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

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.

Durham 2009, Day One

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

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.

Interview with me

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 :-)

PPPSIG Meeting at University of Hertfordshire

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]