Resources to Help You Start Using New Tools in Teaching and Learning

I think that a really good way of learning about the area of Technology Enhanced Learning, and understanding the tools you might want to use, is to follow a selection of blogs and other resources written by practitioners and thinkers. It might be a bit of a chaotic way of learning, but it enables you to explore and find a range of people and ideas that interest and inspire you.

I've created a list of some resources below, which be followed easily using a feed reader like Bloglines or Google Reader. To subscribe to them and many others, download my OPML file [right click the link and choose 'Save link as...' or 'Save target as...'] and import it into your feed reader [Google Reader help] [Bloglines help]. The feed reader will inform you as new posts are added. Glance through these each day and read any articles that catch your eye. Delete some feeds and add other ones that you find.

General Learning Technology blogs:

• George Siemens talks about overarching issues to think about when using technology for learning. His ideas are interesting and his blog is called elearnspace.

• Stephen Downes works quite closely with George Siemens and talks a lot about making education open to all. His newsletter is at OLDaily.

• Clive Shepherd writes Clive on Learning which covers a lot of different things.

• Articulate's 'The Rapid E-learning Blog' - http://www.articulate.com/rapid-elearning/ - has well written posts about a variety of practical aspects of e-learning development.

• Tama Leaver writes Tama's Elearning Blog which also has some useful articles and links.

People and organisations with a more specific focus:

• danah boyd's area of expertise is in how young people use the web socially. She's got a lot to say that feeds into how we use technologies like social networking in HE. Her blog is called Apophenia and a list of her best posts is available.

• Clay Shirky writes about social media, and his ideas are helpful when we think about how the web affects the world we live in, including education. His web feed is available.

• Garr Reynolds writes Presentation Zen which is relevant to educators as so much of what we do is presenting, however that might be done. As a non-designer, I learn a lot from this blog and get a lot to think about.

• Helen Barrett has a good understanding of eportfolios and the tools that you might use to create them. She writes e-Portfolios for Learning.

• Games Can Teach promote games based learning. They keep track of the research in the area of games based learning.

My Top 5 Learning Technolgy Blogs

I've never written a "top 5/top 10/top 100..." blog post. I guess I've always seen them as a cheep attention grabbing tactic - but nothing wrong with grabbing people's attention cheeply if you got something you think is worth saying. So in this post I'm going to share with you the 5 elearning related blogs that I never want to miss... in no particular order.

1. elearnspace by George Siemens
Elearnspace is a great collection of links covering a wide variety of educational/technological issues, always with insightful comment from George's perspective. You could just subscribe to this blog and keep a fairly good grasp of developments and thoughts in elearning.

2. e-portfolios for learning by Helen C. Barrett
If elearnspace covers everything, then this blog details an obsession with e-portfolios and the technologies which could be used to create them. Dr. Barrett has created and recreated her own e-portfolio using almost every imaginable tool. If you are thinking about using e-portfolios with your students this is a good place to start your exploration.

3. apophenia by Dana Boyd
Dana writes about a variety of issues, but her real area of specialisation is on "how American youth engage in networked publics like MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Xanga, etc". If social networking is an area that interests you then having a look at the Best of Apophenia page will be a good place to start. I'd say that we should be very careful about how we use social network sites in education, but understanding what engages our students in their personal lives can help us a lot.

4. Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds
So much of what we do in education is presenting. Whether it be lectures, conferences, or training sessions. This blog gives plenty of ideas about how one can experiment with presentations, and it is always interesting and inspiring.

5. (No Longer) Alone in a Library by Kimberly McCollum
This blog is quite new but so far I've found it's enthusiasm and honesty engaging. If you are interested in using blogs with your students, have a look back at her experiences of undertaking the Comments Challenge and give something similar a go yourself.


These blogs speak to me where I am, and might not be relevant to everyone. But if you're wanting to subscribe to a comprehensive collection of learning technology feeds I'm sure you want most of these in your OPML file. Other blogs that are great and that you might want to subscribe to are:

Remote Access by Clarence Fisher
Eide Neurolearning Blog by Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide
Smart Mobs by Howard Rheingold

Always remember that much of the value of blogs is in the interaction in the comments or between blogs, that can create communities. If you've got any recomendations, why not share them in our comments.

Introduction to Online Tools for Teaching and Learning

There are many beginners guides to new web technologies, but I was especially impressed by Jeff Cobb's concise and well illustrated 'Learning 2.0 for Associations', which covers some of those that are becoming mainstream as well as the theory that is often linked with their uptake in teaching and learning.

The document won't take long to browse through, and if you want someone to talk to about how and where you might implement any ideas that you have, contact your local Learning Technology Development Officer. At Edge Hill University your current contacts are:

-Faculty of Health: Adrian Cain, David Callaghan and Lisa Bushell
-Faculty of Arts and Sciences: Peter Beaumont and Carol Chatten
-Faculty of Education: Paul Duvall and Megan Juss

[Via]

An Introduction to Blogs and Podcasts: Video

A group from Lancashire County Council came this month to learn about new technologies that they could use in their work. As I was asked to do a session on blogs and podcasts, but as I was at ALT-C I recorded a screencast of the presentation for them, and then left some tasks for them to do.

This might be of interest to someone as an introduction to the technologies. I'd like to develop it further as a staff development session, but I'm not sure that most of the academic staff here really want to create podcasts. I'm even less sure that the students want to subscribe to them on a large scale. It might be better to develop staff development sessions about on-line audio and include podcasting as a small section of that.

Sharing RSS Feeds with Bloglines

We've written quite a few posts about sharing information from RSS feeds (see RSS tagged articles) from allowing people to subscribe by email to displaying content of your feeds on your web site.

I think one of the simplest ways has been overlooked - that is creating a Bloglines account containing the feeds that you want to share, and setting the 'Show My Blogroll' option in 'Options/Blog Settings' to 'Yes, publish my Blogroll'. The NHS National electronic Library for Medicines have created a Bloglines account to do this. My own account can be seen too at http://www.bloglines.com/public/pfh.

This gives an easy way to allow people to keep track of a set of feeds by visiting your page. Alternatively they could download the OPML file containing your subscriptions (by clicking on 'Export Subscriptions') and upload it into their own Bloglines account. This would allow them to add and delete feeds to suit themselves.

If you're interested in following peoples thoughts on using technologies in teaching and learning why not download my OPML file, set up your own Bloglines account, upload the OPML file using the 'Import Subscriptions' link and delete the categories and feeds that you don't need. That's a quick way to get started building a library of RSS feeds of your own.

Using Edublogs.org: Questions

As well as my Blogger blogs, I’ve been using an Edublogs (which used Wordpress software) blog to record how a project was progressing . I’ve also had questions about using Edublogs from staff at Edge Hill, and this post aims to answer all the issues and questions that I've come across.

01: How can I filter spam comments?

I’ve had trouble with the amount of spam I get, and it has made it impossible to check through all my comments to moderate them and allow the real comments to be shown. Also the comment notification emails from this blog have filled up my inbox.

However, now the Edublogs Tutorials blog has brought the Akismet spam filter plugin to my attention. It seems to be working well for me.

02: How do I create Tabs at the Top of the Page?

Basically the tabs are links to information pages rather than blog posts. You can choose which you are creating when in your Edublogs admin area by selecting the ‘Write Page’ option under ‘Write’.

Whether the information page that you have created appears as a tab (as with the blog shown below)...

...or just a link (in the blog shown below they are links under the ‘Pages’ title)...

...depends on the theme you choose for your blog. You can choose themes by going to ‘Presentation’ and selecting ‘Themes’.

03: How do I make the blog (or sections of it) private?

All I’ve been able to find regarding this is a plugin called ‘Edublogs only’ that makes your blog only available to people logged into Edublogs.org. Find it in your Edublogs admin area under ‘Plugins’. This obviously doesn’t give you complete privacy, and after trying a few things including setting the Post Status (below)...

...to private I don’t think Edublogs is the way to go if you want complete privacy. Blogger seems to do this well though.

The Use of Blogs at Edge Hill

There are a few blogs that I know of being used at Edge Hill, and I thought it might be interesting to take a look at what they are being used for. They are not all official Edge Hill blogs, but they show different ways in which the technology might be used.

Information Resources
The information resources team in Learning Services have a blog which seems to work primarily as internal communication within that team.

Mister Roy's Musings
Roy in marketing has a blog in which he talks about various things - like marketing. It is interesting as a perspective on Edge Hill University, for example the Are Students Customers? conversation. There are other blogs on blogs.edgehill.ac.uk but the others aren't currently being used very much.

hi.edgehill.ac.uk
hi.edgehill.ac.uk is a site aimed at those who are thinking of coming to University, and several students are blogging their experiences for the site.

EHU E-learning
There is a blog in the Faculty of Health managed by Brian Smith. It is basically a collection of bookmarks rather than original content.

Cakes: Learning Technology Blog
And while we're at it - what is this blog for? The aim is to share knowledge and experiences of using technologies in education with other people who are interested in using them.

Visualising Events in Time: SIMILE Timelines

The SIMILE project is based at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of their developments are interactive timelines that you can use to visualise time based events.

This can be used to display historical events. In this example they've displayed the events surrounding the assasination of JFK, and if you have time to play with the code you can create your own variations.

Meg found a web service that uses this technology to help you easily create a timeline for your own web site. The 'My Timelines' service just uses the RSS feed from your web site and supplies you with the code to place a timeline on your own web site. Meg has created one for Cakes, and it allows you to easily view activity on the blog.

It could prove to be a good way of introducing the concept of RSS feeds to people, because it demonstrates how they work in a visual way.

'Top 100 Education Blogs' from Online Education Database

OEDb put together a list of their top 100 Education Blogs which might be of interest to those looking at widening their reading.

To subscribe to these blogs you could:

• Start off by creating an account on Bloglines.
• Subscribe to blogs individually or download my OPML file and use it to instantly subscribe to each of the blogs in the Top 100 list that have web feeds.
• You can import the OPML file to Bloglines by going to the 'Feeds' tab and choosing 'Import Subscriptions' at the bottom of the page.

When you have a lot of blogs in Bloglines, it is worth setting them so that you only initially see the headlines. This will make it easier for you to quickly browse all the blogs for interesting posts. Do this by, near the top left of the screen, selecting 'Options' > Feed Options > Posting Length > Display Headlines Only.

Using Blogs as Databases and for Lecture Notes

Here in LTD we were talking last year about creating a database driven application to keep track of everything we do. For example if we get an email about a course, we could just search the database for notes about what we'd done for that course in the past, and for other details about it.

In the Geekbrief podcast episode 112 you can watch Cali Lewis talk to Leo Laporte about Robert Scoble's idea of using a private blog in this way. She also talks about how students could use a private blog to keep a database of their lecture notes and if they have a laptop, to take notes on their blog the first place.

We've got WordPress installed at Edge Hill so I'll ask IT services for one that we can use in this way, with all LTD members contributing to it. Look at it as a Cakes intranet site perhaps?!

Subcribing to a Blog: www.feedblitz.com

In our work at Edge Hill University, we find that getting people to subscribe to blog feeds can be difficult because it seems like a new technology to understand.

If a class was using blogs in the course, and the teacher wanted to keep track of all the posts, they would need to.

If they don't want to use feed aggregators in for example Bloglines or a web browser, they could use www.feedblitz.com

I'm still testing the site, but I think that you register at the site, then subscribe to the blogs you want to keep track of. The service will then email you with the new posts each day (I think). I'll post again when I've tested it.

Blogs and Building Online Communities

We are getting more academic staff wanting to look at use blogs in teaching and learning. In my mind, the only current reason we would want to use blogs in HE is to develop communities of learners.

Nancy White on the Full Circle Online Interaction Blog has several posts (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5) about the types of communities that can be developed around blogs. These ideas form a useful starting point for thinking about what we might want to achieve through using blogs, and how we might go about using them in collaboration with other technologies.
Nancy starts off by looking at what constitutes a community, and how that might be different from a network where people have perhaps one off interactions looking for help or assist each other completely impersonally using social bookmarking sites like del.ici.ous.

Indicators of community are looked for, such as evidence of people caring about the development of the group rather than just themselves, group identity and group language. For more about community indicators have a look at who is talking about the phrase through Technorati. This idea if developed further can help us see if the communities that we are trying to develop, are developing to any great extent.

The three types of communities identified are:

• Communities based around one blogger, who has readers and commenters. Some of these commenters have their own blogs. If the main blog disapeared the community would too.
• Topic centric communities which might look similar to a network. The blogs in this link to each other, and the fall of one, while taking from the community, would not damage the community a huge amount. There is no centre in this type of community and often events are organised to bring the actors and influencers together.
• Community centric groups would be based on a single plaform meaning that links between blogs and RSS feeds are used less. The important thing is who is commenting on whose blog. MySpace would be an example, as would I guess, a community based in a VLE with discussion boards and other tools available. These have very clear boundaries as we are used to with WebCT.

Would any academics want a more open community than this third example, with links to other institutions and the students there? Would this be acceptable and could this create a synergistic relationship locally, nationally or internationally between many students studying the same subject or specific area of a subject? If we did want this WebCT would not be the tool to use. We would need something more open.

Tags:

• blogcommunities

blog.ac.uk 2006

I took part in the blog.ac.uk educational conference on the 2nd June. The aim of this get together was to "provide a central point to help focus and drive forward the existence of the UK and web 2.0 educational blogging community"

There are several perspectives on the day out there from Josie Fraser, Stephen Downes, Stephen Powell, Barbara Ganley, Ewan McIntosh, Miles Berry, and various photographers!

Before the conference, my perspective was that I wanted us to get academic staff using blogs themselves, before they will really be able to consider using them in their own teaching. Being at the conference inspired me to think through some further related issues.

Step One: We also need to communicate and demonstrate why and how blogs can improve students learning, to academic members of staff. I think that a list of technologies including blogs with potential uses, and the comparative benefits of each would be a good first step in helping us communicate. This could include links to some more screencasts to demonstrate their use in different situations.

Step Two: I'm not sure that many academic members of staff would be happy to be using externally hosted blogs. I've mentioned using things like Bloglines or Flickr to host blogs and images externally, and got replies connected to issues with control. I guess that means we would have to install blogging software at Edge Hill.

I think there is an obvious use for blogs in professional development courses, currently when the course closes (and our licence requires this) the community closes. A blog could live on after the course for as long as the community wanted it to, and with the professional development courses there would be a reason for it to live on.

blog.ac.uk Conference June 2nd

‘blog.ac.uk’ represents the UKs first educational blogging conference bringing together practitioner and research based expertise to explore cutting edge issues surrounding the educational use of weblogs and weblogging software.

It takes place on June 2nd in London and is free. As the blurb for the conference mentions, there are lots of events aimed at first time bloggers with 'introductory level demonstrations and workshops.' However this will be aimed at those who want to take things further.

I think we will be sending someone to this.

OPML Reading Lists

With all the talk about reading lists in the Postgraduate Certificate course I'm doing, I was interested in looking at how OPML reading lists would fit into this.

OPML reading lists are lists of blogs that you could pass between different blog aggregators (e.g. Bloglines). You might want to export a list to a new piece of blog aggregation software that you want to use, or could pass it between people.

If there are several blogs related to an academic subject, a tutor could keep a reading list on, for example Bloglines, for thier own use. They could export the file and pass the list onto students to add to their own Blog aggregator accounts.

An example of an OPML file can be found on the BlogBridge site. This could be imported into a blog aggregator like BlogBridge (needs installing on your machine) or Bloglines (available online). This file could easily be made available through WebCT for students to use, and it could be displayed in WebCT too.

To display your list of blogs in WebCT you can use the following code in a text block on a WebCT organiser page. This links to the list of blogs that I am subscribed to using Bloglines. If you had a bloglines account, you would change 'id=pfh' to 'id=' your own username (note that your username is different to your login name and > or< tags have been changed to ]or[).

[script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="http://rpc.bloglines.com/blogroll?id=pfh&target=blank"][/script]

Thanks to Bruce McKenzie for this code.

In case you are interested in the technical information, OPML stand for Outline Processor Markup Language and is XML based.

Stop! Hammer time!

Blogger inform us that MC Hammer is demonstrating mobile blogging with his Blog, using his mobile to send photos, and phoning Audioblogger to send audio messages. Currently the Audioblogger number is in America meaning audioblogging from our mobiles would be expensive.

Until then we can't touch this unless anyone knows another way. Meanwhile today or tomorow I'll try and use Feedburner to see if we can actually start podcasting the lectures we've been putting online.

WebCT 'Blogs'

From what I remember from the WebCT North-West User Group, WebCT 6.0 has an add on pack which contains blogging capabilities among other things.

There is a short debate on James Farmer's blog about the worth of these WebCT blogs, which is worth looking at (including the comments).

From these comments I'd think it better to set up blogging software on the server, as Warwick have. That seems to have worked well there, and a blogging culture developed. I'd guess that this is because students can write different blogs on the topics that interest them, rather than the subjects and contents being controlled by tutors?

Auricle Podcasts: ELGG, Blogs and Moodle

The elearning team at the University of Bath have a public blog called Auricle, which contains several interviews with people who work in elearning on its Podcast feed. I found some of these very interesting as they might feed into our work here, and I've summarised them below.


ELGG has come up in conversation and on Cakes before, and March 2005 saw an interview on Auricle with one of ELGGs founders, David Tosh.

ELGG is introduced not as a VLE, or even really as an alternative to a VLE as its focus is not on holding course content at all. It is described as a 'Learning Landscape' and its focus is on providing tools which can be used to build "a community where knowledge transfer takes place".

ELGG gives a lot of control to the learner, to create groups and discussions. It is noted that many institutions would not be happy with giving students this level of control, but also that students who are used to using technologies like Blogs and Wikis are not going to be impressed with many of the VLEs in use, which (in my view) seem to restrict rather than enable in many ways.


Blogs: Warwick are well known for their elearning developements, and there is an interview with John Dale from Warwick from April 2005.

Warwick developed their own blogging software called BlogBuilder, as existing systems didin't do everything that they wanted, and there could have been issues with scaling and managing the number of blogs they wanted to plan for. There are over 3000 blogs on the system, but they believe they can cope with 10s of thousands.

Students at Warwick had always been encouraged to develop their own web pages, but blogging made it possible for those without much technical knowledge.

I think an issue that Edge Hill would be concerned about is what might be said on the blogs. There is no proactive policing of the blogs at Warwick, but the blogs are covered by the acceptable use policy and there is a link at the bottom of every page that people can use to report 'problems' with posts. This doesn't happen very often as people tend to comment on posts and potentially offensive messages are 'neutralised' by plenty of comments stating different viewpoints.


Moodle Migration: Dublin City University migrated from WebCT to Moodle in 2003. Unike ourselves they had only used WebCT in a pilot and so it wasn't as big an issue as it would be if we wanted to. June 2005 saw an interview with Morag Munroe from DCU.

They created a wishlist of what they wanted from a VLE, in close colaboration with the staff who would be using it. From that they created a short list of Caroline, Bodington and Moodle. In case you are interested there is a full list of VLEs on Wikipedia, and DCU if they had to migrate again say that they would be interested in Sakai.

Strengths of Moodle that have been identified by DCU are the user community, the rapid development of new functionality and the Social Constructivist model of learning that underpins its development. Quality support has come from moodle.com. On the downside, issues have come from the rapid development of many tools, meaning that the large amount of choice can be overwhelming for new users. Also functionality for group work needs improving.

Simple guide to Blogs, RSS, Podcasts, Webcams and Video Streaming

George Siemens has pointed us towards a nice little guide created by Will Richardson that covers Blogs, RSS, Podcasts, Webcams and Video Streaming in an easy to understand way. Might be a useful guide to use with less technical academics.

Blogger For Word

The Learning Technology Development team might be interested to learn that you can now update Cakes from within Word.

The Blogger For Word add-in is available on our G:Drive under Software, and gives you an extra toolbar in Word to create and update Blogs. If you are most comfortable working in Word, this allows a more integrated blogging experience!

If you don't have access to the LTD G:Drive you can download it yourself.