Blackboard World Europe 08: Student Led Audio Creation as a Group Assessment

Been at Blackboard World 08 in Manchester this week, and the food was great. There were also some sessions that I thought brought up important points for people thinking of doing similar projects. I'll try to communicate the content of one here.


Using Blackboard Technology for Student Led Podcasting and Group Assessment:

This session by Christopher Stokes and Paul Wigfield from the University of Sheffield was the story of what happened when they asked the dental students to create group presentations as audio files rather than as classroom presentations.

They were asked to create 5 minute audio files on their topic, where the whole group had to speak. They admitted that these aren't really podcasts, but that's what the students wanted to call them. Submission was by attaching the audio file to a message on the VLE's discussion board.

They gave the students little advice on recording and equipment, and were surprised to find that none of the groups came to them with technical problems. They assume that there must have been someone in all the groups who had the understanding to sort out any issues, and said that it might had been different if the assignments had been individual ones.

They also thought that recording in this format meant that the individuals in the groups worked together more, where in the past the students had split the responsibilities. For example they might have had one person creating the presentation slides for the introduction, one person putting all the slides together and one presenting in class. This was what the presenters were most pleased with.

Other important issues brought up were:

-When feedback was collected on the students' experiences they said that it was good to do this near the start of term when people had more time, meaning that it was easier to get together.

-Some students raised concerns that the assignment was crossing over in to their personal/informal spaces (e.g. Garageband software that they usually use to make their own music rather than University work) and later on when students were offered the audio files as a podcast, they weren't interested in subscribing to it with iTunes for similar reasons. Their MP3 players are seen as being for music and not University stuff. It would be useful to find research or undertake research around these student perceptions of informal online spaces.

-Accessibility. Will Deaf or hard of hearing students be able to participate fully in creation and peer review? Do students need to produce transcripts?

-Students awareness of copyright issues. Home made music is OK, but if some use commercial music are you going to refuse to accept their assignment?

ALT-C 2007: Looking Back... and Forward

Well it's OK going to a conference and hearing people speak... but how had that affected the way I intend to go about my role as a Learning Technologist?


What we using the potential of the technology for?

I think I've had time to reflect on how we work while at the conference - helped by talking to people in similar role. I see a clearer distinction between the work we do enabling administration using technology, and the work we do enabling learning using technology. I think that is an important distinction to use when talking with academic staff and will help us and academic staff keep away from investing all our time in what is really administrative work. Examples would be putting course booklets online, or using discussion tools for announcements. Even uploading learning resources that would otherwise be photocopied and handed out in class is using the technology for administration, rather than using it's power to aid learning in a way that photocopied documents couldn't.


Formative Feedback

Partly because it is part of the focus of my SOLSTICE research I noticed a lot about formative feedback, both the importance of it and potential ways of using computers to assist with this. I want to do a bit more thinking and reading in this area and then perhaps work with some staff creating learning objects. These might involve creating complex multiple choice questions for use in sessions with voting software, and for use on the VLE. It might involve games that give immediate feedback on actions, like the Traveller IQ Challenge game on Facebook.


Recording Lectures

Regarding recording lectures, I can better see that there is a definite limit to the amount of lectures we can really manage the recording of manually. If the institution wants to record all, or most lectures we'll need a automatic lecture recording system like Lectopia. I'm not sure of my opinions on the benefit of recording all lectures, but it has certainly been beneficial to record some, from an accessibility point of view.


Don't Be Scared!

Talking to people and listening to presentations, I feel a lot more comfortable about trying things on Mobile devices and in Second Life. Small projects might not be as time consuming in development and student support terms as I had thought.


It was well worth attending a conference to help me move these and other projects forward a bit. I hope next year I can perhaps present, and put a little more into the pot of ideas, as it were.

ALT-C 2007: Day Two - Formative Feedback and Mobile Learning Resources

Formative Feedback

This morning got off to a good start with Dylan Wiliam's Keynote about the importance of formative feedback, and how technologies can play a part in helping teachers with this task.
His work focussed on school children rather than Higher Education (see Inside the Black Box for details), but what he talks about relates to us in HE too.

Research shows that adding technology (for example whiteboards) to classrooms has no effect on attainment overall. Of all the things looked at the biggest factor is the teacher. Teachers who have developed their teaching skills over many years can help students much faster.
He quotes the work of Nyquist, 2003, on types of feedback and talked about how formative feedback was effective in promoting learning.

Wilson and Draney, 2004, have done work on creating multiple choice questions, for example with more than one correct answer, or questions that don't have correct answers as such. These allow teachers to get an idea of how the student is understanding what they have been learning. Dylan spoke about ways in which this feedback could be given instantly to a teacher in a class situation, allowing them to talk with students there and then about their understanding, help them develop better understanding, and get everyone involved in the classroom.

Voting systems kind of go there, but from what I've seen I'm not sure whether they tend to allow this more complex questioning. I'll have a look at Optivote, which we bought, when I get back to Edge Hill.


Mobile Learning

Creating resources for mobile devices has seemed overwhelming to me, because of the massive amount of devices and platforms. Therefore I was interested to hear Geoff Stead from Tribal CTAD talk about their work.

They have 2 main projects. MyLearning Author is software that allows teachers to create simple games/quizzes for mobiles. The Media Board is web based tools that enable the students to upload resources that they have created on their mobile devices to the web, either individually or as a group.

I'll need to look at this further, but I left this session a lot more confortable with the idea that we could create resources for mobile devices without spending most of our time supporting students with issues.


By the way, if you want to learn where Tanzania is, log into Facebook and have a play with TravelPod's Traveller IQ Challenge. That'a formative feedback in action.