#JISCEL12 The Noble @Dr_Black
@stephenfry: The noble @Dr_Black has her @unbounders book on Bletchley Park out now. #BPark How the war was shortened…
Original Message:
http://twitter.com/stephenfry/status/261567705331679233
“The noble Dr Black” has the ring of a first class Bond Villain, but in this case it’s Dr Sue Black, computer scientist, and friend of Bletchley Park.
Bletchley Park was the centre of code code breaking during World War 2, and home of not just pop heroes like Alan Turing and Tommy Flowers, but apparently thousands of bright young minds.
The work they did there not only saved millions of lives, and cut the war short by 2 years, but was the genesis of the modern computer.
@Dr_Black used social media in a campaign to help save Bletchley Park, and has written about this in an “unbound” book. You can support publication of Dr Sue Black’s book by pledging at: http://unbound.co.uk/books/saving-bletchley-park
You can hear Dr Sue Black provide the opening keynote at the JISCEL12.
The Keynote is titled: “Innovation, Innovation, Innovation” and will be looking at “What could be more important than helping others to learn?”.
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearningpedagogy/elpconference12/programme/opening_keynote.aspx
Register for the conference.
The fee for Innovating e-Learning 2012 remains unchanged at £50.
Current JISC projects are eligible for one free place, please contact Rob Englebright for details: r.englebright@jisc.ac.uk
#JISCEL12 Black magic
I can remember doing a very brief demo of some Augmented reality technology at an RSC event in Birmingham, probably in 2003?
The demo was from HITLabs NZ “Black Magic”, it involved printing out the big blocky fiduciary markers, aiming a web cam at them, and running a program in a terminal window.
If you held out the marker in your hand a little sail boat plotted a course around your palm.
I waited for ages to see a really useful educational example, not having much use for small sailing ships in my day job teaching Agriculture, and the best stuff seemed to be part of the abortive BBC Jam project.
More recently I’ve had the real privilege of seeing the SCARLET project build AR toolkits to extend the teaching and learning capacity of rare books: http://teamscarlet.wordpress.com/ and the work at Exeter on unlocking the hidden curriculum.
All this leads up to my delight on hearing that Kendal College were successful in getting funding for a project in the recent JISC Advance FE programme, to create some AR resources to support plumbers, having already seen their AR prospectus.
The second Activity week session at the JISC Innovating e-Learning conference will look at the Kendal College project, the Colleges Wales project, to build an itunes hub, and reflect on the other 28 projects in the programme.
Register for the conference.
The fee for Innovating e-Learning 2012 remains unchanged at £50.
Current JISC projects are eligible for one free place, please contact Rob Englebright for details: r.englebright@jisc.ac.uk
Reflections on Assessment & Feedback Programme Meeting: October 2012
“What you’re supposed to do when you don’t like a thing is change it. If you can’t change it, change the way you think about it.” So said Maya Angelou, black American poet and author, referring, I guess, to intractable issues of prejudice and racism.
But these words ring equally true in any challenging situation. And for many further and higher education institutions, assessment and feedback are high up on the list of such challenges.
The JISC Assessment and Feedback Programme meeting on 17 October in Birmingham brought together projects from all three strands of the programme. Their combined presentations in the market place session clearly underlined a need for change. Making effective use of administrators’ and academics’ time, improving students’ response to feedback and doing so at scale were some of the difficult issues the projects are addressing.
Their accounts provided an insight into the difficulties of effecting change, even when all agree it’s needed. After all, assessment touches all bases, from stakeholder perceptions to curriculum design and administrative functions, and traditional practices are deeply embedded.
But the most enduring impression from our day in Birmingham was that lasting institution-wide improvements to assessment and feedback are beginning to take shape. However, achieving a step change in assessment and feedback means first making changes to the way we think and talk about them.
Technology, as always, provides the catalyst, but there are few technology-mediated solutions that do not require a supported approach to change. Take for example, e-submission and e-marking, aspects of assessment that are new to many academic staff.
These clearly offer benefits in terms of effective curriculum delivery as well as efficiency gains. Several project teams reported positive outcomes from their work on technology-supported assessment management: “Reports from GradeMark are helping tutors identify trends in strengths and weaknesses in student work which also has informed Curriculum Design in two modules.” EBEAM “The move to online submission, marking and feedback has produced efficiency savings and more effective feedback.” E-AFFECT.
Nonetheless, introducing such approaches on a wide scale involves people and cultures as much as technology. Without dialogue with course and programme teams about their individual assessment practices and needs, transformation can prove elusive: “One size does not fit all – you need a thorough analysis of needs. A roll out of assessment management tools is not about the tech, it’s about people, processes and clear benefits matched to need.” OCME. A similar message came from project teams evaluating and implementing electronic voting systems and developing standards-based question banks for e-assessment.
So changing the way things are done clearly involves changing the discourse as well as the tools of assessment. This important first step can be supported by staff development resources from the Viewpoints project in the Institutional Approaches to Curriculum Design programme. The projects in the Assessment and Feedback programme are telling us that more such resources and guidance will soon be on their way!
You can follow the work of projects in the JISC Assessment and Feedback programme which completes in 2013 on their blogs. You can also view their emerging outputs on the Design Studio.
Ros Smith (Synthesis consultant to the JISC Assessment and Feedback programme)
#JISCEL12 solving more interesting problems
In planning the JISC innovating e-Learning Activity week Timeline session I encountered an issue that will be picked up in the first session of the main conference week: “Open Architectures”.
We often say that we let the pedagogy lead our decisions, and whilst this is a noble aim, any decision on technology has an impact on what is possible, and what must be sacrificed. I am using Googledocs to populate my Verite teaching technology timeline. This has the advantage of being fantastically simple to set-up:
- grab the google spreadsheet template from the Verite site
- add a form to allow folk to submit their own entries
- publish.
I then had to twiddle a few lines of html and it all sprang into life.
The form means anyone can submit items to the timeline, without needing to login, or run special software.
The disadvantage is that the Google API (Application Programming Interface) limits things to 100 entries.
restriction can be a plus
At this point I could have chosen to investigate building a form that submits entries to a timeline database as JSON, which was not without appeal.. but the more interesting problem is to see how I can make the restriction work to my advantage.
In this instance the restriction works well, giving me a limit to the timeline size, and adding in a level of competition to the Activity week session, where folk will have to defend their choices. It also lets me use the “History in a 100 objects” in the title, resonating with Radio 4 listeners.
The sacrifice is the lost data points, the additional stories that might not get told.
The first session of the main conference week: “Open Architectures – solving more interesting problems” will be looking at how the decisions we make shape what is possible.
I will be looking to see what happens when I reach 100 objects.
Register for the conference.
The fee for Innovating e-Learning 2012 remains unchanged at £50.
Current JISC projects are eligible for one free place, please contact Rob Englebright for details: r.englebright@jisc.ac.uk
#JISCEL12 The final countdown
There are just 19 days left till the JISC Innovating e-Learning Online Conference 2012 opens its virtual doors for the first Activity week session… my session!
The theme of the conference is “shaping the future”, and it occurred to me to plot our trajectory we really need to think about where we’ve come from. I’d seen the XCRI timeline that Lou McGill had created for CETIS, but wanted something that could be used collaboratively.
I asked the champs list for suggestions for suitable timeline tools, and settled on the remarkable Verite timeline script combined with a Google spreadsheet and form, as suggested by Martin Hawksey.
The Verite TimelineJS can use Flickr, Googlemaps, Youtube and maybe even tweets, and even creates an embed generator to run the script from their site.
Here’s a link to my first attempt at adding some of the key timeline landmarks from my teaching timeline plus a few I pinched from Ben Ryan’s talk at Dev8ed :
http://wychwolf.com/jisc/timeline.html
We’ll be starting fresh in Activity week.
What technology made a difference to your teaching?
Register for the conference.
The fee for Innovating e-Learning 2012 remains unchanged at £50.
Current JISC projects are eligible for one free place, please contact Rob Englebright for details: r.englebright@jisc.ac.uk
#JISCEL12 The way of the future
The theme of this years JISC Online e-Learning conference is “shaping the future”, and it’s perhaps timely to look back and think that we’ve been running the conference for seven years and consider how far we’ve come.
Would the conference delegates of 2005 think we’re living the dream, or still asking the same questions, and trying the same solutions?
In the run up to the conference I’m going to be looking at the topics covered in the conference Activity week sessions, considering the distance travelled, and what the future might hold.
To help with this reflection, I’ll be asking three questions…
What does the future hold?
What do we need to change?
What are we doing to adapt?
Of course my flip answer to “What does the future hold?” is always jetpacks and rocket-boots.
But if I’m serious, what does the future hold?…
What are your answers?
I’m also going to be picking up on the idea of pledges from the closing keynote of #jiscel11 Ewan Mackintosh. Did you make a pledge last year? Did you stick to it? Will you make a pledge this year?
#jiscel12pledge
Recording of closing keynote 2011
Powerpoint from closing keynote 2011
I’d be delighted to hear your comments.
Assessment and feedback: developing a vision for technology-enhanced practices and processes
Birmingham was a hive of activity last week as the Assessment and Feedback programme came together to work towards the development of a shared vision around this theme. It had been a year since all the projects met face-to-face so the aim was to provide opportunities for networking and sharing project outputs and outcomes as well as considering issues such as strategies for managing and sustaining change, evaluation approaches and technical developments.
The day started with a ‘market place’ activity where projects shared their ‘wares’ i.e. specific outputs and resources that would be of use to other institutions. The ‘buyers’ were asked to consider what would be useful to them and what action they would take as a result of engaging with these resources (see the Design Studio). The institutional projects (strand A) also produced some short videos updating on the development of their work.
This was followed by an activity which explored what projects felt they had to contribute to a set of key emergent ‘Transforming Assessment and Feedback’ themes which are being developed in the Design Studio. These point to current understanding and resources around topics such as peer assessment and assessment for learning and the gaps this programme hopes to fill in these areas. It helped to surface and distinguish between what projects can tentatively or confidently say about these areas at this point in time.
We rounded off the visioning exercise at the end of the day through a ‘World Café’ inspired approach looking at four different lens on this vision from learners’, practitioners’, employers ‘and the institutions’ perspectives. Here is an example of how some of the discussion mapped out:
Sustaining and embedding change was also a separate topic of discussion for the institutional projects (strand A). Prof David Nicol revisited the area of educational principles as discourse which he has discussed previously with the project teams. The focus this time was very much on principles in practice – showing how principles-based strategies can bring about institutional change in assessment and feedback practice as demonstrated by the Viewpoints project at the University of Ulster. The project, led by Alan Masson, developed a tool based on the REAP principles and using the Hybrid Learning Model which engages curriculum teams in a conversation around effective assessment and feedback strategies. The principles (written on cards) are not directive but act simply as a tool for dialogue, decision-making and action planning. (See also the Viewpoints evalutation which shows the benefits of this approach).
Developing Digital Literacies programme meeting
We had a busy day on Tuesday at the Developing Digital Literacies programme meeting, looking at the wealth of resources projects and associations are producing, and trying to plan ahead for how these will work together as a programme output.
It didn’t get off to the best of starts: to lose one morning presenter may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness. Helen, our synthesis consultant, was lost in transit, and Jay, our evaluation consulant, was stuck in traffic, but thankfully Jay arrived before Myles and I had finished our introductions, and was able to step in and put a useful marketing slant on some of the work the programme support team have been doing around project outputs and messages, in terms of how to get these messages heard and how they help institutions address challenges. Slides
The main activity of the morning was an hour-long ‘trade fair’, at which the projects and professional associations involved in the programme displayed two of their outputs and shopped for others’ outputs which were useful to them. Everyone had plenty of interesting outputs to show, and a real interest in others’ work, and the activity generated a good buzz, as well as some useful collaborations. This is my first experience of working with lots of professional associations within an innovation programme, and I found their outputs, approaches and insights from their members really useful. I was only sorry I didn’t have a chance to get round to talk to all of the projects and associations.
I was interested to see what the panel discussion on digital literacy frameworks would offer: I’m normally very suspicious of any project who says they’re building a ‘framework’, as the term can cover a multitude of sins. However, I found the discussion of these digital literacy-related frameworks for professional development really useful. It was interesting to see that not many of the projects were using such frameworks, but those which had had found them useful as a starting point for discussions. The panellists all seemed to take a pragmatic view of frameworks, and there was general agreement with David Baume (SEDA) who stressed that the usefulness of frameworks lies in their use as climbing frames – take the bits that interest you and use them to get you where you want, rather than following them slavishly. I’ve certainly found such frameworks useful in getting my head round the digital literacy work, though as a couple of delegates warned, we need to be careful that they don’t perpetuate an over-homogenised view of the area – or the mistaken assumption of a common language or common practice where in fact these don’t exist.
After lunch delegates worked on the ‘promise’ and pack of resources the programme was making in four (or five) key areas: employability; self-assessment and self-development materials; the digitally literate organisation (and digitally literate senior management, which may or may not be the same thing); and tools for teaching and curriculum teams. The detailed outcomes are still on flip-chart paper and post-its, and will feature in a future post, but generally project outputs seemed to meet the promise in these areas fairly well, except for employability, where more work is needed to think through what the messages are here and what sort of outputs are most relevant. We also need to engage relevant professional organisations. Slides from the afternoon session.
Helen has updated the Design Studio pages to reflect the outputs coming out of the projects; see in particular staff development materials; materials designed for students; and organisational development materials.
Thanks very much to Dr Bex Lewis for creating the story of the day using storify.
Another remembrance of summer
In another of our series of blog posts reflecting on the SEDA summer school, Denise Sweeney finds that the experience has given her insights and tactics to take back to her day job, and introduced her to a network of like-minded people. Denise’s blog post
Changing the learning landscape
JISC communities may be interested in two current opportunities in the Changing the Learning Landscape programme, a new partnership venture we’re involved in which aims to take a multi-pronged approach to helping English higher education providers make strategic changes in the way they use technology to support learning, teaching and the student experience. If that sounds a bit all-encompassing, it’s meant to: the programme has a broad focus which encompasses technology-enhanced learning as well as using technology in other ways to support students and staff. It’s also broad in its audience group – the programme’s activities will be relevant to senior managers, anyone involved in implementing technology-enhanced change, educational developers, and academic programme teams. There is a strong theme of student engagement which runs throughout the programme.
The progamme is a partnership between the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education, the Higher Education Academy, Association for Learning Technology, National Union of Students and JISC, and is funded by HEFCE. It has three strands of activity:
- an intensive development programme for strategic leaders;
- the provision of consultancy support and expertise to institutional teams involved in technology-enhanced change; and
- a CPD programme for academics and educational developers.
The first two of these strands are currently open for applications.
The strategic change programme aims to equip leaders of learning, teaching and the student experience to develop, communicate and deliver a vision for the enhancement of these areas through the strategic use of learning technologies. It has interesting links with JISC’s Developing Digital Literacies Programme, which has identified digitally literate senior management as one of the key emerging themes: what skills do strategic managers need in order to develop digital capacity across the institution and develop a cutting-edge digital environment for learning and research? Applications for the strategic change programme are now closed, and the programme started with a face to face event on 27-28 November.
The consultancy support strand offers the equivalent of six days of support to institutional teams to help them implement strategic change in the use of learning technology. Support is available in a wide range of areas, and is provided free of charge to the institution. JISC is planning to bring everything we have learned about supporting our projects to this strand. Bids from institutions will need to outline the project they wish to work on, with evidence for the need for the work. Round 1 is now closed, but watch out for round 2.