiki above and seeing if you can attend the next event!

[This post is back-dated. 27-06-2008]