If you need Learning Technology advice or expertise...

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

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

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?!

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

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.

£200,000 would come in handy

JISC have a couple of bid opportunities that I'm interested in. Here are the basic information summaries:

Institutional exemplars
Projects to develop exemplar technology and practice solutions to large-scale institutional problems (in the areas of administration for teaching and learning and for digital repositories).
Total funds: £1,400,000
4-5 projects £250,000 - £300,000 available per project
18 month duration

Use of e-Learning to Support Lifelong Learners (round 2)
Projects to implement and evaluate the cross-institutional use of e-learning to support lifelong learning, including the provision of personalised learning experiences and flexible delivery to support progression, widening participation and work-based learning.
Total funds: £1,200,000
c. 6 projects, up to £200,000 available per project
18 month duration

Apologies for copying them from the JISC documents - if you really want to read everything, go to this link.

I feel that a lot of what several colleagues and myself are doing: looking at ways to utilise Web2.0 and similar developments in e-learning and considering ways to cut through the crazy repetition of data entry both within and across organisations fits well with the general thrust of what JISC seek to encourage. However, I'm just me and the institution I work for doesn't have 400FTEs in HE so maybe someone out there would like to discuss a joint venture I can contribute to?