Quick thought: Virtual supervision
This year I’m working with two different students as their dissertation supervisor. One is a postgrad and the other an undergrad.
After talking to both of them we’re going to be using Googledocs to share their thoughts and allow me to review what they are up to.
One of them is already using googlechat with me to do interim session and problem solving chats, coupled with the face to face timetabled work.
So far I’m finding it invaluable.
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Can our 11-14s score higher in The Commons than real MPs?
John Bercow, speaker of the House of Commons, was set to launch an online game for young people to understand the workings of Parliament.
Although aimed at schools Parliament.uk says the site will be open to everyone and uses:
…rarely seen footage of the House of Commons giving players a real feel for what it’s like to walk the corridors of power. Several MPs from a variety of political parties were interviewed and feature in the game to provide advice to users and help steer them through the various political dilemmas they face in a very busy parliamentary week.
Players get to decide how to work during their day and keep voters and party – while dealing with lobbyists, ministers and the press.
Aside from the obvious snide gags about what that means they can claim for while playing the game, serious gaming is a great way of learning about a new topic.
Be interested to play this and see what it is like.
Just how do you measure if informal learning happens?
Twitter Friends network map
One of the things that has made me think about my course project is how to measure what I’m trying to look at: informal learning in social networking services.
One thing I’m very clear on is how much I learn from the brilliant people in my Twitter network. So how can I try to assess and measure what is going on around me?
The basic methodology for my research is to do a case study of a number of users by carrying out a content analysis over a period of time and then map these to the user intention categories outlined in 
Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities:
- Daily Chatter
- Conversations
- Sharing information/URLs
- Reporting news
I’ve sub divided these categries to try to assess what they are about.
Great, so that gives me content analysis of what is happening with this group of users, but doesn’t offer any idea of whether there is an opportunity for learning to take place.
My tutor Terry King switched me on to George Siemens and his work on Connectivism (and through him I got into the work of all the fab people who were talking about edupunk a while ago), so the idea from my end is to try to map the tweets on to the connectivist model.
This should give me some interesting data to have a look at.
One brilliant thing I have found, and will be testing in a pilot of the coding sheet and service, is using Googledocs forms to create a coding sheet. The thing I love about it is all the responses are poured into a spreadsheet as soon as the reply happens. And given this can be downloaded as an excel file means it is a pretty powerful tool to use.
I’ll blog about the results of that when I’ve finished it.
Then I think a spot of surveying to get some idea of what other people think, and whether my perceptions about Twitter as a great place for informal learning are being shared by others.
And I’m starting to wonder about the number of people who could use respond to a googledocs survey – could be an interesting way forward.
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- Media Literacy: Making Sense Of New Technologies And Media by George Siemens – Mar 7 09 (masternewmedia.org)
- Is social networking learning? (shannonturlington.com)
- Informal learning community (egrommet.net)
- Twitter Is More Than Connecting (marketingpilgrim.com)
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Communities vs network of practice
- Image by Harold Jarche via Flickr
Been reading a lot about Communities of Practice recently and thinking I’m not quite looking at the right thing – particularly as Wenger and Lave are talking about communities within the same organisation. But one thing that has struck me in what I have been reading is this quote:
It is life itself that is the main learning event. Schools, classrooms, and training sessions still have a role to play in this vision, but they have to be in the service of the learning that happens in the world.
Some of the most useful things I’ve picked up in my life haven’t been in the classroom, but from outside it. – from teachers, colleagues and former colleagues, friends and passing acquaintances. This kind of informal learning is vital to what we do. Read more
Educational adventure in Second Life
Just attended my first group supervision session in Second Life, a very strange session which left me wanting to get to grips with the virtual world a little bit more.
Not sure I’m a big fan yet, but I can see the possibilities of doing lectures for distance courses in Second Life – there’s a video to come of the University of Portsmouth’s island and one of the lecture theatres that has been built there.
One of the oddest things was that I’m on a course with people I’ve never actually met – although we have seen each other through vid chat – so the idea of their avatars didn’t seem overly weird.
Their names were odd and one of our group was a blue monster (he of the long blue dangly tail in the pic) – he is a school teacher and let his students design the avatar themselves, a very brave thing to do and quite cool too. I developed avatar envy, that’s my back you can see in the image.
It felt, at first, like a very posh IM session – but we soon got over that. Not sure I want to spend the time required to really get to grips with the environment, but we are going back for more.
Partiularly interesing is one of my group is going to be doing a build project for her assignment – something I’m really looking forward to seeing.
Web 2.0 and the lifecycle of a news story
Spot of essential reading from Alison Gow for anyone interested in journalism, education or journalism education.
Alison, who blogs over at Headlines and Deadlines, has taken a look at the cycle from gathering to publication and follow-up and comparing web 1.0 to web 2.0.
I had no idea when I started doing this how thin the ‘old’ opportunities for investigating stories would look compared to the tools at our disposal now; it’s quite stark really. It drives home just how important mastering these tools is for journalists as our industry continues to develop and change.
This is a quote you will see all over the place (Paul Bradshaw switched me on to this via his Twitter stream and he used this quote in his blog post) – because it is very astute. The Web 2.0 services Alison talks about are important tools that are vital to all sorts of people – you’ll see the same things being talked about in edupunk, eduwomble, PLE, loosely-coupled teaching.
Alison’s point is major – things have changed in a major way and educators need to understand we are getting the point. I’m in the middle of putting together resources on Web 2.0 for my students, so this has been a great little fillip for me.
If you don’t get why WEb 2.0 is such a big deal here’s a a video by Digital Ethnographer Dr. Michael Wesch.
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Skitch makes Mac photograbs easy
BBC NEWS | Politics | Clarke launches attack on Balls.jpg
Originally uploaded by egrommet
Grabbed this photo while playing around with skitch, shame of it is that Skitch is Mac only. Hopefully will be able to find a decent PC equivalent.
But this is definitely an excellent piece of software for grabbing images and sharing them. Will update this properly later
Ps am trying out Zemanta to see if it puts in any useful links. Not yet, but just started
Elearning and journalism – tackling the same issues
I’ve mentioned this before briefly, but what continues to amaze me is how much my two spheres of interest are essentially colliding. Not only are the same issues being talked about in both journalism and elearning on a regular basis – how should we change the conversation, ‘push or pull’ and on-demand content – but the same tools and concepts keep cropping up too.
Both Amy Gahran and Mindy McAdams have been looking at what a journalism school needs to do to help its students equip themselves for the 21st century.
Note to e-learning types from other fields, these two bloggers are well worth reading as part of your wider blog trawls – good stuff on teaching and technological support tools here.
The technology of teaching
Bill Thompson who writes for BBC’s technology pages on the website has been talking about the technology of teaching. He’s apparently just been to a government-backed meeting looking into the future of technologies in education.
Here’s a little taste of what he’s said:
Learning looks set to undergo a big change as novel technologies make it into the classroom, says Bill Thompson.
Grasping the likely technological shifts is one thing, but what do they imply for education? This is a much harder question, since once you start looking at the way schools operate then you start to question teaching methods, assessment, exams and even the very existence of “schools” and “classrooms”.
If every student has a powerful network device that plugs them into the network, and work on digitising every book and other forms of knowledge has been successful, then what is the point of teaching “facts”?
BBC NEWS | Technology | The technology of teaching
Slight problem here, educators (horrible word, but otherwise you get the list) are already at it Bill!
There are many of us exploring how various technological applications work – with everything from the smartphone through to web 2.0 applications.
What is interesting that just as the government seem to be getting to grips with the subject, those that have been around for some time are stopping using the term elearning and moving towards learning (although maybe we could put a 2.0 on the end to make it a bit more hip).
Will there be an end to schools and classrooms? No. It may be that we end up going down a more blended route, but what about those who don’t have access to the technology (last time I checked there were still a massive amount of people without web access, let alone broadband)?
It’s the same thing that the media are facing, the delivery channels are in flux and educators and education will have to adapt – there will be winners and losers along the way.
But if Bill thinks that all that is taught in schools is fact, he’s got a surprise coming – go and check out what (e) learning is happening already in schools where small-scale pioneers are at work. Go and check the wider collaborative projects that are happening up and down the country.
To be fair Bill is a technology correspondent and doesn’t cover education – but maybe he should head along to the JISC conference in Birmingham next month to see what is happening and meet some of my fellow edugeeks who are keen to explore this bright new future.
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