Transformation: making a ruckus
Today I had the opportunity to open the Bath Spa University e-learning staff development day with a 45min tour of the digital City as I see it.
I had a good time and wrote about the session over at the JISC Digital Media blog.
This weekend we (Louise was a trooper and came to see what the fuss was about) went to Sheffield on a Saturday for the first Purpos/ed face-to-face event.
The event was kick started by Andy Stewart and Doug Belshaw, two folk that I have a lot of time for.
The format was to meet folk for 4hrs and have an open discussion on the purpose of education. Between the few anchoring talks there were a number of 3min lightening talks picked at random that were all very diverse and a welcome change to traditional long sessions.
Bringing Louise along was the best thing I could have done as it was refreshing to hear the voice of a non-educational type (she works for a Mental health charity), who is still greatly affected by education – many of her client base have missed parts or all of school. It is easy to forget who the ‘people’ are and so next time I strongly urge everybody to bring along a friend or family member.
The event also got me thinking about the education my family has undertaken and the paths we took and now follow today. Four different brothers with four unique tales of success, indifference, compromise, dreams and mistakes – yet all very happy! I hope to ask them about what they feel the purpose of education is and maybe bring then along next time.
I am also more convinced that by informal education I can safely chuck lots of non-academic subjects into the pot.
It was also nice to meet new faces and catch up with great folk like Brian Kelly and Steve Boneham.
Oh and the printed book of a collection of 500 words was an amazing surprise… who do I give it to next?
It was fantastic to be in Plymouth again this year for the 6th Plymouth e-learning Conference. For a full run down check out Steve Wheeler’s blog.
After last years great event I was pleasantly surprised to be asked to be on the steering committee to give my 2p worth of thoughts which made me even keener to attend!
There are a whole bunch of conferences and events and what makes this stand out is twofold: great people and a diverse collection of talks.
From the moment of landing in Plymouth by way of train I met follow #pelc11 gang members old and new which really I cannot stress enough is a highlight for me. Everybody is so open to geeking out whilst still gabbing on about personal interests that it really didn’t feel like work.
New folk who’s blogs, tweets and projects I look forward to include: @t3h_pablohunny, @andyjb, @Marie_S , @CraigTaylor74, @janeseale, @ethinking and @doctrus
As you’d imagine a special shout out goe’s to Steve Wheeler for being an excellent host and helping to bring the event to life.
Unlike some events where my ‘stand’ prevents me from attending sessions, I was able to enjoy a talk per session. Highlights include Andy Black’s session on mobile and Matt Lingard’s session on writing for the web.
My session, in the photo above with with Doug Belshaw and went down very well according to the kind comments after the session. We got folk to consider their own uses of mobile which allowed the session to fork between topics nicely. In addition to this session I was chair for a enjoyable session.
I love the people and the chat that happens in and around sessions that you just don’t get at enough conferences so roll on 2012.
Oh and I got to revisit my student days with a Goodbody’s breakfast at stupid O’clock.
I have just spent two inspiring and tiring days at OER Hackday in Manchester with around 40 people with the simple task of building ‘something’ around OER.
Our group gravitated together through our common interest in doing with pulling OER stuff together and using WordPress.
Not wordpress because we think it is ‘cool’ and certainly not because we were highly skilled in hacking it to pieces.. well Pat and Simon could. But because out of the zipped box it has the power to achieve all of the things we might need to do. Being safe in the knowledge that there is a technical solution allowed us to just think about solving our problems and not having to even consider the technical solution because we know that it will be possible.
Knowing this we were able to jump with both feet into the challenge of the event.
OER stuff, like many types of resources are stored all over the shop and my only vague method for finding this stuff is to use delicious. However mentally I have been struggling with this.
So liking Huffduffer’s approach (just audio podcasts) I was wondering if we could make a solution that takes the idea of tagging but with a more blog/ordered style.
By the end of the 2 days we ended up with a great proof of concept (links to come) that I hope can be developed further.
I often visit the grey area overlapping the problem and technical solution too early and get caught up worrying about parts of the solution and how to achieve it which puts my solutions into a tiny box heavily constrained.
So dear self, the next time your working on a problem, don’t sweat the technical solution, just keep refining the problem and sketching the possible solutions. Then take a deep breath and chuck it into wordpress.
The same day I read Fraser Speir’s blog post on “The next generation Classroom AV system” I was staying with friends who happened to have a 42″ TV which is around the same size that Fraser discusses.
Fraser’s piece is worth a read as he dismisses projectors and interactive whiteboards on the basis of their cost and limited value over a TV and so is trialing the use of 40″ TVs.
Having used the TV through the night for gaming and the Australian F1 qualifying at silly O’ clock I am even more interested in Fraser’s efforts.
My initial questions are “What is the maximum viewing range/angle that a student could sit at?” and similarly “what is maximum distance from the TV that this could work with?”. I’m guessing for many classrooms the room will be of a suitable comfortable size.
I look forward to his follow-up in months to come…. plus can i get me some 40″ plus home theater with surround sound??!!!
UPDATED
Fraser has a video with more details.
On Tuesday I had the pleasure of speaking at the annual JISC Conference.
The theme of the conference was ‘Financial challenges – digital opportunities’ and I was teamed up with three other great folk- Stephen Gray, Doug Belshaw and Dr Jane Williams.
We had around 60 people in attendance and one hour to cover a range of topics including: what we mean by attendance, digital literacies, benefits of digital media processes and workflows, student as producer and examples in practice.
I was keen to harp on about using standard processes and workflows as this allows us to make our use of digital media flexible, scalable, affordable and measurable. Each of which can support good practice and therefore make your planning and usage as efficient as possible, thus making best use of the investment in time and cost. Plus when we make mistakes we can rollback to our last known good point and improve.
We purposefully designed the session to weave various key points together and then finish on some great examples so I hope that each member of the attendance took something useful out of the session – if they didn’t then please let me know as I’d love to fix that issue!
We used Google presenter and a wiki to gather our outline thoughts and slides.
Audio for those not present will be made available very soon.
Doug Belshaw & Andy Stewart have just launched Purpos/ed.
we’re going to spark a UK, and perhaps international, debate around the purpose of education.
Reading the Implications of the NonCommercial (NC) Restriction for Educational Content this morning reminded me of a discussion at an OER workshop in November, during which the topic of which license to use naturally cropped up.
Skipping the discussions about the other licenses, the interesting point of discussion for me centred around the use of the licenses BY-NC-SA and ‘BY-SA‘. The general consensus amongst the group was that ‘NC’ was used to stop the commercial world from looting from us.
However it was pointed out that in order for any item to be open then perhaps we need to revisit our thoughts on ‘NC’ and Derek Keats, writing on the use of ‘NC’ makes the following point that resurfaced the discussion for me:
“It is restricted culture. It is freer than it would be if it were subject to full copyright, but it is not free, and I am not free to use it to create free content. To use an analogy, it is free culture to the same degree that an inmate in a minimum security prison is freer than an inmate in a maximum security prison, but it is not free”.
the southern african journal of information and communication issue 7 2006 p77 keats, D
During the informal discussions it dawned on some of the group that perhaps something isn’t really open if it tied up with an ‘NC’ license.
So it was proposed that perhaps the use of the BY-SA is more appropriate as, and this is when the penny dropped – the use of ‘SA’ obliges any content including commercial content to also be licensed as BY-SA, preventing pure commercial use without too becoming part of a creative commons license. Thus, perhaps BY-SA is a better way to be more open with your content.
Being quite green with OER, It is a view that I am certainly leaning towards as my starting point until proven otherwise.
Me, Gavin Brockis and James Clay spoke this week on the subject of ‘Screencasting’ for the podcast series e-learning stuff podcast episode #66.
The Open University is looking to fill a temporary position, the description includes:
You will need to have: effective project management, scheduling, communication and staff management skills; solid media production experience, ideally in an academic discipline relevant to the University’s faculties of Arts, Education and Language Studies, or Social Sciences; sound experience in instructional design; and confidence in working in a changing environment.