Q2 News

Why am I here?

2012-01-16T20:07:00.000Z

No, I know about the Mum & Dad thing, it's not that sort of 'why am I here?' I was just wondering out loud why I spend so much time on Google+ nowadays and used to spend similar vast numbers of hours on twitter, blogs and, rather longer ago now, Facebook.

Twitter I understand. Tweeting is like shouting at the television, except more people hear what I say. It's easy, just type a few words as I'm watching something and get a kick out of making someone laugh. It's also been a useful place to get great links to things that are going on in the worlds that interest me and, with careful choice of who to follow, provided a newsreel that was almost essential reading each morning and still is something I'll scroll through once or twice a week, especially for local news and where the people haven't started on Google+.

Facebook was once a place where I thought I would build a sort of virtual world of Me, with huge volumes of photo albums, blogs routed to its Notes pages and Facebook pages for this and that, events I could invite people to or write about and generally keep up-to-date with what friends were saying. I use the term 'friends' loosely - and Facebook friends almost deserves its own entry in the dictionary. The 150 or so who were in my list comprised a strange collection of family, socially-inclined relatives, ex-students needing help and geeky nice people I met at conferences. And a bundle of others I didn't really know very well or occasionally worked with but added as friends anyway. Now its only use is as the place to post an urgent message for one of my children and I genuinely can't remember when I last specifically visited the site or changed my status as Google+ and Twitter updates do that automatically. The funny thing is that most of my 'Facebook friends' probably still think I'm really active there.

Blogs are great for articles and I do love writing and publishing my thoughts and views. So instead of writing piles of notes and uploading them to VLEs or digging out Dreamweaver to edit my web sites I can simply type, add and publish. Job done. I don't think I've changed how or why I use blogs much at all over the last ten years. Apart from Blogger's recent misbehaviour with page links and the advent of Posterous making publishing almost anything delightfully simple being naughty and nice respectively, if I want to write more than 140 characters and also refer to it again in future then a blog has been the answer.

And then along comes Google+. I jumped in at the very start and now have the dubious honour of being ranked by CircleCount in the top 600 men in the UK. Quite what that actually means I'm not sure but, bearing in mind that there are fewer MPs than that, it can't stay long at that level and I'll surely be plunging before long to the ranks of those who ramble on about this and that and have an average number of followers. But I didn't join to get some rank anyway. Why do I write stuff there? I hardly know any of my followers. Or, for that matter, those I follow. I get a brief description of what they do for most and think they may be of interest in one or more areas of the world I inhabit and they go into one or other Circles. Occasionally someone will have a query so I feel that I can be of help and publish advice or even an answer. Equally, there are some damn fine minds there who can provide answers and inspiration. But that's not the only reason I'm there. The news is good. Like the Twitter newsreel I mentioned above, the Google+ stream is something I'll scroll through several times a day. But even that's not what it was as I now have so many people in the stream from all walks of life and background that it's neither one thing nor the other. One moment I am reading about some fascinating new ideas about teaching and the next there's a video of Andorra's entry in Eurovision. Or a cat doing something cute.

So why am I here (or there, as this is mainly about the time I spend on Google+)?

Level 4 Playing Field

2012-01-14T17:29:00.000Z

I have been struggling with making sense of what I understand to be the requirements to pass university modules at level 4 compared to those issued for Edexcel HNC units at the same level.

Initially, having read through the indicative content and explanation of the learning outcomes for an HNC unit, I thought: "Fair enough. They're damn tough and will need the students to do a lot more research and examination of concepts in depth, as well as writing pretty well to provide evidence of their knowledge and understanding, and whilst I reckon that's going to be very difficult for them in some, if not all, cases, I guess that's life at this level. They scraped through level 3 but now really do have not only to think but actually put their thoughts together coherently on paper." And with that in mind I have been rather frightening most of them with indications of what I am expecting to see by way of assignments to be handed in shortly.

I was actually in the middle of being tedious on this topic when I remembered how several of their older colleagues had just completed degrees in similar subjects. I had been their tutor for a module with a similar title and learning outcomes and, despite all my best efforts, prodding and verbal abuse (it was before safeguarding was on the menu and we could get away with threatening to do dreadful things or tell their parents what they really did at lunchtime in order to get good results), yes, despite all that, quite a few submitted very weak portfolios and only covered a few of the points I'd hoped for and had a basic grasp of what might be required but not a great deal more.

When it came to grading, I managed to get hold of some papers that the university had issued to help us figure out where on the 1 - 20 scale their work fitted. Under the column for grades 1-3 this was the text:

High level of abstract thinking original ideas; understanding is generalised and applied to new contexts ideas drawn to conclusions; highly reflective; sharply perceived; generalised from personal experience; shows metacognitive understanding; goes beyond what has been given; the whole is conceptualized at a higher level

Luckily for them, this was in the column 13-16

The work meets one part of the task, but misses other important attributes; little evidence of moving from the specific to the general; often focuses on terminology; sparse understandings, or some higher level understanding offset by some misunderstandings

The latter being pretty accurate for most. So the degrees got completed and everyone was happy. Well, maybe their employers weren't but that's another matter. The point is I could pass them.

Now, this is what the HNC book says for one of several learning outcomes:

3 Be able to evaluate the project outcomes

Evaluation techniques: detailed analysis of results, conclusions and recommendations; critical analysis against the project specification and planned procedures; use of appropriate evaluation techniques; application of project evaluation and review techniques; opportunities for further studies and developments

Interpretation: use of appropriate techniques to justify project progress and outcomes in terms of the original agreed project specification

Further consideration: significance of project; application of project results; implications; limitations of the project; improvements; recommendations for further consideration

Students have to meet all the learning outcomes so in the appropriate task for this they will have to do what it says. This is just to pass. There is a whole host of further requirements for merit and distinction.

OK, the degree guide text and the learning outcomes aren't directly comparable as one lists academic approach and the other lists things to be demonstrated but you'll get the gist. It looks an awful lot simpler to get a pass in the degree module than in the HNC unit.

In a discussion with a colleague I have appreciated that at level 3 we didn't expect every element of each learning outcome to be covered by assignment. He used the example of an exam at the end of a year: people pass by successfully answering questions about a selection of things covered by the course. So I should use the same approach here too. Yes, I'll provide teaching, materials and guidance about the whole range but the assignments need only test their ability to prove an understanding of some. That was helpful and meant my brain was slightly better able to cope with this assessment business. However, I would still much prefer to deal with university second assessors and panels than the Edexcel External Verifier. Any day of the week.

Why are you here?

2012-01-07T01:39:00.000Z

A small group of Level 4 students returned from Christmas holiday this week. I don't know quite where the idea came from but I decided to start by asking them this question: Why are you here?

We had some fun with the replies which came eventually - albeit after quite a while! They took just two basic forms:

Well, it's our lesson now. It's on our timetable.

To learn about project management.

Before the break I had published their first assignment - quite a tough task that required them, amongst other things, to explain what ideas for projects they had considered, which particular one they'd decided to plan to go ahead with, a detailed project proposal for that one which would include first attempts at setting milestones and considerations of their own strengths and weaknesses.

They had also been provided last term with a lot of information about the assessment criteria, the subject itself, including some very pertinent notes and presentations covering what they needed to write about in this assignment. All the material was available on-line in case anyone had missed a session when I might have gone through it in class.

I had also made it pretty clear that I needed to have their first attempts or drafts during the break or when they returned as the hand-in date was the end of January and it was plainly obvious that not only was the topic itself something new to all of them but even the brightest was finding the academic demands of this programme markedly more challenging than the mostly practical based National Diploma Level 3 programme they had completed in the previous year.

They really should have been coming in either to give me some work, to finish off whatever they'd been working on or to ask me, or maybe the others, for some help to explain what was actually required. Something along those lines started to emerge when I reminded them about the request. To which I then replied along these lines:

Well, there's not much point you coming out in the wind and rain, spending money on fares or petrol just to give me some paper. E-mail works well these days and is free. There's no way I could provide any meaningful feedback as it would take me best part of the session just to read one draft.

You all have perfectly good computers at home so coming in to use these rather average machines and reluctant printers - the 'coming in to finish off' thing - doesn't make a lot of sense either.

Asking for help? OK, but you have phones or, again, we could do that by e-mail quite adequately.

To learn about project management? One of the first thoughts. That sounds very reasonable but you should already have learned enough to do the first assignment. If you'd thought a bit more about that you'd have concluded that I'm hardly likely to go through all that again. I might have moved on to the next topic but, in the circumstances, with everyone's first assignments still outstanding that would probably only confuse you or delay still further when the first gets handed in.

So the only reason left with any validity was because it's on their timetable. It's like they're still at school and will get told off or have letters sent home if they don't turn up. They come because they feel obliged to. They expect me then to persuade them to do something useful during the morning - like get on with what they should have done earlier. In fact, just like all the previous years, very little actually gets done in class at all or it's used as a sort of 21st century typing pool. If I don't nag and prod then, with one or two notable exceptions, I'd get little work until the last possible moment and even only then if I'm lucky and, if previous programmes' submissions are anything to go by, it will be unlikely to be good enough to pass.

The real reason I would like them to be there is to get feedback on what they have submitted in good time beforehand, to discuss queries that either they've raised previously in correspondence or a phone call and I'd even be delighted to help with something that just occurs to them on the way in or is prompted by another student's question.

That would maximise the use of my time in providing constructive support and advice or imparting a little more knowledge and understanding as necessary. However, even all that, indeed, could be dealt with without their having to attend a class.

So, after a fascinating discussion, we all had to conclude that the only time they should attend would be to learn something new as and when it's appropriate. So a few lectures or discussions each term can do that and I can run workshops on the other days for those that want them.

That would be a nice conclusion but for some target I am supposed to meet. If my programme's attendance is below a certain figure I get talked about in whispered and disapproving tones at managers' meetings. Then I get lots of paperwork, action plans and the students have to complete Individual Learning Plans with SMART targets indicating how they'll meet some institutional attendance target so that my target gets met so that the department's target gets met and so on.

So, the answer to my original question, Why are you here? has to be So you can tick the box that says we're here, sir.

Eight Out Of Ten Cats...

2011-12-23T00:45:00.001Z

I first had this idea about a year ago. Now I'm beginning to see others saying similar things and, although I haven't quite got my head around exactly what I want to do, here's the gist of it. I see college students at various places where I work every day and must have about 100 at the moment that I'm teaching at some point or other through the week. (My remarks are a general summary of what I find overall and do not necessarily all relate to any one institution). Some students are bright, some have trouble understanding their timetable, never mind assignment instructions. Some arrive on time for their 9 o'clock session, most don't. Some actually do some useful work during the session. Most don't.

Now you're probably already shaking your fist at the screen or shouting at me something to the effect that this shows a good number have no respect for the college rules, me or that they should be disciplined, thrown off the course and that it's all my fault. If I were a better tutor or course manager then everything in the garden would be lovely...

I have, therefore, asked them for some honest reasons as to why they either arrive late and my colleagues for similarly honest reasons as to why the ones that struggle are on the course in the first place. I knew the answers already but it was good to get confirmation. All many students really want to do is stay on a course for as long as they can or until they get a job. They want to go to university next and that will allow a further extension before they really will have to start working full-time. Few have any real hope of getting a decent full-time job when they leave school so they come to college. Those that might have done well at job interviews are probably the ones who also got good grades at school and so could either go straight to university instead or are the few bright sparks who I've got, with grades that were just not quite good enough so they're doing A level equivalent courses at college and then hoping to go to university.

By far the majority didn't do very well at school, maybe scraped through a few GCSEs and now are scraping through another batch of subjects at college. Several at one place had wanted to do something other than what they're enrolled on but the department managers in that area had got their act together and insisted on decent GSCEs and references before taking students on. So the students tried a department where tutors were instructed to take almost anyone because the numbers enrolled had to meet some target. Not meeting the target would mean fewer teaching hours and so fewer tutors. Someone also said that the college has a pastoral role, care in the community and all that. If they didn't take them they'd be roaming the streets so they were doing the local community a service. Some students had some pretty dodgy behaviour history too and, if their parents weren't going to show them some good practice then that was the college's role too. So we finish up with a class comprising a few who genuinely want to study that subject and have the right attitude and a load that don't really and haven't.

Because their parents get quite considerable tax breaks or income support for them remaining in full-time education, and some do still get an Educational Maintenance Allowance or similar weekly payment for attending too, there is massive pressure at home for them to be a college student. Some I've spoken to would, in fact, be content doing some part-time work and gaining some experience in the real world, even tedious jobs, but their parents insist that they stay at college. So stay they do. They've worked out that it is almost impossible to remove them from a course unless they behave absolutely ridiculously badly and, although some can be a pain, they know how to play the game and don't cause trouble on the premises. They've also worked out that they don't need to attend many classes to pass the course. They just need to do a pile of assignments. There are a lot of assignments but no exams so, as long as they hand something in sometime before June that is good enough to get past the basic criteria then that's all that's needed and, remarkably sometimes, they do finally come in with what's required although quite where they've got it from is often a question not easily answered.

Of course, passing, say a level 2 course means that they can move on next year to a level 3 course. That lasts another two years so colleges have got them for three years at least. That's money in the bank for the college, for their parents and a qualification to boot that can probably then get them into one of the less concerned universities where they'll have another three years not having to worry about getting a job and support continuing to trickle into the home too.

Commands from on high about attendance targets and success rates pervade all that tutors do. If someone has them missing attendance ticks from the register then they get hauled before panels and get planted on some action plan form or another that is supposed to correct things. So now tutors don't bother. As long as they see them at some point in the day and know they're alive then they're there and their attendance figures look exemplary. They may not get the maintenance grants (as no-one will sign those unless they turn up) but there are rather fewer of those now and the sums are less significant too.

For success rates, with everyone staying the course and handing in bare pass material then job done, 100% thank you very much. Well, there's always one or two who do drop out, move home, get arrested or something so it's nearer 80-90% but that's OK. The college can publish reasonable figures and everyone's happy.

Except they're not. The bright sparks who want to study and learn more in lessons don't get a chance to when the others are around. Either there's too much noise, not enough pcs or the tutor is constantly having to ask some to stop playing games, turn off the phone, demand explanations of why they are they late etc. Some actually quite like it when the others are really late or don't turn up at all. For example, I can get on really well and move some of the students way forward and discuss progress properly with them. Not all my colleagues, understandably however, allow the others that flexibility and the good ones suffer as a result.

So the others are not so happy either. I may ignore the passenger students and basically let them play the game but they have a rough time with colleagues who don't. So those colleagues don't have the best of days when they're teaching that group either where many just reluctantly sit in the sessions waiting for break time.

All in all, this is a disaster. Something has to change and this is what I'd like to do. Sweep away the classrooms, the timetables and even some of the courses too. Enrol everyone on a new type of programme that provides the skills that employers demand nowadays, in fact have been demanding for years but we don't seem to do a great deal about it. In their first year they do the basics, Maths, English, communication skills and the like plus some other useful modules that may be pertinent to their general career direction. Then they move on to the specific modules related to what they want to achieve. More often than not these would be shaped by employers because they would be helping to fund the education and offering to take some of them on at the end. So, where this applied, the students would be learning what the employers needed them to learn as a priority.

This programme could be a variation of a foundation degree in the UK for many of the existing level 3 candidates currently doing BTEC National Diploma type programmes which seem to be the bedrock for so many Further Education institutions. Attendance ceases to be an issue because the vast majority of learning can take place on-line, at home or wherever. When they want to learn, where they want to learn at a pace they want to learn at. I would suggest that regular 'workshops' are arranged whereby the tutors do meet the students face-to-face and can assist them individually with their progress or specific queries. This is the Work Based learning model that I have seen used effectively at Middlesex University and could be adapted with a little imagination and effort.

Existing institutions could run this type of programme with rooms cleared of pcs and clutter, furnished as pleasant enviornments where tutors and students can chat as well as work, using laptops, tablets, wireless networks etc. as well as a few pcs or macs. Only those institutions that could prove that they can work in the community with local employers to deliver what was required, though, would get the business so I guess many might close. This opens the door to other types of organisation to offer them instead and I don't see any big problem with that, provided that they can set up the appropriate quality controls over assessment and employ the staff to run things.

That brings me to the other matter - that of quality. Once the ridiculous, and, honestly they are laughable, targets and benchmarks for Further Education are binned then we can start to see both honest assessment and students passing because they genuinely have done what they should have done and all the nonsense about attendance and shouting at students who don't turn up at 9am or can't concentrate at 10:15am for some reason virtually disappears. Those who want to learn and get on will do, some quickly, some not so quickly - it's up to them to a large extent. With some guidance they manage their own learning. The quality of such figures as are produced will also be sound as there should be fewer reasons to want to fiddle them. Local competing institutions might even decide to work together. Good grief, that would be different!

Lastly, students on this type of programme would be free to work as and when they wished. As well as providing some much-needed income for themselves and, I suppose, their parents, they could be learning so much more about what work is actually like and, who knows, even get that thing about getting to places on time, behaving responsibly and even getting certain tasks completed on time! Just like they are constantly being asked to do at a college but which few actually ever seem to manage to achieve willingly. Employment is the answer to a lot of things. Employers can sack them. Tutors can't. Employers can offer real incentives that they recognise. Tutors can't. Employers can offer a tangible, realistic prospect of a future. Tutors can't.

So I would like to ask anyone out there who thinks they could support a Universal Foundation Degree programme along these lines to get in touch and, especially, to see whether there are any commercial organisations who might represent potential financial backers at the outset as setting this up takes time and money. I have a few expert e-learning colleagues who are interested in joining me with possible designs for modules that could be validated by a university to deliver some of the foundation modules referred to. Naturally, there will be a mass of other modules required to meet a wide range of future progression needs but, to a large extent, these ought to be available through tweaking of existing course units, modules or whatever.

After briefly outlining the idea to a group of 40 or so students some time ago, at least half of them said that they would have preferred to study that way if they had had the choice. Of the rest, they were evenly divided between those who liked the discipline and organisation of college as it stood and wanted to remain in a school-like environment. The others said they didn't mind, provided that they weren't worse off and could still get a qualification (and I'm not sure they were paying that much attention to what I was saying!) So my guess is that about 8 out of 10 of eligible students would, in fact, go for it - if the funding or grants were there. There does exist funding for part-time Foundation Degree programmes through Finance England but that is related to family income so its not ideal but I suspect there are other sources that those in the know might be able to tap to make such a venture feasible.

As I said, it's time for a change, and hopefully one where I can help make a difference!

£14 million for Analysis, Thematics and Networks, £14000 for an Intern

2011-12-22T15:04:00.000Z

Surely some of us can get together and apply for some of this huge amount money that is floating around Government departments and The European Commission? This is in addition to the last lot mentioned in my post a couple of weeks ago. It would be easy to grumble about wasting our money but why not actually get some and do something useful with it before somebody else does? And, of course, include me in the deal somewhere!

Local Enterprise Partnership Capacity FundDepartment for Business, Innovation & Skills (BIS)

The Fund now has a broad objective of supporting LEPs to address the issues that will best help them deliver local growth. A share of £3 million funding can be used to support a range of activities, including the following:

Analysis of existing economic data or intelligence to help LEPs prioritise the activities to engage in.
Analysis of new or emerging industries or clusters.
Analysis of potential barriers and collection of new economic data. This may include analysis of data that already exists on a local authority level, on an LEP level.
Training for board members.
Facilitating SME engagement with the partnership.
Identifying economic benefits of working between LEPs on infrastructure issues or sectoral priorities.

ACTION! 2012 (UK)Working Title FilmsA full-time intern placement and bursary award to give individuals vital experience and exposure through working in an international production company. The bursary award is £14,000.

Applicants should be eligible to work within the UK and have some experience in the film development and production sector and a proven commitment to a career in the industry. The internship will take place on a full-time basis for one year. Interviews will be held in London during in the spring. The deadline for receipt of applications is 17 February 2012 at 5pm.

EUROPE FOR CITIZENS 2007-2013The European CommissionActive Citizens for Europe
Town twinning citizens' meetings - indicative budget of €6.1 million.

Networks of twinned towns - indicative budget of €4.5 million

Citizens' projects - indicative budget of €1.3 million

Support measures - indicative budget of €805,000.

Active Civil Society in Europe - support for projects initiated by civil society organisations - indicative budget of €2.8 million.

Active European Remembrance - indicative budget of €2.4 million.

URBACT IIThe European CommissionThematic coverage for this Call includes a series of topics related to the Europe 2020 strategy for innovative, sustainable and inclusive cities. Project proposals must select from one of the following topics:

Innovative cities1. Promoting innovation and the knowledge economy.
2. Promoting social innovation.
3. Promoting employment and supporting labour mobility.
4. Promoting entrepreneurship.

Sustainable cities1. Developing low carbon and energy-efficient urban economies.
2. Enhancing urban planning performance and an efficient public administration.

Inclusive cities1. Promoting the active inclusion of specific groups.
2. Fostering regeneration of deprived neighbourhoods and combating poverty.

The total eligible budget for a Thematic Network is €800,000.

Money, money everywhere (if you can cope with the paperwork!)

2011-12-14T18:07:00.001Z

New Energy Efficiency Funding
The Department of Energy and Climate ChangeUp to £50,000 is available for each successful community to be used to help assess the potential for energy efficiency and local renewable energy generation in their locality. Organisations including parish councils, voluntary associations, development trusts and faith groups are all eligible to apply.

Fundamental Rights and Citizenship
EU Charter of Fundamental RightsThe available funding consists of an indicative amount of €20.97 million. Grant applications must be for a minimum of €75,000, for up to 80% of overall eligible project costs for one or more of these topics:

Informing on where the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights applies and where to turn to if fundamental rights are violated (CFR).
Promoting the Rights of the Child (RoC).
Combating racism, xenophobia and antisemitism (RXAS).
Fighting Homophobia: Enhanced/improved understanding and tolerance (HMPB).
Training and networking between legal professions and legal practitioners (TRAI)
Citizenship
Participation in the democratic life of the Union (DEMO).
Raise awareness about Union citizenship and the rights attached to it and identify obstacles to their effective exercise (CITI).
Raise awareness and improve knowledge about the EU rules on free movement, in particular Directive 2004/38/EC (FREE).
Facilitate sharing of knowledge and exchange of best practices on acquisition and loss of Union citizenship (BPoC).
Address the gender imbalance in participation in the European Parliament elections (GEND).
Data protection and privacy rights
Training and awareness raising on data protection including general information on the fundamental right to the protection of personal data and awareness-raising campaigns.
Improving practical cooperation between Data Protection Authorities.
Reinforcing children's privacy in the online environment.
Identifying and tackling the challenges posed by new technologies for the fundamental right to data protection.
Technological and organisational means to improve data protection compliance.

and, for supporting the functioning of non-profit organisations in this field, €1.6 million is available and grants can for up to 80% of the total eligible cost of the Forecast Operating Budget, up to a maximum of €250,000.

Community Buying ChallengeDepartment for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) A £60,000 initiative has been launched by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) and Co-operatives UK to promote community buying models. The competition is open to groups and organisations within the public, voluntary or business sectors. Awards will be made to support training, mentoring and seed funding for stand out projects, with a £15,000 prize available for an overall winner.

Daphne Programme (2007-2013)The European CommissionThe available funding consists of an indicative amount of €25.83 million. Applications for a minimum grant of €75,000, for up to 80% of overall eligible project costs, are invited.Projects under this Call should focus on the following priorities:

Rights of victims of violence.
Violence linked to harmful practices.
Children as victims and perpetrators of violence.
Perpetrator programmes and interventions.
Training programmes for professionals in contact with victims.
Empowerment work at grass-roots level.
Media violence, particularly violence linked to new technology and social networking tools.

Projects require a partnership of two organisations from two different Member States. Public or private organisations and institutions, such as NGOs, local authorities and university departments are eligible to apply.

Clore Award for Museum LearningThe Art Fund Prize & Clore Award for Museum LearningThe single award of £10,000 will be presented in June 2012. Entries are accepted from across the whole range of museum and gallery learning activities, including but not restricted to schools, colleges, or community settings. Projects and initiatives which were launched or mainly took place during the calendar years 2010 or 2011 are eligible

Europe for Citizens 2007-2013

The European Commission

Town twinning citizens' meetings, indicative budget of €6.1 million.
Networks of twinned towns; indicative budget of €4.5 million
Citizens' projects; indicative budget of €1.3 million
Support measures; indicative budget of €805,000.
Support for projects initiated by civil society organisations; indicative budget of €2.8 million.
Active European Remembrance; indicative budget of €2.4 million.

Film Networks Fund

Creative England Funding is available towards a range of activities including:

provision of editorial and technical support for emerging talent looking to produce work;
delivery of networking;
screening and industry speaker events and master classes; and
provision of peer-to-peer support, mentoring, training and advice.

The Film Networks Fund is a fixed call with £150,000 to award in the current round. Awards will range from £2,500 to £25,000. Applications can be made by legally constituted organisations operating in the English regions (outside Greater London); and legally constituted organisations operating outside the English regions that wish to develop and deliver activity in the English regions (outside Greater London).

Daphne Programme

The European Commission

supporting the functioning (operating costs) of non-profit organisations - such as voluntary associations, foundations and NGO's - pursuing activities which contribute to the objectives of the specific programme DAPHNE III.

A total budget of €3 million is available and grants can be for up to 80% of the total eligible cost of the Forecast Operating Budget, up to a maximum of €250,000 for the financial year 2012.

If you need Learning Technology advice or expertise...

2011-11-13T15:45:00.001Z

With LSN now in administration this may be a good time to remind anyone out there looking for Learning Technology skills or advice that I am available! Backed by some colleagues with many years' experience in industry, FE and HE (and with the JISC RSC Eastern Region E-learning Forum to consult if you have something really difficult for us!), you may find it reassuring that we don't pay ourselves the £160,000 a year that LSN paid John Stone.

The new E-people Consortium web site was something I was going to put together over the next month or so. I think I'd better do that this week now!

We can advise on anything LSN could do. So, if you've been let down or were thinking of asking them for help, contact me instead: design@andrewx.com

It's time for a change

2011-11-11T20:38:00.001Z

With several good minds in e-learning being made redundant in HE and FE institutions recently I would like to set up a consortium of these bright and smart people to provide advice and practical assistance to schools, colleges, universities here in the UK and, where practical, anywhere else that can make it worth our while.

For too long now big firms like Capita and the like have dominated the scene and many colleagues will be familiar with the clunky and poorly designed interfaces, the cost of those extra packages needed to ensure that one set of data can be merged with another and trying to meet management requests for reports by techniques like highlighting a load of columns on the screen and copying and pasting them into a spreadsheet so that they can actually do something useful with them.

Moodle provided FE Colleges, in particular, with an opportunity to escape from the costly clutches of WebCT but, for many, has merely remained a kind of repository of Word and PowerPoint files in long lists broken by the occasional heading. Despite all the enthusiasts and well-meaning support and, indeed the good intentions of its creators and developers, virtual learning environments have remained precisely that - virtual learning environments, an environment where learning might take place but doesn't really. VLEs were all the rage back in 2002, like smartboards, when the British Government handed out substantial chunks of money to institutions to develop what was then called ILT or Information Learning Technology. We had Becta, LSDA, Ferl, NLN, CEL, NLN and a whole alphabet soup of similar bodies with similar aims, all offering conferences in nice hotels and many recruiting Regional Co-ordinators and E-Guides or Subject Something-or-others. I was one, seconded to LSDA and had a marvellous time touring the many institutions in my region spreading the e-learning gospel and handing out grants for projects. With NLN Learning Technologies Team I even got to work with some Education Department officials and began to comprehend how to get money allocated to fund our ideas for what we could do next.

With AoC in 2004 I was particularly pleased to lead the development of a scheme whereby staff in institutions could buy a nice new computer or laptop and get the cost deducted from their salary, thereby saving a very handsome 30% or more by way of income tax and other savings. That started brilliantly but having to put together a 78-page bid document to ensure that the whole thing met all the EC legislative requirements meant enthusiasm stalled and, although it did get launched, the company acting as go-between twixt people and the suppliers gave up the ghost and Labour withdrew the tax relief shortly afterwards.

I have written and spoken a lot already about how little real change there seems to have been, though, in the classroom. Apart from a projector and smartboard, and more computers, many institutions still don't seem to have got it, or if they had, they haven't moved with the times much since. So many tutors still get told to 'put it on moodle' so students have to scroll through tedious-looking lists of Office document links which take an age to open. That's all anyone has taught many tutors to do - upload a document so it is an understandable failing. We need pictures, links to web pages and fast-loading material, not Microsoft Office files. We need some variety so that tutors can do things their way and display material independently, without lots of notes and training, and in a style that they choose rather than being obliged to follow some house style created by someone in Marketing who really only meant to set rules for adverts and posters, not every ruddy document produced by anyone at the place.

We need assignments that are easy to read and understand so there's a chance that students will actually read them and not merely point to a screen and ask the tutor what they're supposed to do. We need systems whereby students can drop work off on-line instead of printing a myriad copies - but not one that refuses to accept anything that isn't on its very short list of acceptable formats.

What we don't need are more and more computers strewn around classrooms, usually arranged so that once the students have sat down the tutor is left staring at a load of backs and heads and shoulders silhouetted against bright screens. Once, yes, I was arguing for more and more equipment to be available in classrooms but now we can move on from there. Wireless networks aren't the on-off affairs they once were and seem to run whatever is thrown at them just as fast as anyone wants. Laptops, tablets and pads take up little space and don't restrict anyone to where they sit, or, for that matter, even which part of the building they actually get taught in. By all means leave a few pcs or macs whirring in the rooms - and, of course, changing to portable devices would imply that all those barren places can now have one too! - but nowadays every space can be a learning space, and every room a 'well-equipped' classroom.

One of the barriers to tutors' advance on the e-learning front has been the fact that so many still don't teach in places where students have access to computers so, whilst those that are with it may get them to use their phones or refer them to addresses to check out at home, in the library or ICT suite later, they don't get the instant in-class benefit of having lots of goodies on hand to display as and when the mood or lesson plan takes them. This could be bashed down in one move.

My heart actually sinks now when I walk in to a brand new multi-million pound establishment classroom and am greeted by the backs of 50 black Dell monitors and, worse, boxes and cables linking everything together in some sad spaghetti world. Where a few weeks earlier had been a delightful, well-lit living and learning space with notice boards still with rectangular profiles and a carpet not decorated by random chewing gum splodges there is now just a mass of machines, chairs and work surfaces like some old office furniture store.

New technology means that we can provide attractive, comfortable space for learning. We can take account of what kit the students themselves bring in and like to use. If that's a phone then we need to work with phones more. If it's a laptop then we need to allow them to tap into our wireless networks and if that means beefing up the security to cope with all that invasion of IT Services' privacy then so be it. They've had a good time secreted in a room far away from the main show for long enough.

It's not particularly expensive these days either. Even if institutions have now spent all their grants and extra ILT funds on this and that or him and her then we're mainly talking about refurbishment and x new bits of kit which shouldn't represent that great a chunk out of the income each full-time student generates. And if the profit really isn't there then I suggest that senior management aren't doing their job effectively so lose one which should pay for 1000 laptops.

There are also still grants and project funds galore out there if you look. It's hard work digging them out and often the deadline for bids is a matter of days away by the time you find it. Universities have lots of bids they can apply for from organisations like JISC as well as the heavier and difficult to comprehend European stuff which appears to be continuing apace regardless of the demise of the countries' economies in the EC. HE is supposed to work with FE on many of these projects but usually have, er, a 'special relationship' with just one institution and all the others seldom get a look-in. And if you're really keen then there's always something available for those politically-correct minority projects which could be tweaked to suit what you have in mind with a bit of imagination.

Tutors aren't going to have time to do all this and curriculum managers are getting scarce these days as belts get tightened and they're the least able to justify their office desks and secretaries. So it's down to the senior management team to get on with this but they can only do so if they actually comprehend what e-learning and the technology itself is really all about. Now that, regrettably, is where all the policies, initiatives and Blair money has almost totally failed. I would say 'utterly' rather than 'almost' were it not for the fact that I do know one or two brilliant minds and enthusiastic people who have made it to the top table and one or two one-time good tutors or curriculum managers have even been promoted and can now bring some common sense and new thinking at their meetings. Most of the 2006 SMT crowd, however, now have very respectable salaries and training in all sorts of areas useful for their own career advancement but have managed to avoid technology for the last 5 years. You only have to to see the e-mail Word attachments, PowerPoints at meetings (and that, indeed is what all their presentations are as few have dared venture into non-Microsoft land) and occasional forays into distributing an Excel file for others to update and send back, to be able to make a pretty accurate assessment of their own skills and confidence in using new technology.

So who is going to promote new thinking when the risk of their own lack of competence at worst or understanding at best is highly likely to be out there for all to see? One or two questions from well-informed staff is all it takes to blow a hole in the poor well-dressed people's veneer. Even those with a determined personality and appropriately thick skin, and especially those with an appealing honesty in admitting they're not as good as they know they ought to be these days, need a stuff drink or to restart a smoking habit before embarking on and leading the business of making a change.

But change there must be. And that's where my colleagues and I hope to be able to help.

1. Recognise things need improving.
2. Accept that you don't really know what you're talking about when it comes to technology and e-learning.
3. Appoint us to get you some money and start the process and maybe locate some experts at your place.
4. Get on with what you are good at.
5. Take the credit later and give up drink and fags again.

Learning Styles

2011-11-05T18:58:00.001Z

Nice Infographic on the Mindflash site. I expect their course building tool costs a lot but it's worth a visit for the pics.

Education Planner have a simple on-line assessment questionnaire if you're not sure what type you or your students are. I made another one in Excel years ago and here's a Google Documents version that's a bit clunky but gives you an idea. I'll try a Google Form when I get a spare moment. That ought to work better as long as I can find a way to show results, of course.

Google and Microsoft need to talk. For the kids' sake, at least.

2011-11-04T21:25:00.001Z

Am I the only one who loves mini Google presentations but is now struggling actually to show them to anyone in Internet Explorer? I have them in iframes all over the place: on blog pages, moodle VLE pages and wherever else they might come in handy should I need to make a quick summary of something in class.

This is how one of them should look:

Since when they first appeared clunkily on the scene many e-learning years ago I've been telling everyone how brilliant they are. Now I feel a fool and probably look a bit stupid too when I'm there at the front of the class or a conference somewhere where IE rules (usually an academic institution of some sort) and behind me is a message announcing to everyone that 'This content cannot be displayed in an iframe' next to a large red cross symbol. No not the ambulance one - the Access Denied type.

Luckily my blog viewers are also now unable to see how stupid I really am as my new Google+ profile image is just a little box with the red x that we all were once so familiar with in the 90s days of web image upload mistakes or sheer sluggishness of connections.

Then there's the problem with Google's lovely new charts that simply don't appear at all! Now, in a way, this is slightly less embarrassing than the message as my class or audience may not actually see that they're missing, just conclude that I've hit the return key a few too many times or that my text had been hijacked by Microsoft's other missile in the software wars, Word's default spacing in 2007 on.

The post should look like this:

So where have the charts gone? Why can't IE display them, or, at least try.

Back to my presentation problem. Internet Explorer offers the choice of opening the aforementioned presentation in a new window. OK, I'll give that a try...

Oh boy. What on earth are we supposed to make of this message?

It really does take a minute or two to figure out what on earth that means. You try. (And I think I'm someone who is fairly quick too so Lord help some of my colleagues!)

It turns out that it doesn't matter in the slightest which you click...

Because the window stays black. Completely black. I gave up trying to make any sense of the Help window too.

Unless I am being very, very stupid indeed I am sure there must be others out there who are getting as confused as I am and, no doubt, wondering what on earth to do. We should be told, don't you think. If all this is due to Google advancing at a rate of knots with which Microsoft can't keep up, or, more worryingly, a deliberate refusal by Microsoft to facilitate Google display in a pleasant an efficient manner so that users may be obliged to blow the dust of their 365 documentation then it is, perhaps encumbent upon both to talk to each other. For the sake of the kids. At a conference I can usually demand Chrome in advance or, if stuck in IE, get some laughs and sympathy and think of something else to keep them occupied. I can't do that with an Ofsted inspector gazing at me from a corner of the room as will be the case on umpteen occasions next week. Heeeelllpp!!

[I am hoping someone will see this and tell me I have been stupid and a simple change here or there will fix it. If so, then I will instantly publish the news and apologise to both G and Big Blue.]

Here comes the $35 tablet!

2011-10-29T14:31:00.000Z

Aakash Tablet from Venturebeat on Vimeo.

Well, if you're at school in India, that is. Even allowing for a Government subsidy of about $20 this is one cheap solution that works and will enable millions more children to see what we see and take for granted on our notebooks, pcs and tablets that cost ten times as much.

Yes, our kit may look cooler, work a bit faster, even have the seemingly essential letter i at the start of the model name but...

... the information we all access remains the same.

Thanks to Robert Rendl, a thinker at Easytouch.com, Vienna, for sharing this initially.

An alternative alphabet

2011-10-24T21:48:00.000Z

Daughter's algebra homework takes me back to school

2011-10-17T21:39:00.001Z

My daughter is smart but was understandably grumpy with some very tiresome algebra homework. The trouble is I love numbers and my enthusiasm for solving even the alien-looking display of letters, symbols, lots of brackets and superscript probably annoyed more than helped her. I can just imagine today's conversation at break:

"Did you do your maths homework?"
"No. Daddy did."
"OMG. What, without getting cross or reminding you how useful algebra will be?"
"Well, he didn't get cross but he did do the 'it'll be really useful' thing. He seemed to quite enjoy it, actually."
"Whatever."

It had been a while since I'd had to do battle with x² and y³ but I really do think her school could have come up with more pleasant exercises - or at least less cumbersome answers that made you think you simply must have done something wrong when the last line of 'simplification' looked a damn sight more complex than the expression we'd started with!

Anyway, for some reason that I can't really explain, but I'll blame her for it, I woke up this morning trying to figure out how to slice a triangle so that the area of the small triangle at the top is one-half of the original area.

So the pink triangle above has 1/2 of the area of the bigger one.

What I wanted to know was where to draw the dotted line. Now there'll be people reading this who can just shout out the answer but I had to work it out. At one point I even looked up sine, cosines and tans on Google as I'd forgotten which was which. The answer, which I think is right, is delightfully simple (and that's the sort of problem Royal Latin School should be giving my daughter). You divide the original height by the square root of 2.

Then I had another thought. What height would a triangle with just a third of the area be? Ah - divide the height by the square root of 3! Brilliant. Ooops, no, surely, that can't be a series developing, can it? Because the next number is 4, so to make a small triangle with just one quarter of the original area would, if my thing were correct, simply mean having one half the height as the square root of 4 which is a nice, friendly number, 2, rather than some weird one with piles of never ending decimal places.

(The fact that I could, in those instances, never actually precisely measure where to draw the ruddy line did disturb me but I decided to leave that, together with why I can't measure a third of an inch properly, to another day.)

A picture helped me convince myself that I wasn't being silly.

So, with a little bit of algebra (I gave up on the trigonometry) I've discovered that you can make a smaller triangle of whatever proportion to the original just by diving the original height by the square root of whatever the fraction is to be. Along the way fractals made an appearance too when I played with numbers like 16 and 25. That's another story I'll share in a while.

And if my daughter is still struggling, there's always the excellent Khan Academy!

Goggles at the Zoo

2011-10-12T20:00:00.000Z

Holding a Staff Conference in a zoo was, of course, bound to lead to a few jokes but what a great place! Whilst networking between sessions has its value, we did, actually have plenty of time to chat over lunch and on a mild autumn day it didn't seem to have as much value as wandering around and finding muntjacks crossing the path or ring tailed lemurs on the other side of a hedge. Add an ape or two, owls and some other exotic birds and some good exercise and you had a good reason to leave the discussions for a while.

Still remembering the Google Goggles presentation from a few days ago at the E-learning Forum this was also a great opportunity to put it to the test. I mean, I had no idea what the muntjack were but Google Goggles told me. This was the first time I'd used the software which had gradually downloaded itself the day before when I was in an area with a rather better connection than I have at home. It really is dead simple to get for Android users, taking care of its own download and installation with little more than the occasional tap on OK - and it's free. I had no idea how to work it but needn't have worried. You just tap the icon and it fires up instantly, presenting you with a camera like view and, assuming the camera's pointing in the right direction, another tap on an icon takes a snap and sets off the scanner. The scanner is a blue faded line that whooshes across the screen (and up and down sometimes too for reasons best known to itself). That takes a while and, once it's done you get told either that it doesn't recognise what you and it have seen or it does and then provides a bundle of similar images and some data which can be clicked to provide whatever else you want to know.

I clearly need more practice at aiming as most of my efforts, especially the ones where others were watching and I was hoping to show off , produced the unrecognised response. So more about that when I get a bit more success and maybe stop shaking when I press the buttons!

Unless I had something else running that I wasn't aware of it does seem to eat into my battery life, though and, from a full charge in the morning the bleep that tells me it's shutting down through lack of power (and, frustratingly, doesn't give me any time to grab a charger and do the decent thing to revive it) comes at about 7pm. That's not too good. Just as well I didn't make any calls or use the phone to make notes or do any research during the day or I'd have been lucky to make it home.

Something else I discovered after almost a year with this phone was that I could zoom in on things with the normal camera. I feel such a fool and must have missed, or not bothered taking, loads of potentially good snaps before! I had an ape in view and accidentally pressed what would normally be the volume control. And I'm now staring the fellow in the eye as if I'm a few inches away! Remarkable.

Some interesting developments with FE on the horizon and, for the first time for a while, I have some real hope that I may have a chance to express some views and constructive suggestions and actually have them considered. More on that another time. For now I have to deal with the problems that Staff Conference days do bring: 34 new e-mails to do something with (and that's after archiving those that are just for reading some day), figuring out what a new HNC course is all about and gathering enough information to ensure that I appear reasonably informed for a new group starting tomorrow and assorted personal matters like advising on increasingly difficult children's homework (I have already abandoned hope of being any use at all on my 15 year old daughter's Biology and Chemistry is virtually at the edge of my comprehension too). I seem to recall that the Khan Academy had some courses - looks like I'll be going back to school there again soon! Then there's the matter of liaising with the nice Edufire people who want me to do a Helping Students Succeed course soon, following up on a bundle of interested enquiries about my Staff ICT Skills Audit and then there's the E-learning Consortium to set up. Twitter and Google+ will ahve to wait another day by the seems of it. Hope I'm not missing too much. They have become my Daily News. Oh, and I nearly forgot ... dinner.

Tutors need to shut up and listen too

2011-10-10T19:23:00.000Z

"We are looking into different ways to survey students to capture the 'learner voice'". Saw this on a Curriculum Champions Forum and I was about to reply with the usual survey webtools ideas when I stopped and thought a little more. Just what is this 'learner voice'?

A few years ago I remember a Quality Manager getting very excited about something called Learners' Voice which seems pretty similar apart from the capitals and a slightly more appropriate s and apostrophe at the end. A few days later the place was filled with Learners Voice (sic) posters and before we knew it this had become a compulsory item in tutorials and things called SARS where we take a guess at what grade a Department will get next year.

Now the Quality Manager concerned was genuinely interested in getting learners' views on what was going well and, I suppose, albeit a little more reluctantly, in what wasn't, but once the concept became an item that could be put on an agenda like Every Child Matters, Equality & Diversity and so on it all became rather drab. Previously enthusiastic tutors got forms to fill in. They were told off if they didn't get them in by certain deadlines. Presentations were issued to guide us and, basically, try to persuade students that when they did fill in the questionnaires that were now being developed left, right and centre they remembered to, er, say the right things.

Each group had to have a Course Representative. Now I have always thought that a better name would be an Of Course Representative because you can just guess who'll get elected. Few people tend to offer themselves up for the job, especially after they've been given a pile of assignments, and the ones that do will be those who prefer talking to listening and it gives them a chance to have a good moan about the premises, too many assignments, equipment or a tutor - and they'll do precisely that. It may or may not be the general view of the group. It can be pretty difficult to tell sometimes as some in the group are so quiet and really do just want to get on with the job in hand as best they can with whatever tools they've got available. A bit like tutors really. We could all go to meetings and say that we could do a much better job with this equipment or that application but it wouldn't make much difference. A decent manager will know that already and if he can squeeze the extra cost - and there's always an extra cost somewhere, even when you don't think there ought to be - out of his boss then he will have done so. A decent tutor will similarly know what changes, improvements, developments or whatever would make life, social as well as academic, better for the students. They'll have asked for them already. So whilst it can be nice to have another body asking for the same things, (and the current view is that students get listened to more than tutors), I am not convinced that much actually changes as a result that wouldn't have happened anyway.

Before the Learners' Voice got its capitals, tutors still knew what students thought, their concerns and their desires. All that seems to have happened is that it has become enshrined as Good Practice, got its own page in the Manual and, of course, ticks an OFSTED box. What seems to have become important is the process - the collection of views rather than listening to them or doing anything about them. Yes, against each statement there'll be an Action Point and against each Action Point there'll be a set of Initials for whoever has to do something by whatever Date goes in the last column. But smart managers will always put in there things that they had in train anyway so that it is no extra work to record action being taken. It's all a procession of evidence now. If we really listened to the learners' voices then we'd hear all sorts of little things that the Of Course Representative isn't going to bring up at a meeting with an agenda and Action Points. But those little things, people chatting about this or that to do with their course or tutor, wishing they could have this or that a bit earlier or later - these are the things that actually could make a difference and are what managers should be hearing. Not the selected sentences or big issues but the casual comments - that's what may tell you or colleagues something new about how the group feels.

So, to answer the Forum post: simply watch and listen, and let the students feel that you are genuinely listening to their voices. Your phone is likely to be a great tool, just tap the video button and record some of them telling you what they think about the course, the environment, tutors etc. Or if they don't like being filmed, record just the audio. Or just get them to share comments with you on a blog or VLE. Freestyle. If you try and structure it all then the originality and flow of comments can cease and they'll be thinking before they speak and it'll get a bit average and grey. Except for the Of Course types. They'll have plenty to say whatever you do! But you'll get a bit more balance this way.

Now, having got all these wonderful, probably rather amateur-looking or -sounding files, what do you do with them? Management and Marketing will adore the positive stuff and will gladly take that off your hands and you may even get back some clips to put on your own programme VLE or blogs. The bits where they're moaning and groaning about things? Oh dear, such a shame that the quality wasn't very good or you forgot to set the volume properly, wasn't it? Never mind. I'm sure you'll put anything important on an agenda for a meeting sometime.

Augmented banality

2011-10-10T14:55:00.000Z

By the end of today I need to have some initial materials for nine new units or modules ready for students. You guys teaching Maths or History don't know how lucky you are that, for a large extent, the content is pretty constant. I've got to cover some at Level 2, some Level 3 and for a new HNC programme a couple of modules at Level 4 in things like web development or the impact of IT on business where, even if the technology hadn't changed much (which it has!) there are brand new sets of criteria that students have to meet this year so even if I had done it last year my stuff would need changing and, for the ones I have taken over, the last chap wasn't exactly hot on publishing material.

"It all has to be on moodle," announce managers. That seems to be the Holy Grail nowadays. "Stick it on moodle and we'll be able to tick the E-learning box for OFSTED." But have you tried making a reasonably attractive job of displaying materials on moodle? It's not easy. First it can take an age to upload every image that you want to work with and rearrange things on page and then you're faced with making moodle web pages look reasonable, which requires more than a little skill and some diving into the html code, and often finish up doing what every else does which is to make a list of Office documents and presentations. I understand that moodle 2.0 makes life much easier but we haven't got that.

I can see how it is a good idea to have a central one-stop shop for students. They log in and can get what they need. But that does depend on us all putting what they need there in the first place. And doing so in a way that is a bit more interesting and appealing than the contents page to a textbook with links to text documents that not only take an age to open but, when they do eventually appear, don't actually say much more than the textbook or an Edexcel web page says already. I have seen super examples of moodle being used well but invariably there's either a web design team or expert geek supporting them or even doing the display work.

Even then there are examples of nonsense. Well-designed, but still nonsense. As in the school that e-mails parents about some important announcement with a link in the body of the e-mail. You click the link and arrive at a beautifully laid out and themed moodle page. There is another link to click for the important announcement. PDF time. Long PDF time. Hurray! It's opened, and it's a size I can read without moving back six steps with a pair of binoculars the wrong way round. Two paragraphs. Important, yes. Glad I got the message but ... why on earth didn't they simply stick the text in the e-mail?!

Then I hear that some tutors in institutions get told to put their schemes of work somewhere completely different as well (or instead, I haven't figured out which yet). Not only is that place some drive on the staff server where they probably haven't visited since the 1990s but it's not somewhere they can access from home, and home is the only place they can actually get any work done in peace and with some reasonable software and equipment. As I said, I'm teaching web design, presenting information using IT and other modern, design-led modules like that where how I provide materials should be an example of the very same good practice I am trying to teach them!

My only solution is to produce all my stuff as I had planned, using all sorts of new ideas and applications that present it nicely and publish that on various blogs and web sites as before, and just putting links to it on the moodle pages for now. I can probably make the moodle pages, assuming someone has remembered to give me editing rights to them, and, indeed, has actually created the new ones I'll need, look a bit smarter with some images and design text for links rather than the odd default fonts and sizes with incorrect line spacing settings that display headings in larger fonts incorrectly when they require two lines. But the actual material will be somewhere else where I find much simpler to work with it all.

Of course that will land me in more trouble as I am apparently breaking some E-safety rule by using my own web spaces. If I remove any reference to a non-institution e-mail or non-course-related sections of my site then I may escape the men with the black bin liners. For a while, at least.

And there I was, getting quite excited about augmented reality after a super session at the Eastern Region E-learning Forum. I can probably mange to keep my students happy and well-provided for and stay in a job. But some colleagues I was speaking with really are still struggling, despite all the wonders of the new things happening around us. It really is time that someone has the courage to tell managers who reckon that adding Microsoft Office documents or PDFs and presentations to moodle and shared network drives is good E-learning practice in 2011 that they're wrong. It's just augmented banality.

Twitter: An Amateur Astronomer's Tale

2011-10-10T11:52:00.000Z

As you sit in meetings today or plan lessons and listen to people telling you how terribly bad twitter is and is just used by students to waste time here's a simple little example of how you might try and change some views. I've often looked up at a night sky and wondered what the stars were and occasionally, very occasionally in the past, seen a shooting star streak across a black background above me. In the last few months I have learned a little about meteors and meteor showers and shown my children and friends where to look and when to see some of these wonderful sights themselves.

I'm really not the type of person to stand in a field at night staring at the sky at all but someone called @VirtualAstro inspired me to do just that. I don't know his name. He lives in Berkshire somewhere and that's his twitter name. I've been following him for a while now and he tells us in simple terms when there is likely to be something worth looking for. An amateur, with equipment he'd collected over years and spent all his savings on, he also publishes great pictures of what's going on up there for the benefit of those of us who may have missed a nice display.

I can't remember how I started following him. I expect someone I was already following must have mentioned him in one of their tweets and that was it.

This morning his news was not about the stars. Someone had broken into his house and stolen all his equipment, including some really old but valuable bits and pieces. Gradually, in a series of short bursts of less than 140 characters each, the story unfolded. The police had been. The insurance company had said the valuable bits weren't covered. He couldn't afford to replace them. The police catch the burglar. Some idiot had sold everything for £200 to buy drugs. He refused to identify the dealer who had got the equipment now. The police said he wouldn't see it again. The poor fellow was angry and devasted. Then he gets a pile of kind messages from followers and donations from some of them too. I don't know how much he has got so far but he's obviously amazed. You can just tell from his words that in a matter of hours he turned from being totally distressed to overwhelmed by the good nature of people he's never met.

This isn't much to do with education of e-learning, I know, and I'm sure there are far more dramatic stories out there that twitter or other social networks have featured in. I just felt that I had to write about this one. It happened this morning.

And if you hear of any Japanese Series 4000 super wide and ultra wide eyepieces for sale, let me or @VirtualAstro know. I have no idea what they are but the twitterverse will and it would be so good if someone somewhere can bring a happy ending to this episode.

Staff ICT Skills Audit Tool

2011-10-08T17:41:00.004Z

Following yesterday's Eastern Region E-learning Forum I have had lots of requests to use this tool in institutions of all shapes and sizes. That's great and I shall be doing my best over the next few weeks. However, there's some help I need. Maybe someone at Google Docs can help or is there anyone out there with a bright idea?

The form collects data wonderfully and stores it all in a nice spreadsheet. So far so good. I can analyse this data using some formulae but it takes a while and sometimes I do like to watch tv or even teach students or mark their work. So what I really want is a tool or an application which will gather up whatever the user fills in and do the analysis for me then display it for them to see. I guess they'd need to click a Show Me My Results button or something to activate the extra feature and it needs some kind of health warning that, as I haven't seen the results myself and had a chance to spot some errors, they shouldn't get either over-excited or unduly depressed should the results appear impossibly good or embarrassingly bad.

The form is available here if you want to take a look.

A colleague at the Forum did mention something that I wrote down as 'flambaroo' but a search for that or variations of the name came up with nothing relevant. Now I know that someone who loves playing with PHP code and SQL could probably knock me up something and I have two possible sources of help for that but it's still a big job and, as I can imagine that different organisations will want slight tweaks made to things like the titles or department names and possibly even the question bank too and how it is compared to a benchmark, I would be forever bothering them with what sounds like a simple change but which actually takes them away from sleeping for several days in order to revise all their code.

If I can tweak things myself and get some magic application to do the night shift work instead of an ex-student who deserves some chance to get a life or a real job then I can survey the whole damn country and see if I can get Michael Gove to appoint me as an E-learning Tzar or something with a nice title and a bit of useful income. Or just gets some E-learning, ILT or ICT training work.

Answers on a postcard to design@andrewx.com or however you prefer!

Me-learning

2011-10-07T20:04:00.001Z

At last, a chance to get out and talk to people about e-learning again! A nice day at The MØLLER Centre in Cambridge. I couldn't find the ALT code for a small version that character, sorry. The Eastern Region E-learning Forum, merged with the VLE and Technical Forums and probably the Staff Development Managers' one as well, and we all gathered in this lovely environment where we were well looked after by JISC Regional Support Centre colleagues.

Both speakers in the morning session had a similar theme - things you can do with a smartphone. It was such a relief that not once did I hear what is becoming an annoyingly generic term iPhone either. QR codes. I had inwardly groaned a bit when seeing this on the menu but the actual title 'Augmented Reality' was intriguing enough to make me pay some attention and I genuinely learned something. Dale from Exeter University explained nicely. QR codes are those strange square icons that are appearing everywhere nowadays. they contain some large box-like graphics in some corners and a load of dots in such a way that one would presume that there'll be quite a few combinations before they need QR2 with either smaller dots or larger icons. Each graphic represents a link to something. You can make your own and anyone with a smartphone with some QR code-reading app installed can then simply point the phone at the graphic and up will appear a bundle of information, usually a web site, about whatever it is the person who created the code wants to show.

Yes, there's danger there but never mind! While the chap was showing us some variations on the theme I downloaded a reader and tried it out. My first QR reading. I was quite pleased with myself and wondered why I hadn't done so ages ago. I think it's something about the graphic which I have to say I find quite annoying, almost offensive to look at. Why i should think that I don't know. perhaps my brain already has some software installed that simply sees the arrangement of black and white pixels and gets grumpy. I now know quite a bit about bats, for that was the material involved in this marvellous bit of research work done by Exeter University to enable students to wander around their campus with various devices and get told all about what creatures lurked there.

Prior to that I'd been dragged on stage to do a brief impression of a magician, sweeping away a cloak to reveal my Vice Chairman's innards being displayed on a huge screen by the QR code slapped on his shirtW we were both quite relieved that he hadn't worn it a little lower. thatw as a more advanced version which even moved as he did so as he jumped so too did his organs jiggle. Not the sort of thing you expect at an E-learning Forum at all.

We also got to see how Google Goggles identifies whatever you happen to point your phone at and comes up with a load of gen about that too. I knew about this but hadn't seen it in action. Great. I shall get that too. In fact, that could be even more useful and may be what can rid us of the nasty looking QR invasion as and when Goggles can do what the codes do and can maybe interpret individually designed items which don't have to be boxes of pixels.

A great time was had by all and I do hope that everyone responds really favourably to the surveys about how useful they find the RSCs as the Government seek to get them to justify their existence. Just get shot of LSIS and give the money to JISC RSCs, especially the Eastern people. That's what I say. Maybe I should make a QR code to link to a large message saying just that and then stick the codes all over the MPs' drinking areas, loos and wherever else they make decisions.

That's the odd thing about these QR things. You see one but may not necessarily know what it's going to tell you about. Could be fun.

Outside The Moller Centre, Cambridge is a fountain with worryingly straw coloured water

Reluctant PowerPoint (or Word or Excel)

2011-08-24T00:26:00.000Z

So there we were, politely watching the smartboard show us how PowerPoint2010 was doing whatever PowerPoint2010 does when it's woken from a long summer break slumber by the presenter clicking one of the files in the list displaying the contents of his memory stick.

For a change, I was watching and not presenting and trying so hard to resist the temptation to help. As the minutes slowly ticked by - and they do tick slowly by in circumstances like this - the presenter, a Department Head, looked around and you could see that classic combination of panic and disappointment in his demeanour. I had promised myself that I'd behave and not comment on colleagues' e-learning techniques or methods used as it was a small group of mostly new staff getting training in something to do with tutorials. I knew how I felt about being dragged back to work a week early for this and had sympathy with my colleague who had presumably been dragged back even earlier to put this stuff together so the last thing I was going to do was make things worse.

When he went for the 'paper option' and distributed the classic A4 six-to-a-page handout with text that made me wish I'd brought my magnifying glass and cleaned my glasses better I thought I'd better offer some assistance, though. I had no quick solution to the slow-opening PowerPoint business itself but saw it as a bit of a challenge to get his show on the screen and on the road. I did have an idea but, as there were only a few of us there and the slides were nothing that he couldn't talk about perfectly well without them anyway, I suggested we carry on and I'd try the idea later.

Once he'd finished and was chatting to the others, I sneaked behind his back and opened Google Documents, then uploaded his presentation file to my account. Luckily it was a tiny file and that was virtually instant. I selected the conversion to Google presentation option and a minute or so later clicked the uploaded file in my list. Up came the first slide and another click had it full screen. "I've got to tell everyone about this!" I thought to myself and asked my colleague if I could briefly explain what I'd done.

"Oh, you've opened it. Well done!" he said.
"No," I replied. "This is a Google document version on-line. This is the sort of thing that could happen to any of us - and probably just when we don't want it to - like when an OFSTED inspector is watching you!"
I quickly ran through the process again and everyone was suitably amazed - that always makes me feel good. I miss not doing this sort of stuff and, with no ILT Co-ordinator or Champions nowadays, no-one gets much guidance any more.

I did think about mentioning that he really ought to have had a .pps (PowerPoint Show) rather than a .ppt so that the audience didn't get a glimpse of what was coming up but with only a few slides that wasn't such a big deal. The filenames and picture icons for some of the other stuff on his USB stick, however, might have caused some amusement and I did mention that it is a pretty good idea to keep the documents you're going to use at least in a folder away from potentially embarrassing or personal items!

It's all very simple stuff but hopefully there's half a dozen people who'll be less reliant on reluctant local Office applications now.

Then I thought a bit more about it

2011-07-29T15:09:00.003Z

Until schoolgirl victims of nasty crimes were found to be in the list of phones 'hacked' by journalists the general feeling I detected amongst friends and colleagues was of little real concern. I'm not saying that celebrities deserved to have someone reading their messages but they should expect that their lives will be minutely examined for tittle-tattle by those feeding the demands for red-top headlines. If they had intended to get up to anything that readers might find a little salacious then they could afford to use a different phone or should have had the sense to ask someone about the risks involved in the communication tools they'd be using. Whilst Hugh Grant and others are right - it is quite wrong and they are entitled to privacy - the fact that their messages didn't stay private was not exactly headline news in itself and some good solicitors would ensure a series of nice big settlements in their favour.

When certain victims' names, and those of other genuinely innocent individuals, sadly came into the story, however, a quite extraordinary frenzy of outbursts has followed and the news is dominated by News of the World, News International, Murdock, senior staff, journalists and advisors, the Prime Minister, Uncle Tom Cobbley and all and, good grief, House of Commons Committees. What no-one trying to defend themselves in all this has said is just how easy it is to get access to most mobile voicemail, which seems to be what most journalists or informers have done. It is not like accessing a person's computer, e-mail account or web site but often simply a case of dialling a number and entering an easily obtainable code. No, people shouldn't do it but there's a lot of things people shouldn't do.

Why might they have wanted to access those girls' phones or those of parents or others the subject of so much unbelievable outrage? No-one seems to have asked that question. If a journalist had discovered some vital clue that had helped identify a place, a person, a time or whatever which helped either solve a crime or prevent another, or display a different motive for someone's actions to that previously assumed or something valuable in one way or another then I doubt whether they would now be being pilloried and we would be generally grateful for newspapers digging deep where the police might have feared to tread. In fact, I suspect that we might never have queried the legality of their activities and the police would have turned a blind eye to the practice. They must, surely, be doing this themselves anyway?

I can easily understand that one's first reaction on hearing the news of certain victims' phones being 'hacked' would be the scream "What??!!" Mine was too but then I thought a bit more about it.

If all the girls' messages, or parents' calls or the minutiae of other non-celebrity people's lives had been publicised as a result and caused distress then, I agree, totally, that that would have been wrong, very wrong, and I would be firmly on the side of the baying hounds seeking sackings, resignations and more. But, unless I've missed something (I don't read the newspapers that seem to be concerned in the main) they haven't been shared with anyone and remain private. It does seem to me that we have, to a great extent, been wound up by a very clever campaign by a flailing Labour Party leader, haters of the Murdock empire and a motley crew of associates with the key aim of tarnishing the image of David Cameron.

Presumably he had better protected his voicemail and texts - or, more likely, not said or written anything they could use.

[This is not about education or e-learning - just something I wanted to get it off my chest.]

The World's Simplest On-line Safety Policy (well... America's, at least...)

2011-04-03T23:45:00.000Z

This is an excellent article on the subject of child protection and how managers scared of their institution being sued ban access and stifle communication.

Someone should now write in a similar vein with adjustments to reflect UK legislation instead of America's. I'll have a go myself if nothing appears soon. I am tired of hearing about decent and good colleagues being threatened with dismissal because they share information over social network sites, their own web sites, wikis or whatever or dare to use their own e-mail rather than the institution's to communicate with a student.

And if you're reading this and can only think of one reason why any teacher might want to do so then I sincerely hope that my 14-year-old daughter and 9 and 12-year-old sons are not being taught by you or staff under your control.

It is time for good, innovative and decent teaching staff to stand up and be trusted.

"Please Sir, I'm bored." "OK. Go home and watch a movie."

2011-03-12T13:04:00.001Z

As a colleague commented, "if everyone watched Salman Khan's talk at TED this year it would change the world." So find yourself a spare 20 mins and watch it - show it in class and see what the students think. Show it at the next staff development meeting in place of that tedious item on the agenda that no-one really has any enthusiasm for.

Although this talks mostly about learning maths there's a whole lot more out there. What really fires me up to write this on a sunny Saturday is how eloquently Salman Khan voices what I've been trying to get across for ages - and how much clear support he gets from the audience compared to the curious blank faces I get in some quarters when I challenge the value of the figures my traditional teaching is supposed to generate.

I am far more useful to students when they want me to tell them something, explain something or just help - not when I want them to be there. With exceptions, I guess, for a lecture or activity that is obviously something that they're all actually asking for where a session to do that makes sense, I really don't care who comes in when. In fact I would prefer that only those who want to learn something, discuss something or get help from me or colleagues do turn up. If the others that aren't ready to learn for some reason drag themselves in and sit morosely playing games or texting friends then they're nothing but a distraction and a pain as I do feel obliged to make some effort to get them at lest appearing to be active in case the Principal walks in again. But that is the only reason.

The vast range of abilities and enthusiasm for various modules that I encounter each year has forced me to look afresh at what I do every year.

So the first term I do the pretty traditional stuff and do tend to follow the rules. After that, though, it's over to them. They look at what I publish or check out ideas with friends outside the lesson and come in to share my time and attention on what they need individually. Looking at what Salman illustrates it could be that I could try that approach from the very start. That would need a bit of courage. The world of education is changing, though. I like to think I'm changing too. I just wish I didn't have to pretend that I'm not because lesson plans that all say 'Start | Wander around being helpful | Finish' don't exactly match the minute-by-minute script I am expected to produce and registers don't have a code for 'This guy is getting on really well in his own time and doesn't need to attend this session' or 'Worked with a group late yesterday and did more than he'd ever have done at 9am on a Monday'

The end of 'the cat ate my memory stick, Sir'

2011-02-25T15:52:00.000Z

Sometimes ideas just occur to you. There you are, sitting at traffic lights, wondering why they're still red when there's nothing else in sight and even a well-driven Ferrari wouldn't collide with you if you jumped them, and you realise that you've thought of something that you really ought to have thought of years ago. But didn't.

So there I was, similar scene, and there this idea was too. Getting work out of students seems ridiculously difficult. I mean, it's not asking much that they print something each week or write some notes and hand them in, or even keep them for a while and give me stuff maybe once every few weeks. I say it's not asking much but, thinking about it, anything involving a presentation file with more than half a screen print seems to gum up the printing works for a whole lesson and, of course, the next few too until you get someone to clear it or a grey-striped print does eventually emerge. Then there's their own well-honed excuses: no longer do dogs have to eat assignments - we have USBs that can be left at home, break, especially those the College issued at Induction, we have networks that mysteriously lose folders, especially in the early weeks and variations on similarly unlikley catastrophes that no doubt will be covered by parents' Contents Insurance policies before long. That reminds me: I need to upgrade my Public Liability Insurance as I am finding it increasingly difficult to avoid using really quite bad language when such lame excuses are presented, and especially when the printer only does the 'er' bit and forget it has a pretty vital first syllable.

Now I tell everyone about Google Docs and blogs from Week One and some do use them but, and this is the thing, if they all, one lesson soon, simply transfer all their tasks and work in progress to Google Docs or a blog then (i) I would get their stuff automatically without waiting for printers, (ii) I could see how they're actually getting on with tasks (many 'haven'y quite finished, Sir') and (iii) marking is dead easy on-line anywhere I happen to be with no carting folders home when I think I'll have time to mark but don't or leave them at work when I might have.

Blogs, particularly, are great for displaying images and more visual stuff that looks crap in crappy grey-stripe-scale. With units like Digital Graphics and Web production to cover it's virtually essential unless I can persuade Art & Design to be nice to a bunch of lads disturbing them and their nice colour printers every week which I never quite manage to pluck up the courage to suggest aloud.

This is linked to my previous post threatening to 'do' all their assignments and I was thinking where to start. This is a good place. There's nothing very new here at all, folks, I know. Just the determination to do it.

Now, when are those lights going to change?!

DIY

2011-02-23T20:56:00.000Z

My National Diploma students are now half-way through their first year, or 2nd years are three-quarters of the way through the whole 18 units and the vast majority still seem to have pretty empty folders in the 70s metal filing cabinet. So I thought I'd do all the assignments myself - for the units I teach, of course! If I can knock out something suitable in a week or so between ILPs, ICRs, SARs, LATs and whatever other initialled documents are requested when staff return from February sojurns to pastures greener and warmer or whiter and colder then that might convince some students that they really ought to do some work.

If I do manage the 15 assignments I've set them reasonably quickly then I'll be much better placed to push forward the suggestion that that's what all tutors should be doing.

Obviously, I shall be marking mine myself!! Just in case.

Why staff ICT skills matter

2011-02-14T16:50:00.002Z

Once upon a time a teacher could walk into a classroom with some chalk, a pile of papers and talk. Students would usually listen, take notes with a pen and more paper and the topic would be discussed, examined and, with a bit of luck, eventually passed. Lesson followed lesson, people came and people went, boards were scrawled on, cleaned then covered again. If a student was lucky he’d get the notes down before they disappeared and would remember that evening enough of what had been discussed to complete his homework too.

Now a teacher doesn’t even have to walk into a classroom but for those that do they are confronted by students with an array of computer screens and keyboards, some maybe their own, others standard issue affairs and in place of the blackboard there’s an electronic whiteboard connected to a computer, a projector and maybe other gadgets too. Those that aren’t in a classroom may be in a virtual classroom, staring at a screen where students’ head lurk in little boxes or text files across other little boxes in different colours as they converse with them and each other. They may even just be sitting at home with a laptop with their students sitting at their homes with their laptops sifting through a website for notes and indications of what they should be doing next.

ICT skills are in evidence everywhere in teaching and in learning. At the start it’s all about impressions as students view institution websites and publications to decide where they shall study next. There they witness the design talents on-line of a marketing team offering illustrations and extracts from a curriculum and decide whether that could be the place for them. On the way they may get a glimpse of some tutors at work in a classroom or a video of their students saying how much they like life there. Sometimes they’ll see some sample course content and learning material too which some tutors have supplied after more than a few requests by that pushy girl from Marketing or found themselves being filmed doing something that makes students smile and look interested at the same time.

If staff have managed to escape being dragged in to the marketing campaigns themselves they sure don’t avoid Open Days or Enrolment Events advertised on the backs of buses or the local radio station to such an extent that they enter a hall throbbing with potential candidates for their courses and clasping certificates for whatever they’ve managed to pass to date. Those certificates, those posters, those radio interviews, the letters inviting parents to come along and the lists on the table of what staff are offering this year and how to pay for it – all created with someone’s ICT skills and, increasingly nowadays, with the teaching staff’s ICT skills in evidence.

As students sit a desk and start to chat to their prospective tutor there is a two-way process emerging already. The staff member is eyeing their behaviour, demeanour and wondering how much trouble they’ll cause in class while the other is looking at the documents scattered on the table, the type of laptop the chap’s using, what applications he has open on it, what browser he’s using and wondering why he’s writing things down or impressed that he has a notes app. on his mobile or data in an on-line spreadsheet to inform the discussion in real time.

“See you’ve got Firefox, Sir.” could even be the first words from the student to which there may seem to be a myriad possible responses from the interviewer when it is more likely that there are just four.

Yes, I’m trying out version 4.02. Released yesterday. Like the new tabs and it’s fast isn’t it?
Oh, er, the browser. Yes, well-spotted! Have to use these ruddy forms admin give us. Wouldn’t be so bad if the wireless connection worked but can’t seem to get on-line.
Have I? Right. Good. Now, how can I help you?
Glance at parent for a clue.

Immediately, the student, and perhaps the parent too, gets one of four impressions of the staff member’s ICT knowledge if not skills: from ‘on a part with mine, by the seems of it’, through ‘could be good but spotted a weakness’ and ‘he’s not at home with this stuff’ to ‘this guy hasn’t a clue’. That doesn’t mean that he’s not the best History teacher in the world or won’t fire them through their Health & Social Care National Diploma at a rate of knots with distinctions all round but it will set part of the scene in the mind of many an observer, including, of course, the Staff Development Manager who happens to be listening in at the next desk.

Let’s assume the interview goes well and after a few more communications of various type and quality the student decides to join, is accepted and arrives in September for something called Induction. This is where things really start to matter. The student has made one big decision and is rather set on a track now for probably at least a year if not two or more. There in a room somewhere he’ll be addressed by the person who will be the main player in his academic life for some time. Before he gets to the room, though, he needs to find it. The tutor thought a map and some signs might be useful. All the other tutors did too so there, displayed in abundant clarity on a noticeboard, walls or columns, is a collection of how well a host of staff can put half a dozen words on pieces of A4 paper and manage to add large black arrows.

In the room the multitude gathers and, possibly for one of the few times in their post-school academic lives, they look up and to the front with some interest. They are ready to be impressed. They want to be impressed. They appreciate that they may not be, of course, in all cases and in those instances they’ll be comparing what they know they can do to what the person at the front does in one of the few areas they can assess at this time. ICT skills. They need to go away with some genuine belief that the teachers they’ll be stuck with can handle the basic equipment and, preferably, show some talent and efficiency using ICT to communicate. They’ve got in the car. They need to know they’re not going to crash. Or they will be making some early judgements and mentally noting that this or that teacher is struggling with something that they can fix or do better.

The smartboard eventually becomes visible on a bright early autumn day when someone closes the window blinds. And there’s the presentation. Or is it? Did they have to watch as the teacher laboriously searched his desktop for the PowerPoint icon and then give them a preview of the first few little slides before the full screen view finally emerged? Can they read the text? Is it just the same as what he’s saying or more like wallpaper? Or something in between that keeps them focussed and provides opportunities for learning rather than mere spoon-feeding? Indeed, do they get surprised by a website or a web version of a presentation they can view at their leisure another time should they wish to? Let us hope they don’t get some dreadful PDF that has to be scrolled and scrolled and scrolled and makes them wonder why it wasn’t just handed out in the first place. Or, worse, a Word document that requires things to be installed before it will show anything at all, or is entirely in Arial font or the appalling Comic Sans that primary school teachers used to use in when there were only five different fonts in Windows 3.1. Some students may now even be wishing the teacher had used Courier New which has a kind of retro look and could even be regarded as rebelliously cool in 2011.
Now a good communicator may get away for a while with simply excellent speaking abilities, moving around and holding their attention, questioning, interacting, inspiring and informing with mere words, panache and plenty of expression and body language. But it will only be a while and, sooner or later, the ICT skills will be on show. And ICT skills really are on show – unlike one’s subject knowledge, dress sense or humour how a teacher puts text and images on paper or on screen, how they record and store data, how they manage classroom equipment are all out there, day in, day out, night or day in fact in some instances, for viewing by whoever looks on-line, unscrambles the handout in their pocket, thumbs through the course material, checks their progress or reads the e-mail, text message or letter home.

No teacher today can avoid ICT or hide their abilities to utilise it.

The induction group has started to look around the classroom. What’s on the walls? Where once there might have been acres of that coloured paper that faded after a few days in the sun with a scalped white paper border and individually cut-out letters and shiny photos carefully arranged in the design there is now a mass of A4 white print-outs, all in black print, illustrating what students did last year or posters advertising last year’s dance and trip to Alton Towers which could be in colour. There are prints of digital photos taken at an event. And then there’s the notice that tells them they can’t use their mobile phones, eat or drink and what might happen should they attempt to download something they’re not supposed to. The IT Department notices are generally a good guide to how well the equipment will function and the range of useful software likely to be available on the computers once they get to use them.

The small print A4 sheets in Times New Roman with a heading in a slightly larger font in bold and red are not a good sign. The big bold, fun-looking Check Our VLE for what you can and can’t do! Or We do IT well to help you do it well! Now they’re going to make the students more inclined to have faith in the team of technicians often only slightly older than themselves and, more importantly, their teacher’s ability to deal wit them effectively when the printer gives up the ghost of the last person has left a load of plugs dangling from the back of the staff computer.

It may be tempting to say that the teacher may have been issued with a set of standard documents or materials for Induction but this is their chance to establish in the minds of their cohort where they stand. I’m sorry about the quality of this presentation / document / handout – I did suggest they used x, y or z application or put them on-line for you but... will go along way towards restoring a bit of faith that all is not lost with the fellow they’re with although it does say something about that person’s ability to influence those who produced the rubbish in the first place. That also brings us to managers who often manage to keep away from students until something goes wrong and they need to be disciplined but do, or certainly should, have time to see and comment on drafts of general department materials. They could have a huge influence, both from ensuring that the best skills are used in the process and in setting an excellent example themselves. Unless they have good ICT skills themselves it can be very difficult for managers to comment constructively on items or administrative procedures. They also need to be aware of what is possible even if their own abilities mean they could not do it themselves.

In terms of teaching staff’s ICT skills, however, it is of fundamental importance that managers know not only how confident their staff feel in a range of activities and processes but also how confident they themselves feel – if not in actually implementing those skills but at least in knowing what could and should be done and in leading the way in negotiations to attain higher standards and, of really significant importance, demonstrating to their staff and colleagues by their own good practice.

Most managers have been teachers themselves in the recent past and not having to teach the students now is no excuse for not maintaining their own ICT skills. In similar vein to how students perceive their teachers so too will many teachers view their managers and be influenced by them for better or for worse.

In this area, whilst demonstrating excellent practice is key, there are areas where managers will have more effective input than teachers. This could be in the processes used to record progress, store data or promote their curriculum. How they distribute information to their staff through presentations, reports, e-mail and more – all of this almost daily activity will set a standard by which they will be judged. For better or for worse. The manager who regularly sends out all staff e-mails with a large Word attachment or the spreadsheet that umpteen people have to complete and return is asking for trouble. Sooner or later someone has to tell them that publishing a single document somewhere with which staff can collaborate or to which they can contribute is far more efficient on many levels. That in itself will inspire some staff to use similar techniques when asking their students to share or collaborate on a task or activity. For enrolment data or progress reports substitute an on-line set of data. For last month’s minutes of a meeting substitute the on-line blog of last session’s discussion and you’ll get the idea.

The manager himself may, indeed, have acquired actual management skills as well as teaching skills and therein might lie an ability to utilise project management software to display and share information regarding how well a particular course is progressing and the contributions being made and tasks allocated to various tutors and colleagues. Substitute course, tutor and colleague and insert group assignment, student and other students respectively and there is a tool that could be used in class instead of the office backwaters or boardroom.

Moving back to the Induction session again there will be the essential distribution of timetables. It’s the one piece of paper that students do tend to carry around and stick on their wall at home. The set of 15 to 20 will be a daily reference for many a course tutor or whoever answers his phone on a Monday morning when that student’s mother calls to say they’ll be late. They’re always tables and probably Word tables with a lot of lines and occasionally more than one font. Even if the institution has some ancient software that produces these automatically and managers believe they have ticked a box or two for effective use of ICT in that respect following years of attempting to solve the riddle of rooms, people and times manually the resultant print-outs are seldom examples of clear and wonderful presentation of information. Tutors and students with some semblance of awareness that such items ubiquitous display does relate to how they are themselves perceived will go home that night and produce a much smarter version. Those clear and attractive efforts will get noticed and gradually, even if students’ versions end up in an array of pink and totally inappropriate fonts for their own use, the second generation of official ones posted on boards and left lying around classrooms will look professional and generally give the impression that those staff care enough and have the basic abilities to make a difference. That can only bode well for the future.

The smarter tutors may also have added some formulae to their timetable that indicate how many hours they’re doing and contrasting that to what they’re supposed to be doing. That can be particularly useful when, as is so likely to be the case, the timetable changes every so often during the first month or two.
After Induction the students finally start coming in or, in direct learning instances, opening their handbooks or downloading materials, and get to see just what their teachers can do. There’ll be text in documents galore – handouts, session notes, instructions, forms, surveys, questionnaires, leaflets and manuals that their teacher has prepared.

There’ll be lists of names and numbers, modules and tasks, who’s done which and when. There’ll be pie charts and bar charts and line graphs that even if based on data the teacher hasn’t originated will need to be produced and knowing how to use spreadsheets and manage data can make a big difference to record keeping and progress reporting both to management and students.

Presentations will be here there and everywhere, still seen as the principal component of a staple ILT diet by many which begs another question to be examined later.

A world without images or graphics would be a very tedious one and teachers will be expected to add them to a range of documents at the very least. Finding suitable ones they are allowed to use and managing the size of ever-increasingly high resolution digital camera pictures is becoming necessary if storage areas, VLE or e-mail uploads are not to exceed limits. Some will be taking their own pictures and getting students to do so too.
Whether it’s through Firefox or not, the internet will play a major part of any course and how teachers utilise its vast resources will be seen. Whilst the software used may be standard issue, it will readily be apparent whether staff can search efficiently. The number of staff that I have observed locating websites by searching for Google, finding that site and opening the home page, entering website addresses there and then clicking on the site link is remarkable. All they had to do was enter the address in the address bar. One step as opposed to four. Having said that, students also do this far too often but the fact that they remain unchallenged in this and a myriad other inefficiencies shows a need for training.

Even those who seem proficient in searching start to look amateur when initial terms don’t seem to come up with what they seek and some simple but effective search terms could aid their quest considerable had they been aware of them. Having found a site, do they bookmark it or add to a favourites list in a manner that makes it readily accessible next time for themselves or their students, probably in another room? Can they quickly display the page in a more accessible way for those at the back or with poor sight? Or do they simply apologise and get students to move closer? Everyone copies and pastes text from a web page of some form – some a great deal. Ignoring whether they should or shouldn’t for the moment, do staff do this in a smart and effective manner with the required chunks now neatly displayed in a document or presentation slide, or data nicely set out on a spreadsheet ready to be analysed, sorted or stored? Or does the pasted bit stand out like a sore thumb from their own text and annoy those working with it by insisting on trying to connect to a web page whenever it is accidentally clicked or thumped on a smartboard?

We may not expect all students to be as aware as they should of the reliability of information on the web but teachers certainly should be capable of speaking authoritatively on the subject and being able to recognise elements of a page that may give rise to contention or is there doubt as to what its content meant?

There’ll be e-mail communications to send, receive and manage and teacher’s inboxes will range from the neat and tidy ordered folders to the mass of mail mostly unopened that they must get round to sorting out one day. Are they aware of the abbreviations that students will use or will they panic, thinking someone is sending them Lots Of Love when really they just think something’s funny? Do they know that there are other ways students like to communicate these days and that e-mail amongst the young is rapidly being seen as old-fashioned just as many of those over 40 might now regard sticking stamps on envelopes and posting in a box somewhere as something we only do when dealing with mother?

Although the term podcast seems to have come and gone the business of recording discussions has become simpler with smartphones being able to do so at the touch of an icon. Video has long been both the bane of some teachers’ lives, the black rectangle in the PowerPoint show that worked fine at home but refuses to display in class as well as something, at the other extreme, some students and staff seem to be able to take, store and display in a matter of minutes whenever the mood takes them. In the middle is a vast array of teachers who would often like to capture some moments or share a visual process and may well have the kit to do so but never quite pluck up the courage to do it.

Not many years ago it was only the few geeks or web specialists who published material on-line. Then VLEs arrived and provided a way for staff to do so in a fairly standard and managed style of web page. Now, through blogs, wikis and literally thousands of web tools, anyone prepared to spend a short time experimenting with and becoming familiar with a selection of applications can publish with ease and do so in a stylish, smart, professional or fun way to suit their audience. Social networking tools have transformed the communication routes and interactivity between students at large outside their institutions and many expect to continue in similar vein in the classroom. Some teachers have kept up but many can only stand and stare and worry about something called e-safety the e-word that above all others has contributed to fear and progress in this particular field. It is now possible to publish on-line not only a complete set of course materials, tutor presentations, reference material and but also videos of the tutor’s lessons themselves. There are simply massive sets of resources on almost any topic imaginable from which a tutor could select to assist in delivering teaching. How good are they at locating these, assessing their quality and accessibility, not to mention actually transferring them or linking to them so that they can actually make good use of them?

Do teachers share their successes and failures in their own development and use of new technology? Do they know how? Even if the teacher we met at the start of the whole process has been impressive in his ICT skills to this point the extent to which he has since sat back and thought that he’d learned enough may indicate how useful he could be at inspiring others to move forward or how he will continue to cope as the pace of change in technology and what we can achieve with it moves ever faster forward and trickles yet further down into general family and social life. Out of the teenager’s bedroom and into the living room, lounge and classrooms, ICT and what it can do has become part of daily life now.

History of Photography in 40 Photographs - Collection Resources - Collection - National Media Museum

2011-02-06T21:48:00.000Z

History of Photography in 40 Photographs - Collection Resources - Collection - National Media Museum

You can teach what you like in a bare room with a blackboard!

2011-01-21T21:59:00.001Z

I know this is no great revelation but it's worth sharing. I teach a whole range of subjects, mostly related to computing, business or project management. Some I can just wander into a classroom and genuinely feel I'm making a difference, getting through to everyone in the room, even tearing people's eyes away from the latest text message or facebook comment and the guys do learn and do something. Even those that don't actually do that something in the hour and a half they're supposed to, do so when they get round to it later. Others, though, I struggle with. I can be well-prepared, with all kind of materials and lesson plans and similar stuff to my other subjects on a VLE. They either just don't seem to get it, tasks get done reluctantly if at all, no-one seems to want to do much research or come up with anything by way of original content. Ctr + C and Ctr + V rule. Time drags and I go off for a cigarette and wonder what on earth I can do better.

Then it dawned on me. It's all about how much I like the topic, how passionate I feel about it. Nothing to do with them, the room, the ruddy VLE and definitely nothing to do with anything I might have picked up from staff development or teacher training. Where the topic's something I do, something I know loads about, or think I do and enjoy researching, writing about, playing with - that's when it all works. I have gone on about ILT and e-learning, about web tools and goodness knows what for years but the really good teaching - those times when students say thank you as they go and have smiles on their faces because they've learned something they wanted to learn or, even occasionally, look a bit sad because I've struck an emotional chord that was appropriate for a downbeat topic or time, those times have had absolutely nothing to do with all that. It's been about me, my running around the room, arguing, prodding, pushing ideas, passionately claiming how brilliant some design is or cringing physically at some ghastly output or text.

That, dear reader, that's where it's at. If you are interested, intrigued, fascinated and expert in your field that's what you can teach. Inspectors may not approve of your methods. Forget whether you're being inclusive, showing equality of opportunity or whatever it's now called. Sod health and safety. Be brave, be bold, be inspiring, be diffrent, be you.

If you find yourself trudging along to the classroom next week with a pile of lesson plans and standard issue assignment sheets or whingeing when you get there because the internet's not working or there's no projector, moaning about the furniture or all the other things that I know I've done at times, if you do then the chances are that's not a topic you should be teaching. You can teach what you like in a bare room with a blackboard!

We need a Tbay - where we can get colleagues to bid for those units we hate that someone else might really care about. Hey, I might even bid for accounting, probably get that quite cheaply. I'm posting up web architecture which I haven't much of a clue about. No reserve!

It's a pity that we all need to keep our jobs so much these days that none of us will admit to what we don't really like. We'll get by. But if DfE could come up with a passion gauge for a teaching qualification instead of turning us all into robots that would be nice.

As I said, I know this is no new astounding theory. I just felt we needed to be reminded that some of us should stop and make way for a colleague's real talent in some lessons. Not all. Well, not unless you're really crap.

Old chairs, a new Principal and chocolate cake

2011-01-21T19:53:00.002Z

My son has secured a massive number of followers to his 'School Life' blog with his hilarious accounts of daily activities, or should I say, mischief, in class. So I thought I'd better keep up and, although I can't see me managing a daily post, I will see what I can do each week at least.

The highlight of the week in Further Education was the new Principal wandering in to a 9 o'clock class. Luckily he left it until 9:30am but there were still only 7 people in the room. I hid the register which showed a list of 12 names under my scarf. By sheer chance I was wearing a smart suit and looking respectable compared to one colleague who had not only had a long night out on the tiles but appeared to be wearing the same clothes still! Not that you should judge by appearances, of course.

The new chap's first impression would have been of a highly animated lecturer performing around the the room in great style. What he didn't realise was that my animation had been brought on by my amazement at the blank expressions and 'Please don't ask me' faces I'd got when I woke them up to ask what they thought might be a problem with a file that called itself kamasutra.pps.exe - disregarding the obvious. "OK," I tried, "what's the .pps bit?" Blanks. Finally I got one person to mumble PowerPoint when I suggested it might be something like .ppt. As for .exe, well, the nearest I got was "Excel, Sir?"

Hey, these were not just Computing students but 2nd year, Level 3 Computing students!! Well, one wasn't. She was doing 'A' levels and tends to come into my classes for some reason best known to herself, probably entertainment. They really should have been taught and learned what those extensions were all about by now. They had only just the previous week completed their UCAS applications and one had already had an offer or two. Hope it was for a Cookery course or something. Anything but Computing.

The original question had been about the news that day about a new trojan doing the rounds which I thought I'd talk about while the latecomers got out of bed and eventually arrived. The arrival of the Principal saved me using words that they'd have needed a medical dictionary to interpret accurately and saved them further embarrassment. He seems a nice enough chap but I was rather disappointed by his first words which were the dreaded Health & Safety. Some bottles had been left from the night before on desks and he was concerned about drinks and computer equipment. I thanked the Lord that he hadn't appeared at the 1pm session when you can seldom see the desks for ASDA bags, cups and plastic trays of foul-smelling lunch.

I also adjusted my scarf to cover my coffee cup.

He then said something about someone's bag perhaps not being best left on the desktop either before asking them how they were all getting on. "What would you like to improve?" he asked. "Good." I thought. "A chance for them to tell him how lousy the furniture and decor is." Someone said something about wanting extra sessions. I even picked up a chair and held it up behind him, pointing at it frantically to try and get them to say what I wanted them to but without success. I can't imagine how stupid I must have looked but there you go. I did try. Every single chair in the room had a broken back. Not just the plastic cover bit that dangles at right angles to the back and catched you just where you'd prefer it hadn't when a student whizzes round as you pass, but the whole damn things seem to have been built out of cardboard and cloth that dissolves in ASDA salt and vinegar crisp fumes.

The week ended with me staying with a colleague in our office until the caretakers threw us out. She has been struggling with an assignment for her PGCE for weeks. It looked so tediously boring and she didn't seem to have much of a clue where to start with pretty abysmal notes from her tutor (from another institution). She hadn't attended many lectures (or if she had attended she hadn't been particularly attentive, I suspect. You know, female, early 20s, phone, friends . . .they all tend to be more interesting than some lecture.) But there was nothing of much value in any of the notes she'd been given and no on-line stuff either. We had to start at square one. I think I managed about 3000 words in 3 hours which wasn't bad going. The poor girl had to try and find references for all the statements I'd made but did a reasonable job until she got hungry and chocolate cake interrupted the search. On the way we encountered some definitions of a whole range of curricula. the language used by the author was diabolically obstruse, almost as if she wanted it to be impenetrable and so appear so academically Level 7. Now I like to think of myself as pretty good with words but these definitions had me stumped for quite a while. Once we'd managed to dissect what the woman was actually trying to say, one or two were quite interesting. there was a null curriculum which appealed to me. It was what we don't teach. What we leave out of a course of study. Loved that one. I didn't think much of concomitant curriculum, though, and began to wonder why we have this need to use obscure words as some form of short term or expression when it would be simpler by far, and much more likely to be understood by students such as my friend, to say something like what is taught or gained from experiences in the home.

Anyway, the point is that such dreadful work turned out to be really quite refreshing after all as I was forced to have to explain ridiculously weird expressions by making up examples almost on the spot (she was an impatient girl) and many of them did feature chocolate cake. I do like a challenge from time to time.

Two things I've only just realised I don't do any more

2011-01-15T16:03:00.000Z

It has just occurred to me that there are two things I used to do a lot but which I haven't done at all this year! In fact, it may have been for a lot longer and I probably don't think I'll be doing either very much at all in the future. How quickly things change.

No, nothing to do with New Year's resolutions. I didn't even try. No, these are both ways of doing something that had become quite sort of normal - in one case it had been pretty essential for years and years, the other a comparatively recent thing to do most days. I surprised myself when it dawned on me but that probably says more about my observation or awareness skills than anything else.

I'm talking about photocopying and Facebook publishing. Sorry if you thought I was about to reveal some deeply entrenched habit or fascinating personal facts but this is a vaguely e-learning and education-related blog. I used to photocopy every morning. Sometimes there was quite a social scene in the Library where the best photocopier was sited as we all queued and hoped we'd be able to carry our piles of handouts or copied draft strategies or whatever back to the classroom or office in time for whatever it was we proposed to do with them. On cold days, that paper was wonderfully warm too.

Whilst I definitely did notice that my photocopying had dramatically diminished some years ago, mainly due to publishing all my materials and notes on my web site or the VLE, I hadn't realised that it had completely stopped. I hadn't even sneaked in a copy of my driving licence or some bill I was sending off which I'm sure everyone does from time to time.

I did need a copy of a few bits and pieces that weren't available on-line recently but I just photographed them and used the picture. I suppose that took a bit longer but the funny thing is that I never thought twice about it. I needed to send someone something and just whipped the camera out and did so. It was in colour, too, not shades of grey.

The Facebook thing is possibly the biggest surprise, though. I quite like Facebook and regularly browse through what various people are doing but it was only when I looked at my own profile page that I saw that my entries were all from one or other of a range of applications that feed Facebook rather than my actually typing in the boxes there. Apart from an occasional profile picture change, comments on someone's comments or picture and maybe a few photos of my own that is it. Quite different to even as recently as last year when I was often updating my status or something.

The big change is largely due to finding a nice feed application in RSSGraffiti which picks up what I publish in various places and throws it into Facebook and using Rockmelt, a great new browser based on the super-fast Chrome. Rockmelt provides a dead simple panel to display what's going on in Facebook without actually having to visit the full page. That's basically all I want. Rockmelt also provides similar panels for my e-mail and Twitter and it is Twitter that nowadays gets most of my attention. If I want to share something I share it there and that goes to all sorts of interesting people as well as Facebook.

Facebook is largely now a 'friends' place for me and I can't recall when I last had any interaction there of any significant 'work' relevance. Twitter is still almost entirely 'work' in terms of who follows me and sees what I say but I am increasingly using it for other things I like to share, be they thoughts on potholes, design, X Factor views or what my son's doing at school that he shouldn't. The people I follow cover all those things and more and, increasingly, I'm getting a lot of local news that way as well as great links to new web tools and the like.

I wonder I'll give up for 2012?

Two useful things to do at your next staff development session.. 1 - show this and 2 - get out of their way

2011-01-03T17:39:00.003Z

This animation is from Michael Feldstein at a Sakai Conference in July 2010. I think the conference was about innovation in teaching. I have to admit to not having heard of it before but the ideas presented and the cool animation are fascinating. It lasts 10 minutes or so but it might help my employers understand how I work, and probably you too if you're the type that's interested enough to watch it through! If nothing appears below, try this direct link.

Surely something wrong here?

2010-12-13T22:04:00.000Z

I spent a good hour trying to figure out why a deceptively simple-looking device in Excel to colour some rows green and others red to indicate which teams were top and bottom respectively in a table didn't do what it said on the box. It's called conditional formatting and my 12-year old son said he could do it fine in Excel2003 but not Excel2010. I had hardly ever used conditional formatting at all before but eventually worked out how to write the formula needed. (For those intrigued, you had to type something like =h3>m3 which, for some reason, just didn't come naturally!)

The task was all about some team scores in a range of activities. They had to be added up and then the list rows coloured to show the top and bottom teams. A macro was also needed to do some sorting which he managed effortlessly. I remember that macros usually took me a couple of goes as I would click something either at the start or the end which stopped it working or landed up on a blank sheet. Not for the youngster, though - right first time.

After solving the = business my only real contribution was to show him how to make the sheet look cool by changing colours, using some different fonts and hiding virtually everything except the displayed data. He had also quite happily protected the sheet and left unlocked just those cells that a user might change and included some validation rules to ensure someone's favourite team didn't get a sneaky huge score added in.

Today, at a Further Education College, I had cause to look at some assignments that were being issued to students. The topic was related to business information systems and required students to suggest and illustrate methods to display data in a pretty similar way to my son's task.

Except.

Except there was no requirement that they could do validation. No requirement for any automatic colouring of cells or smartening of the sheet appearance. Arial, possibly one of the worst-looking spreadsheet fonts apart from Comic Sans, rules OK, apparently, unless you have Office 2007 or later. Not a hint of macros either.

These students are 17, 18, some going on 20. Most of them do not seem particularly dumb, some even give the impression of being pretty geeky and can do things like evade the clutches of the internet filtering system and get extremely high scores in the helicopter game. But not only did they look at me with those vacant expressions that make you wonder whether you've asked them to explain the difference between ought and should and would or explain how the date of Easter Sunday is calculated when I mentioned validation, macros and conditional formatting, many seemed to find the simple task before them a challenge.

These are Level 3 National Diploma Computing students, for heaven's sake! OK, they can do some binary sums that my 2nd year schoolboy doesn't know about but he is so far advanced in comparison on what I call the ICT skills that could be useful in an office environment it's weird. Yes, he's pretty bright but what he's doing at school - in what I call 2nd year (Year 8 I think in new eduspeak) - is what the whole class is expected to achieve, whether they like spreadsheets or not.

I wondered how on earth my daughter, 14, had managed to cope with that as I don't remember tears or dramatic messages on Facebook pleading for help in 2008. Apparently she just did it and hoped for the best and, whilst not enjoying it much and not exactly shining bright on the formulae front, she knew what we were talking about, at least, and had I offered tickets to Matt Cardle in Concert she would have been able to help her little brother in my absence.

Now, the group of National Diploma students are largely similar to most preceding years I can recall. I've never actually taught this topic but it seems that the criteria for passing at Level 3 fall way short of the school's learning outcomes. What on earth is going on? I know standards have slipped but, taken in conjunction with generally appalling written English and research skills which comprise solely Google and Wikipedia it seems we're about to release yet another qualified yet totally unqualified bunch of otherwise pleasant enough people into the world of work.

Wikileaks: disclaimer

2010-12-05T10:01:00.000Z

I can see that I'll shall have to add a disclaimer along the following lines to tweets, e-mail, document footers, presentation slides, blog posts, Facebook and LinkedIn updates, wiki pages, sites and, yes, definitely, Technorati, American Idol and XFactor articles!

The contents of this communication may or may not have been written by me and even if it was it may not reflect what I actually think as I have have missed a crucial not in a sentence or accidentally jumbled up the words. My computers do not all require a new log-in when idle and any one of a range of passing children, girlfriends, clients, colleagues or pets may have used the keyboard in my absence. There are also lots of people with my name and I am never too sure which one is me so treat any text as potentially totally meaningless. I am also not very well off so suing would be quite pointless.

A 140 character version is available on request.

I shall also start talking to people more.

Reason 543 Why You MUST Stop Site Blocking: Your Employees Can't Solve Their Problems On Their Own

2010-12-03T22:12:00.000Z

I couldn't have put this better myself. So I won't. Here's an excellent article by Michelle Martin's The Bamboo Project. The link takes you to the original article which I have simply reproduced below. Of course, it's probably blocked by your institution :/

Yesterday was a typical day for me as a knowledge worker--lots of unrelated problems to solve, ranging from troubleshooting an issue with a Wordpress blog I was setting up for a client to gathering information on employment statistics for people with disabilities. I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in having this kind of wide-ranging work to do. Even the specialists among us have found their job duties broadening in this tight economy.

For me, solving these problems turned out to be relatively easy. I work for myself and don't have to worry about site blocking, so was able to easily access and search the blogs, social networks, videos and forums that gave me the answers I needed. If necessary, I would also have been able to access my own networks through social media.

Unfortunately for the vast majority of front line workers at the organizations I work with, this would not have been the case. For them, many of these sites are blocked. If "blog" is in the title or URL, they can't go there. If the information is on a social network or forum, they can't visit it. Forget YouTube and its vast array of tutorials. Even many basic websites are blocked.

At the same time, their managers will complain that staff don't solve their own problems, that they aren't innovative or creative in their work. Well of course they aren't--they are denied basic access to the people and information that might actually help them get their jobs done! They are forced to rely on people within their own organizations--many of whom don't have the answer either--and on those websites the powers that be deem to be "acceptable."

When I do trainings and presentations, participants will frequently ask me how I "know so much." It's simple. No one is blocking my access to the web, so when I have a question, I can get an answer. I'm empowered to get information and solve problems on my own. If you want people to do their best work, they need the same access.

Well said! Not only do I see the Access Denied sign almost every day at work but the screen also tells me my attempt has been logged and if I'd bothered to read the rest of the small print it's probably also been passed to HR to add to my file and someone will be talking to me about retraining and mind adjustment in due course. I am so tempted to type in some really bad site addresses and don't know how I've resisted that to date! To be fair, IT technicians do usually free sites up for me when I ask them but I'm usually in the middle of trying to get some answers and waiting for however long it takes them to do that isn't an option.

People wonder why I do so much work at home.

Why work doesn't happen at work

2010-11-28T22:34:00.000Z

A brilliant talk by Jason Fried, well worth sparing 15 mins of your busy time at work to watch!

There are 9 million bicycles in Bejing

2010-11-20T13:36:00.000Z

I was never particularly brilliant at Geography, which probably explains why I often ask "Where am I?" but that's another topic, but I did spend many hours with a small paperback Atlas, especially those little maps of the world where the sizes of the countries were changed to reflect their population, fridges per person or whatever.

I'm still fascinated by statistics and maps, though, and The CIA World Factbook is one of those sites I can wander around for ages. You learn that there are more girls than boys in Ukraine, for example, which may explain why there always seem to be a lot on stage in most of their Eurovision entries. And there's not a lot going on in the phosphate mines on Christmas Island these days but no doubt many of its 1,402 population will be enjoying a vaguely palindromic Christmas Island Christmas soon, knowing that no other country can do that.

Back in the 1990s the data was available in a huge workbook with hundreds of sheets and that was a great tool to use in Excel classes. Now it's all web page stuff and not so easy to play with. However, it's still got a massive amount of well-displayed, and reliable, data which is updated every two weeks or so. The whole shooting match can be downloaded too, free, which is nice when the internet breaks down in class and you need to give students some research to do. With so much data available, thinking up some questions to keep them interested shouldn't take long - and there are maps galore too.

You might also have a giggle at the Kids' page which includes the classic line "CIA employees gather intelligence (or information) in a variety of ways, not just by “spying” like you see in the movies or on TV (though we do some of that, too).

Good ideés

2010-11-17T19:16:00.000Z

The talented people at Ideé Labs have added some new tools to their set. You may know about Multicolour Search Lab, which will find images matching whatever colours you choose, and TinEye, which will locate where duplicates of an image (maybe that photo of you when you were 2?!!) have been used (with or probably without your approval) on a web page somewhere.

The new ones (to me, at any rate) are the Visual Search Lab, where you enter tags and get pictures displaying that particular combination, and BYO Image Search Lab which finds images similar to the one you provide.

Whatever you may be teaching or training people to do, I am sure you'll be able to find a way to sneak one of these into a lesson. Or stick a collage on the wall, for no other reason than it's about time those old posters were binned. (But that's the subject of another article to follow!)

Naughty but nice and a lot quicker

2010-11-12T23:05:00.000Z

Yes, I know I should have done them in August. But I didn't and I've just spent most of the day knocking out 10 schemes of work and a slightly ridiculous-sounding 300 lesson plans. It was blowing a gale outside and raining so that helped keep me indoors.

If you do the sums that's nearly 700 pages. Now, I can type pretty quickly but that's beyond even my old PA's capabilities in a single day. Luckily, there's the new version of my Scheme of Work and Lesson Plan tool which made the whole job a lot easier. Still clunky, but it does the job. (I'm hoping a nice young chap called Steve will help with a web version soon!)

You fill in all the bits and pieces related to the programme and lessons on one spreadsheet. Then some nice formulae copy the text into the right places on either a Scheme of Work sheet or to the appropriate one of 30 Lesson Plan sheets. Those sheets are set up to look reasonably good when printed on A4 and I can now run off whichever items I need as and when required.

In reality I usually find the notes I scrawl on the back of an envelope in the car a few minutes before the lesson starts are what I actually do but on occasions like next week, when someone is likely to come and watch the proceedings I'd better look a bit more organised.

Of course, if you happen to work for one of those institutions that say "You'll be downgraded if you don't use the standard institutional form" or it's on the wrong colour paper, even, in one place I've heard about ". . . using anything other than Arial size 11" then you, like me will be very naughty. But it is nice and a lot quicker.

I've added a sample you can use to the More page of the webtools site if you're also running a bit late with this task.

Binging - it simply neither looks nor sounds right

2010-10-15T16:54:00.000Z

It's amazing to watch students searching on the web these days. I nearly typed googling but that doesn't actually describe what they do . . .

You see at one of the places I lecture the IT technicians have made Internet Explorer the only browser they can use and left all the Microsoft defaults in place. That means the search box is for Bing. But that doesn't seem to affect students because as soon as you ask them to do anything they type google into the address bar anyway which produces a list of sites from which they choose google.co.uk and then, finally, type what they want to know about in the box. (In fact, they'd probably do this anyway even if the technicians did change the deafult search tool to Google.)

If we had Chrome then they could just type the search term in the address bar and they'd save a lot of time. I did ask why some of them did the long-winded thing and thought it might have been because they all now used Chrome at home but no, they just seem to have got into the habit and some didn't even notice the Bing box

I suppose that instead of googling we might have been talking of students binging. Hmm. I guess now I understand wht that never took off.

Facebook for teaching and learning?

2010-09-16T19:42:00.000Z

This is a reply I gave to a question on the excellent JISC Curriculum Champions list today which I thought may be of wider interest.

I've been experimenting with Facebook pages (as well as lots more!) over the years. In one institution that I'm associated with these have only been accessible on phones or via proxy browsers in class so of little use there but, after almost zero activity of value for two years, I have found a remarkable increase in the last few months by students and colleagues from home and discussions, sharing of thoughts, constructive comments and links to pretty relevant resources surprisingly (to me!) unlittered with rubbish or 'I'm just getting Luke to make me a sandwich' stuff which they now seem to reserve for their own personal pages.

I won't pretend that anything marvellous is happening but it's a familiar, dead easy to use environment and the new input each week has been something I have been able to refer to and expand on, or encourage more research into, in normal sessions. In particular, I've seen students helping each other with tasks and saying what they think about topics which doesn't seem to be happening much on the VLE.

In another institution access is not initially restricted and although one or two tutors have set up course or module pages none seem to have had much impact. It really does still seem to be something mostly used out of the classroom. This place has installed a control mechanism that enables tutors to monitor students' screens from a staff pc and as purely social use gets their access pretty smartly cut there have been quite a few mistakes as it was difficult to distinguish a personal page from an 'approved' one! I guess the topic (project management) hasn't lent itself to as much interest in research and sharing there as the other (web design) where there are links and visual interest a-plenty.

What does appear to be working well are pages set up in some Work Based Learning sectors I've been involved with. All the participants are adults and spread out across the planet, occasionally meeting for practical workshops. The simplicity of creating photo albums, for example, has enabled people who I know have pretty low ICT 'Office-type' skills to share examples of what they've done at these workshops. Discussions do have regular and generally organised input and a little direction from tutors which helps a lot. The main purpose of the pages was initially just to promote an organisation's events and activities and the inclusion now of nice comments, images and links to resources has had the pleasant effect of enhancing its image and their workshops.

There's nothing being done here that couldn't be done using other applications but Facebook just kinda works for many. I certainly wouldn't describe any of this as particularly significant, however, as there are lots of new tools around and coming up which enable more efficient and manageable delivery of course materials and interaction which will, I feel, be ultimately be preferred to facebook (unless fb develops its own app further in that direction!). In particular the advent of sites people can contribute to (and tutors edit) simply and the marvellous RSS feeds from tutors, students and authoritative source blogs will make a big difference to life in the classroom. Twitter is also proving to be an excellent tool for finding and sharing really up-to-the-minute ideas and resources and, indeed, many of the most valuable posts of those facebook pages were, in fact, auto feeds from Twitterfeed or similar!

Lastly, here's a video I found of a recent discussion in the States that you may get colleagues talking too. Some odd spelling in the comments - not mine, I should add!

BLT! I like that. (The new webtools site).

2010-07-30T23:21:00.000Z

Once upon a time there was ILT. Then it became e-learning or elearning and now it's . . . well . . . both and yet neither one nor the other. I've always liked information learning technology. It says it all - technology, learning, information. I suppose it could be argued that NLN got it right with their Learning Technology team, of which I was a member for a while. E-learning has always confused people and required us to spend the first 20 minutes defining it at the start of sessions and our colleagues from other parts of the planet think e-learning is distance learning or variations on the theme anyway. Which is fine too but all this hyphenated stuff is very 90s now. If you have to think up a term to describe something then your time's better used thinking up ways to use it. So I'm going back to ILT and good old web tools. Oh, hang on, they're apps now. Back to Square One.

Whatever it's called, we want tutors to use IT. Students expect it. They like accessing notes, tasks and anything they missed and want to look at again in their own home, with a friend or just somewhere other than the classroom at 9am. Or the library where they can't make any noise. Or the IT Workshop where they need the ID card they've forgotten and the computers probably don't have their familiar software, especially browsers, anyway.

All that's needed is to get a baseline of course materials on-line somewhere, make them look attractive, quick to load and simple to find. There are lots of great tools out there to make using learning technology easy for even the least enthusiastic tutor.

I've updated the webtools site and it's now all about what I'm going to call BLT. Brilliant learning technology. What you can do now is amazing and there's not a moodle upload or log-in in sight! The concept's unchanged: office-type, planning, research, media and web design applications listed in categories. All are free and almost all ad free. You are encouraged to review them, make comments and these you can now do using forms on most pages. I've dropped the PBworks wiki pages for this as it was quite hard work adding new pages both there and on the site plus links between them for every new entry. Instead, I'm using Google forms which will publish responses through the site. Good examples people have supplied of apps in action I shall retain and make links to them on the appropriate pages. The wiki will stay but I'll redevelop it as it is one of my favourite BLTs in its own right.

So, go and get your images sorted out and resized, find or even make a video, add them to some cool web pages showing students how to be really smart in their research so they can complete your course for which, of course, you have put everything on-line somewhere, haven't you. Ah, forgot . . you'll need to plan all that but, yes, there'll be a tool for that!

Enjoy the new site!

Forums for a change

2010-07-22T01:27:00.001Z

Something else I need to research is a forum. A colleague at an institution I work with has suggested that we should have one for distance learning students. Now forums, or fora I suppose, have been around for a while but the only ones I've actually found useful myself have been those I've been taken to by Google when trying to find answers to something like why I'm getting strange messages on my laptop or how to focus the viewer display on a digital camera.

You know you're in a forum because most contributors have strange names and even stranger icons next to them. They either know absolutely everything or are asking simple questions. There seem few in the middle. The answers and links often provided are usually jolly good and have to date either reassured me that I needn't worry about something or provided a pretty quick answer confirming that I should. Very seldom have I ever had to post a new query and most of the ones I've visited I never joined anyway.

You also know you're in a forum because whoever designed it was rather better at php code than designing things. Nearly all comprise streams of verdana stretching across the wide screen with shades of grey or lime green separating entries. There's little clue on the page to where you actually are in many cases either.

An exception used to be Lefora, with nicely laid out pages and templates you could use to create your own forum. I used these a lot once but because there were inactive for a period they were archived and now I'd need to start all over again to retrieve them. That says it all, really, no-one participated much in them. They could contact me in all sorts of other ways and the material I published there was essentially stuff I'd already written and published elsewhere too so it would only have been interaction between members that would actually have created any original content.

In some fields I am sure such interaction could occur and be encouraged so I'm not against the idea. I just don't see myself doing any more with forums in the future than I've done to date. Pop in when I need something and then move on. That doesn't help with research, though, so I am going to try very hard to keep an open mind and see what I can come up with.

Facebook pages have a lot to recommend them for some groups of students who would feel completely at home in the environment. That's one option. Another is LinkedIn which I have joined but done little with since. It could be the answer for the more adult types we're likely to be dealing with. I shall also take a fresh look at Lefora and PBworks, the excellent wiki application. Zoho might do something too. I seem to recall that their suite of applications dwarfed the might Microsoft's mainstream list - and Zoho's are free.

I do have this feeling, though, that whatever we created will have a burst of activity for a few weeks and then people will just e-mail each other or their tutor as they've done to date. We'll see.

OneNote is probably the answer . . . if I can figure it out

2010-07-22T00:59:00.000Z

I've got a presentation to make soon to a University about how students can use Microsoft's OneNote to keep activity logs, notes, plan to meet learning outcomes, liaise with tutors and maintain a portfolio. Whilst this was intended originally for students on distance learning courses in the Work Based Learning sector I keep thinking to myself that it really ought to be of interest to almost any student.

For some reason, though, I'm finding it hard to get my head round the application. It seems to look nice and I have a good idea of what I need to illustrate and can use several of my own courses for material and samples of collaboration and liaison, web links, notes and the like but actually doing it in the Microsoft product just isn't coming naturally at all.

I may well have to take a look at some samples from a Scottish institution that I know are using it, or have recommended that their staff use it for various courses they send them on but I really do want to be able to do it myself so that I can illustrate the idea with confidence and recognise the various elements easily. My mind keeps wondering whether I could do all this more easily in Google docs and that's probably the problem. Whatever I do nowadays, I have the same thought: "Ah, I could use Google for this..." which is great in many ways but not what I can expect everyone else to do.

I keep telling myself that I've managed, finally, to get the hang of 2007-style ribbons in Office, that I really do like the new ease of smart document styling and there are some nice graphic tools there too. Hopefully I will get there in the end with OneNote too and have something other than Google to share with colleagues soon.

Short distance learning

2010-07-19T14:53:00.001Z

In a couple of months I shall walk into a classroom and there'll be around 20 new faces looking at me and wondering just what they've let themselves in for. I tended to think the same thing some years ago but I seem to have got the hang of it now although I still get nervous which is silly but there you go.

There are a few things I can do between now and then which will help enormously. So this is my list of things to do over the summer break.

1 Write a plain English intro for the course, module or unit that reminds them that it can be interesting and can be useful stuff to know or be able to do in the real world

2 Look at the criteria or learning outcomes again and check that the tasks, exercises and assignments I've got in mind will meet them and that they don't have to do a whole load more for no good reason

3 Re-write the tasks and display them in an appealing way. It's bad enough calling something an assignment, never mind giving it to them as a long-winded form that puts them off and has the actual bit about what they're supposed to do buried on page 3.

4 Do the tasks myself, not just to make sure I'm not asking something silly but also to create a sample that they can see where appropriate. This will also give me an idea of how to extend the task for the smart guys and perhaps make it simpler for the less able at least to achieve something.

5 Make the tasks easily accessible on-line, on web pages rather than Word documents. Add links to notes, the criteria they're supposed to meet and my sample effort.

6 Write bundles of notes on related topics and some specific guidance for the tasks themselves. Make the notes look nice, with illustrations where appropriate, and presented well, including as web pages that load quickly.

7 Provide links to useful web sites and further information on the topic or tasks.

That's really what I've got to do, and what they've got to do in a nutshell. The funny thing is that I wrote these notes for a totally different institution's tutors who all work on distance learning courses. I also wrote some notes to guide students through their side of the process and how various web tools can be really useful. I might add those here too next.

App Inventor for Android

2010-07-19T14:11:00.000Z

This is quite remarkable. The very idea that 'normal' people can make applications, sorry, they're called apps now, for their mobile is just so hard to grasp. Yet it seems to be true and could be one of those massive leaps that happen from time to time in technology and what we do with it.

The GoogleLabs App Inventor for Android ..

"You can build just about any app you can imagine with App Inventor. Often people begin by building games like MoleMash or games that let you draw funny pictures on your friend's faces. You can even make use of the phone's sensors to move a ball through a maze based on tilting the phone.

But app building is not limited to simple games. You can also build apps that inform and educate. You can create a quiz app to help you and your classmates study for a test. With Android's text-to-speech capabilities, you can even have the phone ask the questions aloud.

To use App Inventor, you do not need to be a developer. App Inventor requires NO programming knowledge. This is because instead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app's behavior."

Apart from spelling behavior differently there'd be no point in me trying to put this any better. I carry on, with acknowledgements to the GoogleLabs writers..

"App Inventor is simple to use, but also very powerful. Apps you build can even store data created by users in a database, so you can create a make-a-quiz app in which the teachers can save questions in a quiz for their students to answer.

	Because App Inventor provides access to a GPS-location sensor, you can build apps that know where you are. You can build an app to help you remember where you parked your car, an app that shows the location of your friends or colleagues at a concert or conference, or your own custom tour app of your school, workplace, or a museum.
	You can write apps that use the phone features of an Android phone. You can write an app that periodically texts "missing you" to your loved ones, or an app "No Text While Driving" that responds to all texts automatically with "sorry, I'm driving and will contact you later". You can even have the app read the incoming texts aloud to you (though this might lure you into responding).
	App Inventor provides a way for you to communicate with the web. If you know how to write web apps, you can use App Inventor to write Android apps that talk to your favorite web sites, such as Amazon and Twitter."

This all sounds great and I can imagine students will really love this too. Now, I wonder just how 'easy' it really is? I'll let you know in a while.

Google just keeps on getting better and better

2010-07-19T13:53:00.000Z

And it's still free, that's like a bonus! The latest improvement that I'm itching to try is in options available when making Google Forms. Forms are already a brilliant way to add lots of interest to teaching and learning material and now it looks as though we'll be able to make different parts of a form display depending on the responses to a question.

I have been staring at a blank screen for a while over the last few days trying to figure out the best way to revise my ICT Staff Assessment tool and this may be an answer. More about that in a while I hope.

The webtools site is also undergoing a good shake-up. It's proving to be a longer process than I'd first thought but'll get there. Google now could appear on virtually every page but I still do want to get you playing (and hopefully reporting back too) on some of the lesser known and newer tools out there.

Let's do the Time Warp again

2010-07-05T18:21:00.003Z

I've just spent an excruciatingly boring day at an FE college. No. I'm not a student; this was as a member of a department team tasked with completing a form. This form appeared to have been designed to fit into some kind of quality management process, with good knowledge of an Ofsted language dictionary being required which (fortunately and sadly) I do possess. With nine pages divided into sections covering various elements of course management and delivery, each seeking strengths and weaknesses - no, sorry, we're not supposed to have weaknesses any more so the latter heading read Areas for improvement - it would be familiar to any of you who have wrestled with something called a Course Review or even a Strategic Annual Review.

The first thing that struck me was that the form was dreadfully badly designed for anyone to use. In fact it wasn't a 'form' at all in a Word sense. It may have looked OK when printed, in an Arial Bold kind of way, but the boxes to be filled in were all formatted as justified text so huge gaps appeared between words and the font in the box was the same black ruddy Arial Bold so it rapidly became a messy-looking affair that wasn't something anyone could possibly have any enthusiasm to read. Perhaps that was intentional. Filling in a box tended to push everything below down and, more often than not, split things confusingly and randomly across page breaks. I did suggest Control + L or + Enter a few times at appropriate moments during the day but that fell on deaf ears or may have been mistaken for something to do with hell or giving birth.

The second thing was that as we debated what should be entered the most senior chap there was typing it very haphazardly and slowly on the form. In some ways this would have made sense had he been able to spell or summarise what we were saying reasonably quickly but we could only watch as a succession of red and green wavy lines appeared at almost every burst of keyboard activity. As he'd connected his pc to a smartboard an original idea of sharing the process became a bit of entertainment for the rest of us.

What was actually being entered, even after debate with reasonably intelligent colleagues, was typical academic-speak. Saying the same thing twice, using long words wherever possible and not actually saying anything much at all at the end of the day, just in case it didn't match something somewhere else on this form which was rapidly assuming almost biblical importance. This was because all the good things we reckoned we were doing well didn't have any obvious evidence. Our assurances were not to be trusted. It had to be something written in a Course Management File and if it wasn't written on the right form in the right section of said CMF then it didn't happen.

So this drivel went on for several hours. I did think about asking why we were doing it in the first place but that was one of those question that you really do need to pluck up a bit of courage to ask. I did have the courage but didn't think of it until about 4 o'clock and had to dash off to collect my son from school five minutes later.

What really frustrated me, though, was when many strengths were shown as figures for things like how many students had enrolled, been retained and succeeded. These numbers were on various sheets of paper. Those sheets had been printed from a nearby computer. Someone then counted up the three numbers from the lines on the printed sheet, yelled them at the expensive typist who then did his best to slap them in the right box. Then we all watched the little Windows calculator appear on the smartboard and sums being entered, the answers then being put in brackets with a percentage sign added into the same boxes. To top it off, a benchmark figure was entered with a ± number indicating how much better or worse we were.

All this flaming data is available on a college Management Information System or other computer records. Why on earth couldn't the form be populated with this information automatically?? It's a successful department in many ways but we should surely manage information better.

And the department? Computing. Oh boy.

Google for Educators

2010-06-11T21:33:00.000Z

I like the idea of being a Google Certified Teacher. Even if you don't apply for that then there are still lots of well-produced and effective materials available, for free of course, the latest being ideal for tutorials on whether to trust websites and appreciating just how stupid you can make yourself look on-line!

Applications for the Google Certified Teacher have to be in pretty soon and they insist that they're accompanied by a link to a 1 minute YouTube video that applicants have created. I wish my sons' smartboard antics were sub-1 minute which would save me the trouble of thinking up something new. actually, typing that has given me an idea - I can interview Bryony, Kirri and Matti on what's cool in the classroom or which teacher's the one that needs the most help . . or something like that.

Big picture solutions

2010-04-30T11:40:00.001Z

We love images. But lots of staff and students still seem to have trouble resizing them to share, whether by e-mail or in documents.

Thanks to an E-learning colleague for reminding me about XP PowerToys and their Image Resizer which makes the task of making that huge digital image manageable and probably less than 5% of its original file size delightfully simple.

If you use a lot of screenprints you should also get Irfanview to edit and save them rather than just pasting some whole screen image in. (If only to avoid the embarrassment of showing everyone what else you may have had open at the time! Many times I have had to smile at the other browser pages visible, file names in a folder view, an ancient operating system still being used, snippets of personal e-mail visible or that nice pink and purple Windows theme!)

More information and some illustrations on my FAQICA blog.

Feedback :)

2010-04-05T17:47:00.000Z

Although some of these appear to be from earlier times, I am doing my best to keep the spirit of good marking and report-writing alive. (Feedback, being a screeching and wailing noise, is something I seem to receive from, rather than give to, parents and students.)

A vision of students today (old but relevant)

2010-03-13T14:42:00.002Z

Draft Blogger

2010-03-13T08:59:00.000Z

Well done, Blogger! I have so often been tempted to move to another blog application where much smarter designs and simpler editing of the look and feel have been available. The choice of initial designs has been fixed since the year dot or shortly after until now . . .

Although still in 'draft' they say, Google have opened up some really smart developments for us bloggers with their Blogger Template Designer. Looks like I'll stick around a bit longer!

Have a look and start using this for your own blogs. Or go to Blogger in Draft and log in as usual. Have fun.

When will they ever learn?

2010-03-05T18:07:00.002Z

You know you're getting older when everyone in the audience appears younger than you are! Still, that helped my theme along a bit as I had an opportunity to get good minds a-thinking at Cambridge Regional College for a VLE Forum earlier today.

A last minute change of agenda meant that I got to speak earlier than expected so it was a relief to find the internet was nice and quick and my sample moodle site opened up reasonably quickly. Not as fast as my own site would have but I couldn't recall where I'd put the link on that one. I started by recalling a visit to Hertfordshire Regional College some weeks ago where the blisteringly fast speeds made web pages sort of snap at you and you seemed only to have to imagine a page and up it appeared.

Back in 2004 or thereabouts I had taken part in an end-of-event show entittled The Good the Bad and The Ugly in which I bemoaned the slow progress in getting some pretty simple ILT and e-learning ideas into the mainstream, especially with people who really should have been setting a good example.

I recalled:

VLE courses that were just lists of links to Word documents in blue text, interspersed with the occasional PowerPoint link, none of which would exactly open in a hurry or without umpteen further decision-making clicks on the way.

SharePoint coming on the scene but only being understood by pretty techy people who produced similarly long lists of blue text links for staff à la form for students' courses on a VLE. What was good enough for students must have been good enough for staff, I mused,

I recalled inboxes stuffed with huge 1MB attachments and sometimes several Word files attached to All Staff e-mails. Word documents staff were expected to complete and then save and return so that maybe 20 or 30 individual documents could then be combined in some way by some hapless secretary; Excel spreadsheets that tutors were expected to complete and return every month in order to update some central record that must have caused headaches for the ultimate recipient when he or she received 56 files with names like achievement[23].xls, achievement [22].xls and so on.

There were a few odd geeks like me around in 2004 who were creating web materials for students but not many and we were seen as a bit odd.

Portfolios were made of something called cardboard. Thick card which folder in such a way that, by placing sheets over two metal pillars stuck inside somehow, papers could be retained. The papers themselves needed to have holes punched in them by gadgets most people had somewhere other than where they looked first.

Ah, how times have changed, haven't they? Or have they?

Finally getting to the second slide of the presentation the screen changed to reveal a massive list of links to Word documents, so many on a VLE course that the complete list wouldn't fit on the screen print I'd taken. That was a current 2010 course I'd copied from a VLE I had seen. It wasn't at all unusual.

The third screen showed a staff intranet page made by IT Technicians using SharePoint. Another long, long list if tiny blue lines of underlined text, more links to hundreds of Word documents. That was a current 2010 page being used at another institution.

A fourth screen showed my own College e-mail inbox. Top of the list were files with attachments. Yes, things had changed here - the size. Two were over 7MB and several at 3 or 4MB! I recalled how I used to get messages from someone called System Administrator. System would write to tell me that I had exceeded my limit. Another click revealed yesterday's mail which included, yes, you've guessed . . Mr Administrator was still employed and still sending me the same message.

I wailed a bit about this as I tend to do when stuck for words (although I certainly couldn't have been stuck for Words). then, in the spirit of being helpful I went to slide five and illustrated how a VLE page could be a happier place altogether. Adding images would be a good start. There they were. Replacing Office documents with web documents would be a good move too. I showed people both the use of moodle web documents using text simply copied and pasted from Word and the lovely Google documents solution.

I emphasised how several people could be given permission to edit a single document using Google Docs and how the application would retain all the versions and changes and indicate who had done waht. It would be saved automatically and kept safe and sound my the mighty G team.

The multiple spreadsheet file nightmare could be solved by using an on-line spreadsheet too.

Then I showed how a presentation needn't be PowerPoint and how a mini version could be used to display ideas on a VLE, blog or web page. I was, indeed, using a Google Presentation there and then and had arrived with zero materials to plug in or worry about.

The penultimate slide was a recommendation that we should see these types of provision of materials and communication and the new 'basics'. There was nothing particularly complicated about using any of the tools now available and anyone who can find headers and footers on the Office 2007 ribbon in under 10 minutes would be able to do what I had done. The people at the meeting were those who could make a difference and help bring the new ideas to colleagues. Training programmes and staff development sessions on these topics could be fun as well as genuinely useful rather than merely ticking boxes on the latest Government educational 'initiative' compliance list.

But it isn't really our colleagues who need the real help. From what I could tell by observing a range of senior staff at work over the last few years it is the institutional leaders and even some heads of organisations supporting change who need to change the most. Because they haven't had anyone nagging them or insisting they include ILT in their 'lesson plans' for staff development, teacher training, academic board meetings, Startegic Annual reviews, statistics gathering and all the rest, or maybe just because they didn't feel comfortable with new ICT, many have fallen far behind or not moved an inch since the start of the Century.

Just as Government departments and various quangoes are now urging us to help Granny get connected, I suggested that we could do our bit by 'adopting an Executive' or 'supporting a Senior'. If we see something that can be improved by utilising the very same tools tutors are being exhorted to use then we should, as delicately and tactfully as we can, show them how they can demonstrate so much better practice.

Otherwise, now that they don't teach . . . when will they ever learn?

My thanks to JISC RSC Eastern for inviting me to speak at this event and for Cambridge Regional College for hosting such an excellent day, including a wonderful five course lunch! But that's another story.

Until Heads, Principals get it, use it, live it or retire much frustration continues

2010-02-27T19:36:00.000Z

I have been invited to speak to some nice e-learning people at a JISC RSC forum in a few days and really would like to make an impact. I guess it's not going to change the world but I would like to do a bit more than just talk about web tools. For a while now I've been attending events, listening to students, watching developments at my College and others and seeing staff development activities come and go and I'm amazed at how little seems to have changed since I started looking at this in any detail back in 2003.

Yes, there are more smartboards in classrooms and the PCs seem to work a bit better and more equipment is available in staff rooms and classrooms. But I would have expected that to have happened anyway - as a sort of natural progression - what I can't detect is any significant shift in the enhancement of teaching and learning using the stuff, despite all the money poured in to various government agencies, some of which trickled out to institutions and despite all the effort made by some really talented and well-meaning e-learning advisors, guides, support people et al.

What appears on the smartboards or on the new screens is much as one would have expected from gradual progression too. But that seems to have ground to a halt with Moodle. It's been available for 5 or 6 years now but all students get from the vast majority of courses on the 'VLE' is a long list of links to Word documents or PowerPoint presentations. Click on one and you're waiting while the PC configures something or other and after a few minutes there's some tedious-looking Times New Roman or Arial spread across a sheet of A4 that doesn't fit the screen and a bundle of toolbars that are not exactly relevant to the content. Go for the PowerPoint link and hold your breath as the excitement builds - will it be a new window or not? Will it start playing and advance at a rate faster than I can read or will it open with all menus blazing and invite me to skip the first five slides as I can see them to one side and they look uninteresting?

The presentations themselves seem largely to be text only, and far too much of it at that, and many slides appear pretty much as they did when the content was imprinted on a thermal transparency encased in a cardboard frame and displayed on the wall by some overhead projection device.

That really seems to be about it. Where are the images? Where are the web pages that load so much more quickly than Office-ware? Where are the news feeds and illustrated links to interesting support material? Often students simply print out the Office-ware and carry on as before which makes me wonder why on earth the tutor went to all the trouble to upload the stuff in the first place. Oh, statistics. Of course. I forgot. By logging in to the VLE management can get lots of lovely figures about how many students are using it, and how many tutors haven't visited the CPD section since 2007.

I know some well-intentioned managers who have wanted to spruce up the rather sad default display of courses or links to other pages by introducing icons, images related to content etc. and this has improved the visual side of things. The trouble is, it can take a while to set up and is a pain to change should any of the content pages be moved or should new ones be required. It's usually only a few members of staff that can do that sort of thing well anyway as it's not exactly straightforward.

Even if progress by staff generally has been gradual, it has been positively zooming in comparison to that of many senior managers. 'All staff' E-mails still come out with Word documents attached, often several and PDFs a-plenty. The inevitable presentation at a meeting is a PowerPoint, with only the nice new Office2007 backgrounds distinguishing them from years gone by. The handout, though, is still the familiar six-to-a-page sheet of mini slides that sets everyone looking for their glasses. Some more enlightened presenters do put the material on Moodle but, once again, it's the link as I've bemoaned above.

That, indeed, in my view is why so little has really changed in some institutions. Few senior managers, those who should be setting an example to others, who should inspire others, who, damn it, can afford to hire the staff to do so if they can't themselves, so few seem to use technology effectively themselves in either their 'teaching' staff or general communication. If Marketing or PR people haven't something handy then it's unlikely that there'll be any images in the communications. There's very little use of the VLE that staff are constantly being hounded to use. There's virtually zero evidence of any of them having any web presence themselves or being able to contribute to updating web content to share with staff or the world.

I remember, six years ago, showing a Principal's Secretary how using a blog could replace whole piles of minutes and notices and how her boss could use it too. The feed from the blog could have appeared as headlines on a web page or the VLE and people would think 'Wow! If he or she can do it then so can I'. Well a few might, at least. The blog is still live but the last entry was the first.

I remember showing another College manager how Google documents could be utilised in 2006 to allow several people to work together on a document. Instead of umpteen people battling with different versions of a spreadsheet and never knowing whether report[1].xls or report[3].doc was the right file to use, there would be one document on-line which was automatically saved and the latest edit shown. Everyone would know where they were and inboxes would be saved vast amounts of confusing attachments. The guy loved it but nothing ever happened.

Where these events occurred and I was the person trying to make the change then I feel as though I failed. I should have been more firm, insisting that they try the new ideas. I tried to show good examples and where other institutions did seem to move on a little I hoped that would help me implement change. It's funny - I never actually found out why senior staff didn't do it. I have a feeling it was a lack of confidence - having to ask for help may have been embarrassing, a fear of making a silly mistake when using the 'new' technology. They were the bosses, too. They had made it. They didn't need to impress anyone. No-one was going to threaten them. Old, familiar ways sort of worked still and only odd people like me seemed to object out loud. So nothing happened.

Now that they don't teach, will they ever learn?

E-learning? That's kids' play . . . !

2010-02-16T22:31:00.000Z

Getting IT right and getting IT wrong

2010-01-29T18:14:00.005Z

Interesting e-learning forum meeting at Broxbourne today. Wandering around the brand new college it was great to see plenty of spaces that students, or anyone else for that matter, could use with pcs and wireless access available across the building for those with the log-in details. They claim to have 'the fastest network speeds of any educational establishment in Europe' which wasn't something I could test although web pages certainly did snap at you, loading as fast as you could enter an address. In a funny way, I quite missed the small delay!

What I did particularly like, though, were the myriad facebook pages evident and the fact that the equipment was scattered and not limited to strict rows in a workshop. There were even comfy seats, sofas and I could well imagine students happily staying on there after the last timetabled session as opposed to rushing to get away as most tend to do in most places I'm aware of. Well done, all involved in planning there.

Sure, the small matter of £zillions being available so that one could start from scratch will have helped but I am certain these kind of areas could be created at other institutions, and the less restrictive attitude to where students go in their own time wouldn't cost anything except a few slices of humble pie to be eaten by those who keep maintaining that they have to block all blogs and social networking to, er, protect students. They do have filters in place for the nasty stuff but generally tutors are trusted to control where they visit in classrooms and the use of proxy browsers appears to be as close to nil as it'll ever get.

That cheered me which I did rather need as a lunchtime discussion was worrying. Another member of the forum was explaining how yet another compliance word now being spelled with a capital letter, safeguarding, had affected her day-to-day life at another college. Apparently she could not have students as 'friends' on social networking sites, she couldn't send e-mails from a private account, nor text from her own phone. Basically, she was told she mustn't communicate in any way with a student other than via an 'official' route and that included offering lifts as well, incidentally, and not for reasons that had anything to do with insurance. I presumed that it was OK to talk to them about something not directly associated with college but not so sure she wouldn't have had restrictions on that too!

The person in question was not some dodgy old bloke with a history of complaints from 16 year olds. It was a bright and cheery young lady dealing with students not a great deal younger than herself. Whatever the age or gender, though, this sort of misinterpretation of initially well-intended guidlines is dreadful. Clearly her institutional managers have decided to bolt down the hatches and have attempted to regulate themselves out of any possible issue but just what does that say about their trust in the decency of their staff? It says they have none, or worse: they presume that their staff will behave despicably unless controlled somehow.

It is so difficult to argue against this sort of thing. You get all sorts of looks and tut-tutting but someone has to. I am beginning to wonder if I might need safeguarding myself - against misguided policy-makers and the aspersions they'll be casting before long.

"It's worse than that, he's got bullets, Jim"

2009-12-18T12:04:00.002Z

Excellent article and brilliant video from Brain Rules by John Medina. Anyone planning a presentation next term should see this!

Are you the next Bill Gates?

2009-11-05T23:17:00.003Z

If you're a student entering University in 2010 then here's a nice opportunity to get some fees paid and probably lots more goodies too! Although part of a marketing campaign by an organisation called XMA, still worth a try.

Here's the link. Good luck. Remember me if you do win - you might need a chauffeur, someone to make tea, fix your spelling and grammar . . .

Catch a wave

2009-11-03T18:33:00.002Z

Delighted to get a Google Wave account at the weekend. And 20 invitations which I have already had requests for at a ratio of about 5:1. If you haven't heard of this then you soon will (and there are links in some previous posts). Think e-mail, IM, live collaboration on a document, image or video sharing, maps showing where you or something mentioned is, polls all rolled into one application that lets you see someone's message or additions as they enter them rather than waiting for them to hit send and you may get the idea.

I'll be trying it out with some carefully chosen friends, probably doing something silly like planning a trip to Greece or boring like agreeing a meeting agenda at first and then hopefully extending it as we get more expert and figuring out what we can achieve.

If you think you could be a useful ally in this trial then contact me - there should be a link somewhere on the blog. Or look on my web site.

So, to end as I started, with a Beach Boys track, Let's go surfin' now, everybody's surfin' now, surfin' USA . . . and UK.

Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age: what people said

2009-11-03T00:23:00.004Z

This excellent discussion produced a host of intelligent and thought-provoking comments, as well as reassurance that there appear to be plenty of others who share my views on how well and how not so well e-learning is developing.

Fifty statements/quotes from panelists taken from notes at the Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age Forum, Oct 27 & 28, 2009 made by Cheryl Davis, Miramonte High School can be seen at the link below. What I really like is the use of Google Sites to publish this! That makes it 51 statements!

https://sites.google.com/site/breakthroughforum/home

By the time we get to Phoenix

2009-11-02T21:49:00.002Z

SARS Farce

2009-11-02T20:26:00.004Z

Hundreds, no thousands, of middle managers across Further Education (and maybe schools too) are probably locking themselves away in their rooms or burning the midnight gin at home on something they call SARs. Because virtually everything in education has to be reduced to a set of initials, like I'm sure STUDENT came not from the Latin studere, to be diligent, strive after, but seldom turn up daily eventually never there or something along those lines, SAR stands for Self-Assessment Review. It's a set of facts and figures and comments that every curriculum area has to do within an organisation. All the data comes from records maintained by the institution but, of course, they get re-written again here. Then, all the individual forms, which can be a dozen pages long, get sent to someone at the place who has to combine them all into a single document which gets sent off to a government agency and, amongst other things, can form the baseline against which people like OFSTED may assess progress.

Collating the data and setting targets for improvement, commenting on things that may or may not have gone well are all sound enough and the general concept is a sensible enough management procedure but what really strikes me as crazy is the way in which the process is handled. My guess is that just about everyone will be filling in Word forms. Except they won't even be real Word forms (the type where you can type in boxes to update a document rather than editing the whole thing). Even if they were decent Word forms, though, the business of typing, printing, putting in pigeon holes and then some poor person having to extract bits or somehow make sense of the whole before transferring it all elsewhere (never mind what could be several interim approval meetings) is crazy in this day and age. It's bonkers, which is more than mad.

Firstly, all the data should be filled in before anyone gets the forms. It really shouldn't be re-entered again and again. Some institutions may have figured that one. Let's hope so. But still we have people handling, many literally, all this paperwork.

I say it's time they forget worshipping at the statue of Word. Why not use a Google document that lots of people can collaborate on? All that each manager needs to add will be comments, actions etc. in the areas related to their activity and maybe check data and other standard stuff. As they progress with the on-line document it can be shared with others and, as necessary, older versions retrieved if someone makes a mess. Then, when it's ready, they can share it with the person collating all of them or anyone else for that matter.

No need for any repetition or printing. No slow opening e-mail attachments, confusing file names, folders full of awkward files with names with [1] or [2] after them because people have used the same file name . . .

And then we need to think of the government agencies or departments involved. Why don't they demand a more efficient method of submission? It must be almost as crazy for them to have to sift through all the inbox attachments.

Everyone involved in the whole damn process really should know better and be setting a good example to others. New e-learning technology has the answers to this. Use them. It won't totally remove the stress from the faces of my colleagues but would make everyone's job a whole lot better.

Wake up, folks. Let's end the SARs farce.

Odd things at Generator

2009-10-29T12:00:00.005Z

"I really want to see Further Education students enjoying the opportunities and benefits technology offers. There are already excellent examples of learning technologies right across the sector. But I want to see more and better. I want to see our colleges and training providers recognised nationally and internationally for the innovative and creative way they use technology. One practical source of support is Becta’s new online assessment tool, Generator, to help leaders in FE review and improve how technology is applied in their organisations. We need commitment from top management if the strategic importance of technology for learning is to be recognised."

Apart from the sentence about Generator, that's exactly what I said at a conference back in 2005. But it's Siôn Simon MP that gets the credit on Becta's Generator site. Well, it would be if you could actually see the text (and picture and Government department logo).

I had forgotten all about this since filling in yet another e-maturity tool there back in April. then I received a couple of weird blank e-mails which I would normally have ignored but they appeared to be from generatorfeandskills.com (don't you just love how agencies spend our money and come up with so many urls) so I decided to have a look at the site again. In Firefox it looks dreadful and not a great deal better in IE so I thought I'd have a look at the code (the underlying script that a browser reads so it knows how to display the web page). That's where I found the quote above. Initially I did actually think it was a response I had made on the site, perhaps when registering or something, as I often copy and paste stuff from other articles, but then I saw the code for the MP's photo and the bit about Generator which I wouldn't have included.

I didn't spend time checking the code as to why the quote doesn't show but there's probably a missing tag or something. Looking at the standard of display of the rest of the site I would not be surprised if there were an error like that.

Losing count now of how many attempts have been made to create these e-maturity tools. I believe that there are even training sessions being run to show people how to complete this one! Presumably, the trainers will first format delegates' memory of previous tools. Whilst it doesn't look as though much of our money has been spent on Generator, I wouldn't mind betting something in the region of £½ million has gone this way to date. The only obvious immediate beneficiary would seem to be the Department of Whatever Education Is Called Now who can publish nice glossy statistics showing changes in e-maturity.

"Surely he's not saying students should have Facebook in the classroom?"

2009-10-29T11:35:00.003Z

That's what many people will probably say when they start reading this. Especially the IT Services people who control what everyone in the College can access, including teachers!

Having read through Online College's 100 Ways You Should Be Using Facebook In Your Classroom, though, I do hope some will think about this a bit more. I can't say that I agree with every one of the 100, and you may well think of some more, but this is a great list of ideas and some simple but effective ways to approach tasks in a different way.

I'd probably change the title to say 'Could' instead of 'Should' and you'll need to bear in mind that it's American so some tweaks here and there required as well as a few less 'z's.

I'll add the list to the web tools wiki for future reference, which you can also access via the Facebook link in the More Tools section on the main site.

In two minds

2009-10-23T17:21:00.003Z

I'm in a bit of a quandary about Facebook and Twitter. Up until now I've been using Facebook mostly for social stuff and Twitter for slightly more serious work-related thoughts. Occasionally they've overlapped or I've used Twitter to say something that just occurred to me but generally Twitter seems more suited to the quick comment than Facebook.

Lots of people, though, do use Facebook status messages very much like Twitter and I get streams of odd thoughts, outbursts, comments and rants changing the home page every few minutes. The people I like to communicate with are also spaced out across the two so Facebook friends miss my tweets and vice versa.

Perhaps I'm not so much mad (previous article!) but schizophrenic now, displaying one character in one place and another in the other! So I've decided to join the two which means my poor Facebook friends will now see their home pages scrolling down even more quickly as my tweets get added and what was once a weekly status change could turn into several times a day or more as the mood takes me. There's always the Remove button so I shall not feel too bad.

I divided the two initially when I noticed that a colleague tended to send tweets every few minutes from various conferences she attended. She had the two accounts linked so I was getting everything twice and some days the whole of my Facebook home page was occupied with copies of tweets I'd already seen and wasn't really wanting to see again. I didn't really want to annoy or bore non-work Facebook friends with my tweets so stopped Facebook collecting them. I don't seem to have got into that tweet-a-minute gossip mode, though, so, hopefully the increased status changes won't now be too much of a nuisance to Facebook friends.

Something else I noticed about my behaviour was that I tended to think before changing my Facebook status - not so much about what I was writing but who would be likely to read it. Tweets didn't matter - they seemed more transient (although I am aware that Google can now locate and publish them!) - and the likelihood of actually seeing any of my followers other than a couple of people was almost non-existent. I quite liked that laissez-faire approach (and also got the message out much more quickly) so my Facebook friends will be seeing more of that now.

Until I decide that I prefer schizophrenia again.

Less pcs, more comfy chairs and clean carpets

2009-10-23T10:48:00.005Z

I am beginning to think something quite strange: maybe we should start reducing the number of computers in FE classrooms. This is pretty weird stuff from me, I know. I teach various computing / ICT units for courses at a Further Education college. I've been saying for years that every member of staff should have a computer and my suggestion that we should have a 1:1 ratio for students to pcs was regarded as slightly mad. Yes, staff should all have one but I'm not so sure that I want rooms full of computers for students any more.

A little while ago I visited a college which had had substantial rebuilding and lots of new classrooms. The people showing me round were clearly really proud of the shiny new rooms and all the new equipment. I remember walking into one new classroom and there were rows and rows of black boxes and screens before my eyes. It was awful, even quite threatening. There was precious little space on any desk for anyone to write or place papers, despite the small footprint monitors and pc units. It reminded me of those language labs some schools used to have. It was like the sole purpose of the room was to provide access to a computer screen and keyboard.

I think they'd crammed 45 machines into the room. Then, at another college, I visited a library where gigantic monitors were lined up against each other on desks all over the place. Beautiful screens but, boy, did they dominate the whole environment.

At my own college there has been a gradual replacement of the big beige monitors with the little black (inevitably Dell) screens and there's no doubt that the extra horizontal space is welcome, along with the better speed of new machines. There, by not cramming the place so much there is, at least, still an airy feel to rooms and room to do something else. Not a lot, though, and there are several rooms where I have more students than chairs, never mind computers! That, and chairs with backs that never stay in position and make access to some parts of a classroom quite impossible, is another story.

What has started to happen, though, is that students have started to bring in their own laptops, some netbooks are appearing too and, unable to access the college wireless network, they solve the problem by utilising their own mobile broadband sticks or accessing via mobiles. I am waiting for the smarter ones to work out how to display mobile internet images on the monitors! My feeling is that this is quite a natural move. They are using a familiar pice of equipment. It probably contains all the applications and files they want to access. It's rather like bringing in your own pen and notebook instead of using the standard stuff dished out to those who forget. I see this use of personal equipment escalating. Another interesting observation is that whereas all the monitors are standing near vertical at head height, the laptops and other devices are far more angled and the general position of students appears much more relaxed whilst still attentively so.

I have less trouble seeing students when I don't have to peer across or around all the displays. I get their attention more easily too when I want to talk about something or show them something on the whiteboard or smartboard. It's as if their smaller screens, less intrusive on their immediate visual environment, are easier for them to be diverted from by whatever antics I employ.

So, where does this lead? My first thoughts are that we could clear all but a few of the college machines from most of the rooms I use and reclaim the horizontal space and have a much more pleasant teaching and learning environment. (This would have the immediate benefit of allowing every room in the college to have a few decent machines. Currently other departments struggle to get access to computers and often have the limited choice of the endless rows of 96 black screens in the rigidly disciplined, no talking and pretty unpopular IT Workshop or occupying a computing department room thus leaving computing students with a room with zero equipment).

It's not something that will happen overnight because although nearly all my students do have a laptop, I accept that this may not be the case in other disciplines and it is only a small proportion who have a mobile broadband facility. But it is changing, and fast.

Something that could be considered would be opening our wireless network (or some part of it or a specially created one - sorry, I'm not a network person!) so that the mobile broadband wasn't a necessity. As I have said in a previous article, saving documents in some allocated part of the student network isn't that important these days as there are alternatives.

There will always be a need for a few computers for students to use - for those who don't have suitable equipment or if theirs breaks down. Tutors would need to keep an eye on what was being accessed but no longer would students be needing to spend time getting around net nanny systems or having to use applications that aren't quite what they would naturally use elsewhere. Perhaps the savings in future IT equipment budgets could support the provision of some laptops or netbooks, even broadband subscriptions, for students. Things they can use anywhere rather than fixed items they can only use in one place. No-one need be excluded. Yes, the rich parents may provide kids with top of the range kit which will make others jealous but is that really any different to the range of clothes they wear or their forms of transport in the car park or bike shed?

There will also still be a need for computer labs where units require specific applications to be used which students wouldn't be expected to have on their own equipment and some rooms will inevitably stay fully equipped. But I believe the vast majority could be totally refurbished with decent desks and chairs, blinds and carpets so that the room is attractive, clean and genuinely inviting rather than formal or threatening. We don't need a rebuild, we need a rethink and clean carpets.

[I'm not talking about schools here, just institutions for 16+. Not sure about the provision for younger people. They may need to retain current standard equipment for a bundle of other reasons.]

Digital exclusion

2009-10-22T19:48:00.005Z

There is a lot of talk these days about digital inclusion but as the internet and on-line applications become more and more part of life I am having problems with the restrictive policies operated by IT Services departments at a UK Further Education college.

Web design students need to test their pages in several browsers but can only access IE8 in class. Firefox has some great web developer tools but they can't get at the browser, never mind the add-in. Students make videos but can't access YouTube, never mind upload their work or share them that way, which is where they would normally just click a couple of buttons and have the job done. I have developed some useful Facebook pages on e-learning but exchanges of ideas, comments and the like are invisible as no-one can access that anywhere, not even staff!

Twitter is regarded as some kind of new threat and students will be using it inappropriately when it could be a great way to share progress with tasks and even search for ideas in a different way or find answers from others in the big, wide world. Again, no-one can access Twitter on College equipment.

Students ask me why. I try to defend IT Services' position but it is getting very difficult. I tell them that if something inappropriate is viewed then the College might be sued by parents. I can't honestly think of any other reason. Yes, it's in some strategy or policy or procedure but that will have been written several years ago and probably just to satisfy OFSTED inspectors that we were complying with whatever was the initiative of the day, Every Child Matters et al.

Some staff worry that their students will all immediately lurch into bad places or spend the whole lesson sending each other rude messages. Sure, some will. Maybe many will, at first. But the novelty will wear off. And, anyway, tutors should be able to control this. It is pretty obvious when a student isn't looking at what he's supposed to be - the body language gives it away if the giggles, red-faced laughter restraint or even expressions on nearby faces don't give the game away. Then there's the swivelled monitor. Easy to spot. A little hard discipline should sort that out soon enough. If it proves really hard to control then surely it must be possible to have some extra restrictions applying within a particular part of a network? I have seen systems that allow tutors to see what students are looking at on their own screen. It wouldn't help me as I am seldom looking at a screen when teaching but for those still stuck at the front behind a monitor then using the monitor to monitor will show who's misbehaving (or teachers could just pretend it did which would deter quite a few!)

I have a pretty crazy diversity of students. Some will use proxy browsers and get round the system anyway but, guess what: most of the time they're doing so to access sites they want to get genuine information from for my tasks! A few minutes checking e-mail or facebook these days is no big problem. If I were to tell them to do so then it would probably soon become uncool to do so as well! Some have some very dubious interests and visit apalling sites. But they only do so once. They don't like the idea of their parents being shown a list of sites visited by them. The threat works on all occasions. I don't have the very young - everyone is over 16 and most over 18 and adults in other legal respects.

I am aware of anyone's sensitivities - it's all about getting to know one's class and understanding what may offend them or cause upset. The worst problem I face is actually the language that the boys and girls come out with. I should be the one suing their parents!

It seems that no-one wants to make a move on this. My colleagues just shrug their shoulders and don't bother. The rules help them as they probably haven't thought about using anything other than very safe sources and few know there's anything other than Internet Explorer anyway. Tweeting is seen as very strange behaviour and Facebook, well, "why on earth would I want a Facebook account?" they ask!

What a shame. They're all missing so much.

I have also recently heard about something that might prevent me even having students as 'friends' on Facebook or similar. This is a really worrying development and seems to indicate that I shall be assumed to have bad motives which is atrocious. Something has to be done to stop this steady State control of how we think, how students think, what we may or may not say, do, act like. So much has happened already and I seem to be surrounded by tacit acceptance that the authorities must be right and anyone who objects is to be regarded with suspicion.

I am used to being regarded as a bit of a rebel but this latest development, if true, wouldn't be amusing. I so much hope that someone somewhere can see sense and start trusting teachers, tutors and decent staff generally. We don't need procedures, policies, regulations. Many of us are parents, quite used to making decisions. In some circumstances my rules might be even more draconian than the college (certainly on litter, manners and language!). In others they may be more relaxed but I know what kids try to do and can control and maintain a decent, clean and respectable environment in my class. I dislike not being trusted by others to do so.

My Google day

2009-10-22T17:49:00.002Z

It's just occurred to me how seldom I use hard drives or even USBs these days. Google Documents provide a perfectly acceptable alternative to Word for all the word processing type of things I need, like handouts, instructions, notes etc. and students are now happy to save their work in the same way, sharing it with me which makes giving them feedback and correcting things so much simpler. My son shares a folder called 'homework' with me which I don't look at as often as I should but it's there if ever he's stuck with something, wherever I am.

I use Google presentations to display quick mini slide shows on either students' VLE pages or course pages I publish elsewhere. They love them and one or two have started doing their own presentations that way too. It will be a while before the majority do, as instant pretty designs are thin on the ground and layout controls still a bit basic. For simply getting a message across, though, rather than creating something along the lines of a Hollywood movie, the application's great.

Google spreadsheets found their way to my heart as soon as they came out, what seems many years ago now, saving all those problems when you wanted to share data with lots of people and maintain an up-to-date record of your and their amendments. Everyone should use these, I reckon. Just so sensible.

Today I needed to update some records and provide colleagues with some data which was so straightforward. Really, really cool, though, was when it came to collecting students' opinions, targets and the like during tutorial sessions.

The official College method is to download and print about 8 pieces of paper Word documents (in regulation Arial 11 and various boxes outlined in black). then you trot down to the Library and photocopy them 40 times. Well, no you can't do that becuase you're restricted to 20 at a time so you do it twice. Sometime through this process a ream of A4 needs to be added to the tray, of course, but you eventually walk away with this massive pile of hot paper under your arm. Next you try and hide the mass of paper as you enter the classroom and slowly get the students round to the idea that they have to write in the boxes with black lines and tick other boxes, not forgetting, of course, to write their name and a whole load of data we already have on file. To do this they need pens which is often another problem but I'll skip that now. Finally, if you're lucky, the forms come back in grumpily and the comments are about as short as they can make them as they just hate writing these days. Forget trtying to analyse the data. It's a mess anyway and you just stuff the forms in their files and hope they haven't set themselves too silly a target or said anything disastrous about you or a colleague.

Being the rebel that I am, though, I thought there must be a better way. Google Forms! Brilliant! I copied the questions onto a Google Form and selected the type of response required (short text, paragraph, tick boxes, etc) and put a link to each form on a course web page. There are some good, simple designs available which make the form a little more inviting too. Not Arial 11 so I'll be in trouble but never mind. I was a little nervous when I watched the first few students clicking the link but slowly screens around the room filled with my new creations and I was amazed at how little objection exactly the same questions raised. Within a short sapce of time I could open my copy and see who had responded and review comments.

Nicest of all were simple charts illustrating things where choices were available so I could instantly see which type of assessment was proving the most popular, for instance, or what proportion of the class felt they needed to improve their time-keeping or whatever.

Later in the day someone wanted some text from a novel which Google Books found smartly for them and no doubt Google Mail and Google itself got in on the act too. I showed another class what Google Chrome's nice new designs looked like but no-one could use the browser at College as they're locked in to IE8. Still, something to do at home, maybe.

Oh, nearly forgot, to show my last class some of last year's students' work I used the blogs they had created with posts for each task and images uploaded with Google Picasa and more of those mini presentations. That was a Level 1 class too - far more impressive portfolios that many of the Level 3 bundles of grey Word documents in Times New Roman I had.

So, unless I've missed something, I don't think I saved anything or carried anything around at all. Remarkable. I'll still be in trouble for the Arial 11 omission, though, and not having piles of standard documents in their folders. Pity. Nice day, though, for all that. One day I'll be appreciated.

'On-line community' maturity tool

2009-10-15T20:01:00.003Z

Interesting take on the 'maturity tool' developed about 5 years ago by Steve Smith and myself, now using grid to illustrate development of community.

http://www.slideshare.net/rhappe/the-power-and-peril-of-online-communities

Etherpad brings real-time collaboration to documents

2009-09-09T18:53:00.003Z

While Google Wave developers are polishing their product for launch Etherpad have slipped in with one bit that will certainly cause quite a stir - the document screen where you and others can interact in real time. It's quite an odd experience at first, watching someone else move your text around and add theirs - but you'll get used to that soon enough and appreciate the benefits and advantages.

This is certainly worth experimenting with - public spaces are free but if you want to work privately with a title.etherpad.com address to store work the free version is limited to 3 colleagues. I'm a bit surprised at the $8 a month fee for more people at this early stage. Few people will have heard of this and are unlikely just to buy, however cool the instant participation is. And, of course, Wave's on its way, and that will be free and, I rather suspect, knock anything like this into the wilderness.

Polls are getting really interesting

2009-07-29T09:40:00.003Z

Polleverywhere have come up with a great new way to get people to participate in your presentation. Here's an example. It will be pretty empty to start with but add your comments, suggestions or whatever and see them appear on this page! To vote using the web click here.

Smartphone users should browse to poll4.com to avoid text messaging fees.

There's also a twitter interaction that I haven't figured out yet - this post is also for me to play with to find out how it works.

Build television sms voting polls at Poll Everywhere

Here and there

2009-07-27T07:56:00.002Z

Nice example of the internet at work. I received a request from someone who wanted to add some comments and links to the webtools wiki the other day. Checking the credentials of the person making the request, I noticed that she was based near Milan in Italy.

Replying to confirm I had authorised the new contributor, I mentioned in passing that my children were on holiday there at the time. A few minutes later the lady wrote back to say that as they were close by she would be delighted to show them around some of the best places often missed by tourists. Now, she didn't know that I had had a series of text messages from my daughter, 13, to the effect that she really wasn't enjoying things very much, visiting non-Italian relatives and not actually seeing the sights or tasting the local food which she had hoped to do.

So the offer from someone who seemed also to have a good affinity with children was pretty cool. I sent her e-mail address straightaway and hoped they might find a way to contact her. The lady in Italy then sent me her telephone numbers which I sent via a text message to be sure they reached them.

Within a matter of hours she wrote again to say that they had called her and would visit her and I hope as I am writing this that they are all having a bit more fun, eating some great-tasting pizza, pasta and seeing how beautiful that part of the country is.

The Italian lady is fairly new to using web tools but at Creative English Labs she has written about several simple ideas and I shall be working with her on some new projects in this field too.

It is just a simple little story of serendipity. Certainly made my day. Which also happened to be my birthday!

Live Mesh because I'm lazy

2009-07-22T21:05:00.003Z

England. Summer. Working outside with a laptop isn't too bad when the sky's grey. At least I get some fresh air. It was one of those jobs that I'd been putting off for ages, well, actually hoping someone else would do it as it was going to take a while and wasn't particularly enthralling. I had to find literary agents that might be interested in my novel by looking up details on the internet and then copying and pasting their addresses into a document that would ultimately finish up as a database for a mail merge, envelopes and all that jazz.

Without thinking, I just copied and pasted the information into Word, where I knew I could tidy it up and turn it into a data table without too much hassle. You know how text from the internet comes with a load of garbage and an assortment of fonts, colours that can quickly be removed that way (or via Notepad if necessary).

After about three hours in a strong breeze I had about 30 potential names, addresses and contact details in a respectable-looking and usable table, ready to send to the person who will be sending the stuff out.

Coming indoors, I was delighted to find that the document was already available on my main pc where I could continue to work on it with some other bits and pieces I had there. No copying to USB drives or e-mailing to myself, it was just there. Great.

Then I realised that there were probably a host of web tools I could have used to do the job - and certainly something like Google Docs would make the future collaboration on the data easier. The thing is, there were so many other ways that I couldn't quickly decide on any one in particular and I wasn't sure that my partner would have Google Docs ready to go and the thought of explaining everything and her not getting on with the task as quickly did put me off a bit. So I just went with the comfortable option. I bet lots of the people we describe wonderful new e-learning techniques to often do the same!

17 new additions to the web tools site!

2009-07-20T18:24:00.003Z

Quite a few changes to the webtools site today. The main one is a nice simple rating system for some of the tools in each category. Thanks to ZohoPolls for making that so easy.

I'm particularly keen to get some examples of the recent additions in action so if anyone has used them and doesn't mind sharing the results somehow do let me know.

The new pages are yet to be created on PBworks wiki but I'll get round to that before long. If you want access then please contact me.

I'm sure there are lots more out there I haven't featured yet. I do trawl various lists whenever I see them and do remember that I'm unlikely to feature 30-day trials (although there are exceptions) or sites that hit people with adverts (again, with some exceptions). The whole idea is to help people, not sell them stuff. Many of the free tools are brilliant and, in my experience, better than some of their ££ licence alternatives. Naturally, the developers hope that someone will come along and pay them lots to turn their application into a product you have to purchase or subscribe to. Good feedback will help that process but often those who signed up at a beta stage will be able to continue using applications for free. Some do disappear completely but that's unusual. I've found that many of the individuals behind these products are happy to talk to you so even if you do find you've got data on a distant server and the free access has been changed they'll help you out.

As always, let me know if I missed something. Hope you get some ideas.

Google Chrome OS

2009-07-13T16:46:00.003Z

Well-written article on what I think will be big changes in the way we use applications and our computers.

http://zenhabits.net/2009/07/what-google-chrome-os-means-for-computing/

Well worth a read, especially if you have no idea what Google Chrome OS is!

Here's a link to the Google updates blog to keep up-to-date:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com

E-fair 2009

2009-07-02T18:49:00.000Z

Copyright - nice on-line guide

2009-06-24T22:23:00.001Z

Just found this via Twitter friends - looks excellent.

http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/tutorials/copyright/

Trying out Zoho Polls

2009-06-13T22:36:00.004Z

Just discovered Zoho Polls. I've been telling everyone about Zoho's other particularly useful tools - Forms for web design use and Project for project management - but I hadn't appreciated that they now have a full range of office-type services. Not all are free but many are, including this one, Zoho Polls which I'm using here as an example.

If I add some links to the applications listed then this could make a brilliant addition (or even replace part of) the webtools site.

The millionth word in the English language . . .

2009-06-10T20:23:00.001Z

. . . is Web 2.0!! Brilliant!
http://bit.ly/ahu3Q

Wave Hello

2009-06-10T19:58:00.003Z

This is going to change everything. The video's long but well worth watching.

Why I'll take a year's break from moodle

2009-05-26T18:47:00.003Z

Moodle 2.0 is coming along well according to Martin Dougiamas's presentation and I particularly like the proposed integration with Google Docs (see slide 27). Unfortunately, all the good work looks like continuing through until 2010 and will it even be ready for the crucial early summer of that year when tutors will need to become familiar enough with it to use at the start of the academic year?

Even if it is that still means another year of frustration. Principal woes are the drag of uploading documents individually to each course. I write notes, task sheets and things that lots of people can use and I finish up staring blearily at a screen and trying to remember to choose them and sometimes get so fed up at having to enter this or that time and time again that titles get more and more abbreviated and as for descriptions, well, forget it!

Then there's the business of making the page look reasonably professional. You know, add a few images, consistent fonts and arrangement of things on the page. You've got the images but upload them at your peril as most will be too big either in pixels or KB. Yes, you should have done that before hand but there you are, with editing windows open and ready to roll and the temptation to say 'sod it' and forget the pictures is pretty great. As for figuring out what font or size you may or may not get from the odd information supplied on the toolbar - well even I get fooled by that more often than not.

Something lots of people ask is to have links on the page to other course pages which I can do but, boy, it takes ages. I do try and explain to some of the more web aware how to make the other page if it doesn't exist (and, yes, do all the assigning roles and mind-numbingly repetitive admin stuff each requires) and then note the long, weird-looking url which can be used as a hyperlink for an image or text. Honestly, I do try but mostly feel sorry for them and just do it myself which takes about the same time.

Then there's what actually gets put on to most pages. Word documents abound. PowerPoint files everywhere. Loads and loads of lines of text links to documents that often are far too big anyway and take a while to load, sometimes in one window, sometimes another. Anxious not to give my students the same mundane experience, I use pdfs, web pages, Google docs and slide shows that are there, ready to roll, on the page. However, especially if I want to arrange things a little, I have to work in html view and tables can be so confusing but necessary.

To cut what could be a long moan short, I have for a while realised that I can create nicer looking and more usable areas on wikis and web pages far more simply. I want students to start in moodle but I get them out again which rather defeats a lot of what moodle was intended to be all about. But do I care about stats for who's visited which page how many times? No. I know my students and can see for myself how they're doing from coursework and simple observation. I can make quizzes with other software and provide feedback on their results automatically. I can handle a bit of extra admin storing the results if need be but none are used other than for refreshment. Forums? Much nicer with social networking apps or something like lefora. Calendars? Again, much nicer in Google or many others.

I'll get criticised for students leaving the moodle frame but I'm not convinced that other tutors keep them in either with myriad external links and documents opening in new windows. All I lose really are those ruddy stats but so much more to gain.

Logging in? This became a huge issue this year. It even resulted in having to pay someone else to host it as no-one could really manage the database. All the problems of people not being able to log-in for a couple of months while we decide if they're staying on a course, user names and passwords, incorrect e-mails I shall wave goodbye to. They can add themselves to pbworks courses, forums etc and, whilst I'm happy to share all that I create, if there is something to hide or restrict circulation for then I can do so sufficiently well elsewhere. Anyway, I'm not suggesting we abandon moodle completely so they'll still probably log-in when they can but I shall leave my courses open to guest access anyway. I honestly cannot see that the benefits outweigh what will be the advantages of a much more modern, professional and interesting alternative that might even inspire a few. Who knows, if I can get facebook allowed, the fun will really start and I'm very tempted to experiment with some DIY games apps there.

Not being the ILT Co-ordinator has its advantages! I can just be a tutor and do what I like instead of feeling obliged to set a good example within the party line. Another year of that would be depressing. Instead, I'm actually quite looking forward to the challenge. And 2010, of course.

Any colour you like as long as it's #002f7e

2009-04-27T15:12:00.002Z

If you need an image with a particular colour whether for a web page or just to hand on your colour-co-ordinated wall then this site is the place to go. It may sound a bit odd but you'll be there for ages trying different combinations of colours and seeing what comes up.

Images from Creative Commons places like Flickr and others are searched and those that have a prominent proportion of the exact colour you seek are presented in an attractive grid. Collect them and enjoy!

Live Mesh: it works, and works well

2009-02-12T23:19:00.004Z

I am very enthusiastic about Microsoft's LiveMesh. It has proved itself genuinely useful twice this week.

Once was with photos. I had taken loads in the snow and downloaded them onto my main PC. Later I wanted to use some of them on my laptop. In the old days I would have had to put them on to a USB stick and move them from one place to another, attach a data cable between the two machines or maybe uploaded them to an on-line album and then downloaded what I required. This time all I had to do was check a folder which I had set to be synchronised between the two and, sure enough, there were all the new pics for me to do what I wanted with.

The second occasion was when I needed a bundle of old files which I knew lurked in the depths of the PC but I was somewhere else with my laptop. I was able to access the desktop of the PC, open folders, open files until I found the ones I wanted. Then I could just copy and paste them to my laptop.

Quite brilliant.

Whilst it won't do staff or students' carbon footprints much good to leave their PCs running at home when they come to College, it will enable them to access and save files and even use home software if they prefer and no longer need 'Sorry, I left it at home' be a valid excuse.

Yes, I know there have been similar applications around for a while that allow remote access but this is free and just works in a familiar way. Microsoft have stolen a march on Google with this. It will interesting to see how Big G respond as, with Live Mesh, Big Blue cannot fail to reclaim users to their other Live products where Google Documents have flourished.

How did I miss Live Mesh?

2009-02-05T19:41:00.002Z

I can't believe I missed this. Microsoft's Live Mesh will allow you to do all sorts of things like synchronise computer and laptop files, get remote access to a home computer when out and about or at work, and maybe vice versa which would be something.

Rather than ramble on, I'm going to get on and install the stuff and start experimenting. You may want to too. The good people at Office Watch have all the information you need.

More if and when it works!

More web tools updates

2009-02-02T14:34:00.003Z

There's a host of new additions to the web tools site. Here's a quick list - there'll be more information on the updates page of the site or with the individual entries.

Office: drop.io and another plug for e-snips

Images: Zoto, PhotoSynth, animoto, Jing and Camtasia

Research: Shelfari, Timeline, TeacherTube (which you already knew about), Quizlet and Poll Everywhere

Web design: Glogster

Reviews are needed for quite a few entries so don't forget to add some comments either to the wiki or join the studyzone forum, whichever you find easier. Of course you can always just tell me what you think and I'll try and remember.

Now anyone can start a forum or discussion group

2008-12-17T21:17:00.004Z

I know moodle has a forum but I'm not so sure it's that easy to use and it certainly isn't very pretty. What is easy to use and is pretty is a super free tool providing free forums by Lefora'I managed to set up a forum from scratch in about 10 minutes. OK, so no-one yet knows about it which will take a bit longer but it needn't be restricted to one course or another and has an interface which students will find more attractive and interesting.

You can set up various categories of discussion and add gadgets, polls and the like very simply. Remarkably, it's completely free, has bags of space, no obvious limites on uploads where people wish to share files, pictures etc., and no adverts that I spotted either.

Unless I've missed something, this has to be one of the best new additions to the webtools collection for a while. Right, now to make another one for The Village to gossip in! Here's a link to the Studyzone forum if you want to see how it looks.

This discovery also came from the brilliant pbwiki educators forum which uses the same software.

Did they copy it from the internet?

2008-12-17T19:15:00.004Z

I'd like to think I can spot text that's been copied from a web site and pasted into an assignment. Often all I have to do is ask the student what a particular word or phrase means and the slightly desperate, blank look says it all! The really lazy ones who don't get rid of the formatting don't deserve any feedback and even those who try usually miss something and a stray table or odd font size gives the game away.

However, for the times when I need a second opinion, an FE College I work for bought some quite expensive software a little while ago and I might have thought about being one of the first to use it. (I don't think many have. In fact I might have been the second to use it. And, no, it wasn't my recommendation.) Now, though, there's a free tool that's worth a try and may be useful for checking an odd paragraph or two that appear far too well spelled and punctuated for the urchin who handed it in. Called The Plagiarism Checker, try it out at this link. If I get some decent feedback about it I'll add it to the webtools site.

This discovery came from the brilliant pbwiki educators forum. Full of good stuff and still free.

Unfortunately, it won't catch the blighter who hands in someone else's work with the footer changed unless the person who did it first did his own bit of copying and pasting!

1s Upon A Time

2008-12-10T17:40:00.003Z

In the beginning, God created the bit. And the bit was a zero.

On the first day, he toggled the 0 to 1, and the Universe was.

On the second day, God's boss wanted a demo, and tried to read the bit. This being volatile memory, the bit reverted to a 0. And the universe wasn't. God learned the importance of backups and memory refresh, and spent the rest of the day reinstalling the universe.

On the third day, the bit cried "Oh, Lord! If you exist, give me a sign!" And God created rev 2.0 of the bit, even better than the original prototype. Those in Universe Marketing immediately realized that "new and improved" wouldn't do justice to such a grand and glorious creation. And so it was dubbed the Most Significant Bit. Many bits followed, but only one was so honored.

On the fourth day, God created a simple ALU with 'add' and 'logical shift' instructions. And the original bit discovered that -- by performing a single shift instruction -- it could become the Most Significant Bit. And God realized the importance of computer security.

On the fifth day, God created the first mid-life kicker, rev 2.0 of the ALU, with wonderful features, and said "Forget that add and shift stuff. Go forth and multiply." And God saw that it was good.

On the sixth day, God got a bit overconfident, and invented pipelines, register hazards, optimizing compilers, crosstalk, restartable instructions, microinterrupts, race conditions, and propagation delays. Historians have used this to convincingly argue that the sixth day must have been a Monday.

On the seventh day, an engineering change introduced Windows into the Universe, and it hasn't worked right since.

Reproduced from something I found on ZDNet without an author so I hope they don't mind.

Open now for free software

2008-11-22T21:26:00.003Z

I've just updated the Open Education Disc in the More section of Webtools. There is a brand new selection of free, open source applications covering a whole host of things. This may have been designed with students in mind but I have to say that tutors, their families, hey, everyone will find something useful here!

There is a way to download the whole shooting match onto a DVD but you probably won't want all the stuff. I have already used a couple of the goodies there in the last week as a matter of necessity in a tight situation. HTT Copier copies web sites and a client needed a copy before an advisor with whom he was dispute removed it. It has more normal uses though - if you are teaching somewhere without an internet connection but want to use a web site then use HTT to save it onto a USB drive or your computer. Works a treat.

The other application that came in useful was VLC - a media player that seems to be able to cope with anything. There I was with a laptop and a Narnia DVD, announcing to a group suspicious of anything techy, how simple playing a DVD was on a laptop and, er, the DVD player didn't like the regional code for the DVD!! Ooops. But I switched to VLC and away we went, trouble free.

Lots more there. The best is not actually a teaching tool but you just have to get the screensavers. So much cooler than the standard Windows fare and no adverts, really professional graphics. Beautiful.

At last . . . [2]

2008-11-22T21:07:00.003Z

Google have made some improvements to the look and feel of their brilliant GMail. It has worked wonderfully but looked awful. Now it can look a bit better with the addition of a Themes option under Settings. Still a long way to go before my daughter will tear herself away from the smooth looking and very well-designed MSN but a move in the right direction.

At last . . . [1]

2008-11-22T19:58:00.003Z

Those of us who have been teaching in FE for a while but really don't want to go back to school and learn all the theory about someone's pyramid of a long-winded way of explaining how some people are brighter than others and so need some challenges in class (and others who arrive looking like death warmed up may need some extra attention or breakfast and probably both) have been thrown a life-line.

I was greatly relieved to discover that we could still register with IfL but now there is something called Professional Recognition which looks as though it could be a route to getting some sort of approved status through a portfolio route with various references, statements and confirmation of existing skills and previous good work in the field.

This is great news - on the surface, at least, as I have yet to discover more. I shall be attending an ACER guidance session in Cambridgeshire soon and will report back on the SVUK scheme (yes, another quango, quasi quango or whatever but in this world of regulation and paperwork I guess that's necessary if the Powers That Be are going to accept it).

Watch, as they say, this space.

What's a wiki? In Plain English . . .

2008-10-03T10:37:00.001Z

Microsoft free web sites

2008-09-24T17:25:00.002Z

I have mentioned this before - they're still available and certainly worth getting. Go to this link and even if you don't want a web site it's worth getting the free domain.

Google sites

2008-08-27T11:07:00.002Z

Whilst Google Pages was a great idea, it never quite took off, being a bit awkward to use with not the most intuitive of user interfaces. Google Sites looks a whole load better and my first stumbling steps seem to have produced a reasonable page or two.

Google Sites is, as with much of the best things Google do, well hidden and you'll need a Google account of course but then everyone should have one of those now anyway. Actually, I have just tried to find it again while writing this so I could give you instructions but completely failed to do so!! Oh boy. You'd think Google of all people would help you find things! Eventually I found the link by looking at my own account where all the Google products I use get listed. The link is here, at last.

Give it a try. You choose a site name - be careful as that will form part of your web site address - and then get on with the job of selecting a theme, a page layout and then you can edit the page, create new pages etc.

The ready-made templates are a bit bland but under Site settings you can change quite a lot of the elements, much like you can in Blogger, including background colours, fonts and things. You can also replace the Google logo with your own. I've only had a few minutes with this application but, once I knew what I was doing, found that it works well with some nice features that help resize images or drop a slide show of Picasa images straight in a page.

Google gadgets are simply added and now that these include some genuinely useful things rather than odd little boxes that tell what the weather is in San Francisico someone with little clue about web design can create some nice pages quickly.

There would seem to be good integration with Google documents and similar facilities for sharing content and collaboration too. Now that could be particularly interesting in education and I am wondering whether teachers will find Google Sites an easier way to share stuff than apps like pbwiki and even, dare I say it, moodle?

Microsoft have Office Business Live or some variation of those words which looks good and is also free, aimed fairly and squarely at people who want a web presence without the complications of code, servers and hosting. The two are pretty similar but I'm drawn to Google by virtue of its clever integration with my other Google activities. It'll be interesting to see how they both develop, especially with pbwiki increasingly looking to charge for their better products.

Another Review Survey Examines How Organisations Lacerate English

2008-07-17T18:59:00.005Z

I'd just completed one survey from LSN asking what I thought of their web site (dreadful) when up comes another where I could really let rip. It was mostly on the subject of how government agencies communicate and even includes a list of expressions and made-up words with an invitation to rate each one on a scale from jargon to acceptable Plain English. Great! Full marks to LSN for trying and I can't wait to see the results. Well, actually, I can and probably will because I cannot remember ever getting to see any results from government agency surveys in the education sector with one or two notable exceptions from Becta and the Regional Support Centres.

I recall one that LSDA did in an effort to see how well colleges were getting on with getting staff to use new technology. There had been one survey in 2002 or thereabouts and I was involved in analysing the data received for a repeat performance two years later. A colleague and I had to conclude that roughly half the respondents had used a 1 - 5 scale one way and the other half had it the other way round. Didn't exactly make analysis easy! I refused to make any report but my more obedient associate rattled off a couple of pages of Word A4 in wonderful edu-prose that meant he got paid but no-one in the sector was any the wiser as I never saw it mentioned again.

If you haven't already contributed to this one, though, you really must. They've included a box where you can say what expressions or terms annoy you too. Some questions are unanswerable but the jargon ones are fine. They also ask things like how often would we like e-mails advertising CPD events (I did include CPD in my list of annoying terms along with almost everything beginning e- . . )so there's a great chance to say NEVER or at least 'less than once a month' please.

The Learning & Skills Network do do a lot of good work and have some intelligent people on board but few people running the show have good current experience at the chalkface and desperately need our help. This survey might just do the trick. If you didn't get one in your e-mail then try asking at http://lsneducation.org.uk if you can participate. It's your chance to kill of some initials and jargon.

On-line surveys and poll tools

2008-07-01T20:25:00.002Z

Another selection from the really useful people at Wild Apricot:

A couple of these, their favourite, polldaddy and surveymonkey are already featured on my webtools site but the others are worth adding and will, as long as they're free and reasonably ad free, be there in time for Friday's E-fair.

1. Poll Daddy

Poll Daddy is a fairly new site that allows you to create free polls and place them on your website, blog, MySpace account or anywhere online. After you sign up for a free account, you can create a poll and customize it to fit into your site design or choose one of 14 “skins”. Results can be viewed via the poll posted on your page, or you can see all the results of multiple polls from their site after you log in. Poll Daddy is great in that it provides specific instructions on how to embed the HTML code into WordPress, Typepad, and Blogger. Results can even be accessed via an RSS reader made possible by an RSS feed generated from your poll.

2. Cool Web Toys

After you register for a free account at Cool Web Toys, you can create a poll by choosing from a web poll, an embedded web chat client, or a “CoolWebOfTheDay”. The poll can include content such as word of the day, quote of the day, or any other content. As far as poll creation goes, it’s quite easy to use. You can specify size and colors to match your site! Results appear quickly and the visitor will not leave your site unless they click on “More Info”. If they click on that link a new browser window will open up and they will be on the site with a bunch of Adsense ads.

3. Vizu.com

Polls generated by Vizu.com are delivered via a Flash widget rather than a snippet of JavaScript or HTML code. Vizu walks you through the steps of creating a poll and gives you total control of the look and feel. To create a poll, you first create the question, then choose if it’s an “opinion” or a “prediciton” poll, then choose keywords and categories so that your poll is easy to find. You can also add pictures or links to your poll. A Vizu poll on your site is free with registration.

4. Blog Flux

Blog Flux requires that you create an account on their site before you can create a poll. Once your account is created, you can then create the poll with up to five options. You also have a choice of customizing the poll's look and feel. After the visitor clicks on the add my vote link, the results will appear in place of the poll questions on your site. A unique feature is that the voting results are mapped on Google maps. The site has other tools to enhance your blog such as a button or chicklet creator, a link logger, and a page rank checker.

5. Quimble

Creating a poll at Quimble.com is a simple two step process. After you are registered, log-in and choose your question and create the answers. There is no customization however. Visitors who choose to click on the “Discuss this poll at Quimble.com” link will be taken to their site, where they will need to register as a user before they are allowed to leave a comment about the poll.

6. SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is a web-based service that allows you to create online surveys. It is quite intuitive and easy to use. You can either create from scratch or use templates. Participants can go to the site to respond, or you can create a link from your site. You can add logos and banners, change colors and customize in many different ways. Basic subscribers are limited to a total of 10 questions and 100 responses per survey. The basic subscription is free. If you want to go beyond 100 respondents, and up to 1000 and gain access to many more features, there is a cost.

7. Zoomerang

Zoomerang is a subscription-based web survey tool. With basic membership, you can conduct free surveys of up to 100 people! Effective, affordable and easy to use, Zoomerang helps organizations conduct professional-looking surveys and instantly analyze the feedback. The great thing about it is that no technical expertise is needed. You can easily create, send and start receiving survey responses in minutes. They also have some deals for non-profits and offer a version with limited-features for free.

8. Survey Gizmo

Survey Gizmo has an easy-to-use interface. It requires that you create an account on their site before you have access to the tools to create a survey. Once your account is created, you can set up an online survey with over 12 different styles of questions. You can also generate multiple reports when all of your data is inputted. Finally, the connect-to-website feature is just great, allowing you the copy HTML into your site or just provide a link. I also like that it is free for up to 250 responses per month. After that the pricing goes up to $14/month for 1,000 responses. For surveys where you're expecting thousands of responses, Survey Gizmo's pricing is very reasonable and offers very good value for money.

9. Ballot-Box

Ballot-Box allows you to create a free online poll for your website. Before you can get started, you'll need to create an account. Then you can create 15 questions for your poll and each question can have 15 answers. Poll appearance are completely customizable with real-time updates and poll results. Poll results can be made private or public and also prevents users from voting twice. You can also create up to 25 polls. If you are conducting a survey, you might want to consider creating a poll with multiple questions.

10. Easy Poll

Easy Poll is an easy and effective way to make your site more interactive. Easy-Poll has a large selection of patterns and colors for free polls. They offer two sorts of polls: a yes or no poll and a multiple-choice poll. Another great thing about this poll creation site is that you don't need additional software or IT support - everything is handled and calculated on their servers quickly and safely. Two minutes is all it takes to sign up, and you can create a poll for free.

As you can see, there are many choices for poll creation, but my favorite one would be Polldaddy.com for ease of use and customization options.

On-line quiz tools

2008-07-01T20:17:00.003Z

Here is an excellent selection of new ebtools I'll be adding to the site soon, hopefully in time for the E-fair on Friday!

ClassMarker is an online quiz-making tool that's geared to both educational and business traning, with both free and paid versions. Create your quizzes, and your learners or business clients take them online. There are a few nice features that I wouldn't have expected to find in a free lightweight tool like this one -- the ability to randomize test questions, for example, and to set a time limit for taking the quiz. The ReBranded ClassMarker option that lets you add your organization's logo to your quiz page and match its colors to those of your website.

The free version of ClassMarker includes most of the basic features, while a paid version ($24.95 for educators, $49.95 business) gives the ability to add feedback to correct and incorrect answers, an option to receive the results by email, and access to a range of more detailed reports as well as enhanced product support.

Create A Quiz is a completely free web-based tool from ProProfs that allows you to create your own online quizzes and tests, or choose from a library of existing quizzes by browsing topic categories and tags. You can share any quiz by sharing the link to its webpage, or customize your quiz with your choice of logo, text and colors, and embed it on your own website with a copy-and-paste code snippet. Each quiz includes a number of automatic extras such as printable and interactive versions, discussions, and suggestions for related quizzes. At the end of each quiz, students receive their marks with question-by-question feedback that shows areas of wekaness.

Create A Quiz is a fairly feature-packed free tool, but the quiz results seem to be public, not privately reported to the administrator, and I wasn't able to find a way to keep results private. Unless there's something I've missed, it is probably best to save this tool for study groups or self-testing rather than for more sensitive assessments.

Quia claims to offer "the Web's most extensive collection of educational tools and templates" -- and that may very well be the case. You can create 16 types of educational games and activities, quizzes with eight different types of questions, surveys, and other online learning tools that provide immediate quanitfiable feedback to the student or, for questions where a variety of responses are acceptable, can give a "potential" mark pending the teacher's review. The existing large library of activities and quizzes is available for use free of charge, as are student accounts. To create your own acivities and quizzes, however, you'll need to subscribe.

Quia's educational package starts at $49 per year for an individual instructor, with group discounts available. That'll exclude it from the webtools site but you can sign up for a 30-day free trial to decide if Quia is for you.

QuizCenter from DiscoveryEducation is a free online quiz maker with plenty of features, but there's no way to test it without diving in. To get started, you'll need to register with the My Discovery site and set up a Custom Classroom. Registration, however, enable a variety of privacy settings so quiz pages can be password protected for access only by individuals or user-defined groups within the online classroom. "After a student fills out the quiz form and submits her answers, Quiz Center checks the answers against your answer key, determines which answers are correct, and tallies the total score. Within seconds it produces a page that shows the results or, if you prefer, e-mails the results to you."

This is a very good free service, no question. My largest quibble is that I found the site navigation less than intuitive -- stray off the QuizCenter path and it's not always easy to find your way back there from the pages that promote DiscoveryEducation's other (commercial) products. To save time, you might want to bookmark.

QuizStar from 4teachers.org lets you create unlimited quizzes in multiple formats and different languages, and to include multimedia files as well as images. Set start and end times, privacy levels, and whether you want to show the correct answers when students review the quiz after taking it. Quizzes are graded automatically, and the results can be reported by class, student, question, etc. You can choose to save the reports online, print them, or download as an Excel file. For ease of use, flexibility, and privacy, educators could do worse than give this tool a test drive, though it might be less useful to other organizations with a more public agenda.

QuizStar offers a 60-day free trial, but the service itself requires a subscription so it is only really eligible for inclusion if you can fir what you want to do in those couple of months! Still, worth a try!

This information has been provided by Wild Apricot, a non-profit organsational web site tool that is featured on the webtools site.

A laptop for every tutor

2008-05-09T16:56:00.004Z

There you go. I've said it. Took a bit of nerve but not as much thought as I'd expected. I had to write an E-learning Strategy a few weeks ago and the more I looked at what was happening the more it became clear that a simple, single action could make far more difference to bringing technology's benefits to our students. Give every tutor a laptop.

With a new building looming for 2010 we're now in that phase where it is so easy for any requests for new equipment or changes to rooms to be answered with sentences beginning "Well, when we have the new building . . . " or the slightly better but still unsatisfying "Planning the new building will take that into account . . . " That still means two whole academic years by my calculations and simply isn't acceptable or, more importantly, necessary.

The problem I have to deal with is rooms with no computers coupled with tutors having to share computers in the staff room. So even if a tutor does have a room with some equipment, he often hasn't been able to have sufficient access to a computer (when and where he wants it) to work ILT into his sessions or put materials and things on-line. Or if he is lucky and has a computer to work on, he then is unable to use the lovely stuff in a technology-bare space!

Against my advice several smartboards were slapped up in rooms but are not used particularly effectively as smartboards and the cost of the whole installation comes out at not much under £3000. It was when I realised that that could now buy 10 laptops that I began to formulate the new policy.

With 100 staff, the maximum cost would be £30,000 but a good number already have a computer and where there are 2 between 6 in a room that is only 4 new ones needed. Laptops with wireless built in are the norm these days and my initial checks have found access is feasible in most rooms so there's not much need for any cabling or IT Services staff costs which often cause projects to be jettisoned at early stages. My guess is that it would cost nearer half that and would be an instant hit with staff. I'd like to include part-time staff too but that's a bit tricky - something along the lines of laptops available for them while they're there may work if they don't all want them at 9am on a Tuesday.

We've got a pile of projectors and whatever money has been sifted away from more smartboards can go to just them instead.

Who knows, I may soon be able to get on with getting ILT more visibly used across the College as there'll be no excuse then at least for tutors to carry huge piles of paper everywhere if there's a smart ILT option available, which there usually will be.

It is so bizarrely simple. I have been saying it for years but now, doing the Strategy, it may actually happen. Now I've been saying that all this e-stuff is a bit old hat now but if an E-learning Strategy gets me what tutors want then I may keep quiet on that one for a while!

There is a lot more in the Strategy document and if anyone wants to use it to help draft theirs then I'm happy to share it, minus identifying features. I'll add a link soon.

There's only one e in education

2008-05-09T16:28:00.002Z

Despite a post which I'll be publishing shortly about E-learning strategy, or maybe as a result of thinking about that, I have come to the conclusion that there's little point in the expression e-learning. It really isn't terribly difficult to talk about using technology to enhance learning and, although there could be some subtle differences if we are being pedantic, most staff understand this as ILT, which, unless you're fresh from teaching in the States, seems to have stood the test of time and is understood for what it is, learning with IT, and everyone knows IT now.

In fact, if it wasn't for government agencies perpetuating the term (and worse ones like eCPD, e-tools e-etc.,) I'm sure it wouldn't have survived this long.

The test of a good term is whether normal people start using it (reasonably correctly). All of us who live with technology and all that it offers in education know what we mean but I'm not so sure our colleagues do. They certainly would be hard pushed to distinguish it from ILT so why bother trying?

There is also a huge chasm opening up between places like my FE College and mostly private training organsations and course providers who use e-learning to mean on-line learning, or distance learning or quite specific packages of materials that deliver session materials with little tutor involvement. Indeed, the growth of these in the commercial sector is founded upon the very fact that organisations can save a fortune by substituting these 'e-learning' packages for human tutor packages and the rather more swish image that the monitor presents in comparison to the usually rather less than swish, and tending to the dowdy, appearance in the flesh of the human.

Interestingly, OFSTED inspectors at a recent visit to an FE College commented on the use of ILT and, to the best of my knowledge, made no reference to e-learning at all. Some may say they're behind the times but I reckon they've got it about right.

Option 3 revisited

2008-04-11T15:45:00.003Z

Some of you may remember my articles about the lack of options apparently available to staff at FE colleges who didn't have what was described as an 'appropriate teaching qualification'. Back in 2006 we were faced with new regulations that seemed to say that we all had to have one, or be working towards one, by September 2007.

I had enrolled on a course and found it a complete waste of time and was intending to do an on-line one instead with Greenwich but still knew it was going to be really tough finding the spare time to do it properly and, to be honest, I genuinely believe that I'm familiar with much of the theory of teaching and put it into practice pretty darn well, with great obsevation reports and student feedback (even when I don't bribe them!)

All that culminated in my Option 3 article which got me lots of friends and also into approximately the same volume of trouble. All I wanted was some form of recognition for years of experience and existing qualifications and a shorter, less time-consuming route to proving to the Powers That Be that I'm a reasonable bloke to run a class or two.

Well, it's been Registration Time at IfL, who seem to have persuaded some Civil Servants that they should be the sole organisation policing the regulations, and everyone has been nagged to do the honours in our sector. I approached this with some trepidation because I was wondering how on earth I would be able to register without having, or being able to prove that I was working towards, a suitable qualification.

On the site I filled in the details and put down the first course that I'd started, that being the only entry that I thought would get me to the next screen, and you needed to go through all of them to complete the process. At the end I got to the 'Hurray!' screen and was congratulated on registering which was nice but worried me a bit. So I wrote to their enquiries address to say that, whilst I had started the course and was considering enrolling on another, I was hoping that there would be another option available and didn't know what to put in the boxes.

Returning to the site later, I noticed a section that explained the regulations in Plain English. There I learned that the regulations don't require me to have any qualification at all! I had started teaching way before 2001. I have to register to record my CPD development - the 30 hours a year that we all need to do and which I have always said is reasonable, indeed pretty modest. But the best was in another section. There it announced that IfL were arranging for those with existing qualifications and experience to have some sort of accreditation and hence be granted some exemption from certain qualification modules or units. Of course, there were no further details but at least they are, to coin a phrase, working towards an Option 3. Great! Just wish I hadn't been worrying for a couple of years about it all and hoping no-one had asked how I was getting on with the 'course'.

Now, it may still turn out that I get no more than 1/4 of a unit exemption for an FAETC and various other bits and pieces I've accumulated so I shall not get too excited but knowing that (a) there is no legal compulsion to have a qualification (unless the College change my contract) and (b) I've been able to get registered with IfL with honest declarations after all is a great relief and I can get on with preparing some staff training courses. Strangely, most of those attending will have much better paper qualifications than me but they will still enjoy working with this lesser being and, most importantly, will be learning the sort of stuff that should have been in their courses but wasn't.

I must also thank a colleague at MK College for tipping me off about the fine print about ancient lecturers like me.