Motivating Learners with web 2

On Monday I went along to the Ramada Hotel in the Bayswater Rd for an event that was titled “Motivating Learners using Wikis, Blogs and Podcasts”. The day was organised by Dice UK and the presenter was Adrian Jarratt. The sessions were organised to achieve a nice balance between Adrians presentations, which were very informative and supplemented with notable comments and idea’s from Adrian; I found myself scribbling away a fair amount, and practical hands-on exercises. In fact the hands-on bit was a particularly nice touch as it featured the use of handheld Internet PC’s for both morning and afternoon sessions. There was ample opportunity to take part in open discussion and exchange of experiences, which carried on over a very civilised lunch break, where of all things the subject of Key Skills featured, very illuminating that was! Anyway I came away with enough links and ideas to keep me busy and thinking for a while, so all in all this turned out to be a day well spent.

Captivating Moodle Scorm

Should you be a regular reader of this blog, then you will no doubt have picked up that we have experienced a number of aspiring highs and avalanching lows in our attempts to deploy Scorm materials. Well here comes a new high, because we just tried out Captivate, which Adobe describe as software that enables anyone to rapidly create powerful and engaging simulations, scenario-based training, and robust quizzes without programming knowledge or multimedia skills. In short it tracked attempts, timing and produced the correct score for a quiz. The down side of course is that being a licensed product captivate will cost you money, the upside being, it actually works.!!! If you have any experiences of Scorm or Captivate then please feel free to reply with a comment on this posting.

FOTE at Imperial College

I went along to the FOTE event yesterday. FOTE is a one-day conference aimed at looking into the technologies, trends and core drivers that will impact the academic sector over the next 18 months to 3 years. The agenda was really good inckluding presentations fro the commercial and education sectors that covered and broad range issues like Cloud Computing, Social Media in education, Shared Services, Internet Video, 21st century skills & learners.

So here are the sessions that I found of particular interest. Well naturally I found the work being conducted in Second Life by Pauline Randall of Virtual-E particularly interesting and there were some innovative approaches coming through you like to take a look at their website. Google were represented by Sam Peters who explained the search engines vision for Cloud Computing, using their growing array of on-line applications, which will certainly find a place in many sectors of education, least not those were there is a need for low spec mobile cloud type devices. Though I am not an Apple user, my only experience seems to be centered on the act of closing down i-Tunes from the family PC once the kids have finished their Homework! I was impressed by John Hickey from Apple, when he presented the coming I-Tunes U, which it seems is going to be a free resource rich repository of links and content, look forward to that one.


The last presenter of the day was Alistair Mitchell from Huddle.net. If you have yet to hear of Huddle and it was new to me, then its basically a web based application that provides a collaborative file sharing workspace that encourages us to make use of the best of the and new application. On their website they do say that its free to get started so I guess must be worth giving it at try.

And last though by no means least Tom Abbott from the University of Warwick demonstrated a really impressive in-house live capture blog

The event was hosted at Imperial College, and needless to say it was a very nice and enjoyable day.

New Rollout

We are about to embark on a new Moodle roll-out for staff in September 08 with three phase programme spread over as many years that will in the first year simply require everyone to utilise the system as repository for lessons plans schemes of work and handouts. One of the principle incentives for this will be 1 the running don and removal of the competing Intranet drive and the e-Maturity drive from Becta. While it has always been a contention from me that we must avoid at all costs the possibility of allowing the VLE to slip into the role of document dump, the reality remains that popularity and acceptance will only really emerge with use. For my own part I will see my current role as administrator and course creator being disseminated, so leaving me with the time and space to develop a training programme for content production and strategies more consistent with using Moodle as a VLE.

Books and eBooks

I was invited to present at an ‘e-Book and Content’ event the other day, which unlike so many of the venues I had been invited to before, was attended predominantly by non-academic staff. In the main the audience was made up from by library / information professionals, administrators and publishers. Much of the theme for the event naturally centred on the subject of e-Books, which many appeared to agree, was the next natural stage in publication and distribution for learning materials. The reason for my inclusion of this event in a blog on Moodle, is that if like myself you have come to feel that to become a vle, certainly in my own understanding of the term, requires more than just the copious posting of course notes onto the system, but the development of materials more consistent with an eLearning delivery platform than a class handout. Certainly there does seem to be a case for the production of content that departs from our more traditional model of chapters and indexes following a comment from a delegate who reported the difficulties that one cohort of students had identified, that certain sections of books ’do not seem to read very well’; the section in question turned out to be the index!
A general consensus expressed on behalf of library professionals seemed to center on the burden of cost exacted on them by publisher bundles, which it seems often contain publications with a very low reader frequency. I wonder if we could learn something here from the music industries experience with i-Tunes. In this age of digitised music, the needs of the market seem to being served by the granulation of the traditional album into tracks from which personalised albums can be constructed, can we not think about doing the same with chapters! If you have any views or experiences then please feel free to reply to this posting.

Moodle Cute Repository

I received an email recently describing a new content repository from the Worcester College of technology, its called MrCute and is intended to be an optional add-on to the Moodle Virtual Learning Environment. More specifically, it extends the functionality of the IMS Repository system originally developed by Alton College, UK. From their website a repository is a storage area where materials – in this case elearning materials – can be held and from where they can easily be accessed by teachers and learners. IMS (Instructional Management Standards) Global Learning Consortium is an international body which aims to set standards for interoperability between learning systems. The specific standards involved in this case are the IMS Content Packaging Standards.
MrCute will be compatible with Moodle 1.8.2 but not with earlier 1.8 versions. You may like to give this site a visit and see what you think and please remeber to get back and post your views, but it certainly sounds worth while.

Open Source Mahara and Moodle

I was wondering if anyone out there in Moodle land has thought of trying out the e-portfilio and social networking tool Mahara yet. Mahara has been designed as a means of storing evidence of lifelong learning in digital format called artifacts, a Mahara concept. An advantage to this approach is that students can display their artifacts in views depending on the intended audience; seems good in itself. In relation to Moodle, its appears that 1.9 and Mahara v0.9 support a transparent Single Sign On, all well worth a look. Please feel free to reply to this blog of you have any thoughts.

Death of the Podcast

As a supplement to my lectures and notes for 2006-7, I decided to begin making some specific MP3 recordings at certain strategic points during the delivery, which resulted in about four or five recordings with each lasting somewhere between 3 to 4 minutes per session. While I used the MP3’s in audio form, I also decided to tryout driving an avatar with the audio and so give them all something to look at while listening, basically duplicating the material. All these recordings I then posted onto Moodle. At the time my students thought this was a bit of a novelty, and by tracking their activity I found they seemed to be making good use of them, very encouraging for me. At the start of this academic year, I simply restored my course and released the MP3 and Video casts, great for me, and I thought my students, however tracking has revealed an unexpected trend for the first semester. Below I have listed the students access, from a group of 20+ on a topic basis for the material

MP3 11,6,6,0,1
Video 9,4,3,0,4

As an experiment I have not installed the Podcasts for the second semester, and I have to say so far have received no requests for them! Has anyone else out there had a similar experience? Was the podcast just a blip? Or is this a reflection of my present cohort?

The rise of the networker

What is that can make one years group of students so different from another, you have no doubt asked yourself this question and so do I, and this year is no exception. If you have been following this blog, then you will have picked up on the Social Networking exercise I devised for my 06/07 group as an icebreaker, that would eventually serve as a means of comparing final outcome. Well I ran the same exercise this year 07/08 and have finally got around to looking at the figures for September; this is the month on which outcomes will be compared. To my amazement the number of Forum postings has increased nine fold on the previous year! That’s right 900%. I have no explanation for such an unprecedented increase, the opportunity was presented to them in exactly the same way, no mention made on likely impact for outcome. Can it simply be an early indicator of the growing perception and influence that Social Networking is having on our expectations for life style, as we come to increasingly live in an online world? Comments welcome.

Social Networking outcomes

If you had read my previous bog to this, where I presented two Social Networking diagrams, produced from the Sociomatrix data processed by Agna, then you will no doubt have been having some thoughts about the likely final outcome for the two groups. If you recall group ‘A’ displayed a very low level of social activity and group ‘B’ a far more impressive set of connections. Well here are the results.



Of course it is not possible to draw any firm conclusions from a single trial, more are needed and more will now take place, but certainly the outcome even to a casual observer produces a clear enough impression. The less well-connected group ‘A’, have between them achieved results that are skewed toward Pass and Merit, while the more active network of group ‘B’ displays a skew toward Merit and Distinction. I must say that I was more than pleased with this outcome, as it does at least on the surface appear to support the case for a more socially oriented model of learning.


One more small and possibly insignificant point is that group ‘A’ would seem to have double the amount of late assignment submissions.

You will no doubt have guessed that I have been keenly showing these results to just about anyone that will listen, and the response I must say has been very positive. Apart that is from one senior manager, who will of course remain nameless. But who pointed out somewhat reasonably, that had the outcomes for the two groups been reversed, then we might have been able to build a case for blocking access to all these Social Networking sites! And what if any are the intrinsic suggestions here I wonder, that entertainment wins out against education, perish the though.

Thoughts on Social Networking

Going on as I do these days with regard to the value of social networking tools practices and the implications for collaboration in learning, which you may well have picked this up from a number of posts in this blog. As its summer now and there are no classes, its given me time to start thinking about trying to see if I can extract anything at all meaningful from the exercise that I encouraged my year 1 level 3 students to carry out at the start of their course in September 06. In fact I did a couple of blogs on this which you can still get to from here and to save repeating myself they are:-

Tell And Post, Thursday, September 14, 2006

Social Networking So Far, Sunday, September 24, 2006


Essentially the idea was to start them off by using Moodle as a social tool and see if this had any impact of the likely emergence of online groups and ultimately outcomes. Just recently, during the summer, I have been dipping into SNA (Social Network Analysis) this is a methodology for mapping and measuring relationships and flows in a system; this can be human or even data itself. Now being a software person, my first reaction was to go looking for some tools, free ones anyway and I found Agna, a superb little piece of Java freeware. I used Moodle reports to produce a student-by-student activity for the Social forums throughout September 06. Then using their names, though for this exercise I have replaced these with numbers, as the node values in the Sociomatrix; see below.

For this simple Binary exercise I simply recorded a 1 at the intersection of contact between two students.

I carried out the exercise for two groups, who I shall simply refer to as A and B

My next stage was to use the Agna Network Viewer to produce charts.

I shall let you make up you own mind on the level of social networking taking place here, but just establish for you that the arrows indicate the direction of communication.
Well what do you think? Is any of this likely to influence outcomes for later on the course? I will reveal all a week today, on Sunday 12th August.

So long Intranet welcome DSpace

This week thanks to some major groundbreaking efforts from my fellow Moodle VLE administrator Clive, we now have our DSpace content repository accessible through common authentication with Windows Active Directory via Free Radius server. If you have been following this blog then you may recall the posting
DSpace Content Repository - Tuesday, April 12, 2005, where I reported that the system was now fully installed and rolled out for user access. Well to be honest, that turned out to be somewhat optimistic, because apart from myself, Clive and couple of other brave souls, not very much has been happening. But now that can all change, because through Clive's efforts this week not only can we offer users a common Windows Network, Moodle, DSpace login; you may like to keep up with his blog on all this. DSpace will now only allow authenticated users to access the actual content, in other words, the Meta Data is visible and will continue to be Harvested by OAIster, but only Bromley College staff and or Students can access the content. This of course overcomes one of the major concerns from staff, that their material will be open to all, regardless of Copyright or IPR. Naturally the next big bonus is that DSpace resource are now available from within Moodle; you just have to login in once at the start of your session. So goodbye to dupliacted Moodle resources, network drives, incomprehensible folder structures and ground fills of orphaned documents, from now on may DSpace and Meta Data rule.

Handouts to videos

Well its that time of year again when following the upgrade of Moodle to our test server and tried out all the features that I need to star thinking about updating the Moodle course notes for the new version. This usually means I check each page of the notes with the new version and apply changes as they occur. This year however I have decided to reduce the actual Moodle training notes in their printed form and deliver the rest as a series of short video clips that can be run on demand by users as and when they need them. The impact of this will be to reduce the time needed for initial training, while at the same time ensuring that during the training, which does tend to be a bit hectic, given I only get 2 hours, I can spend more time looking at specific curricula issues rather than Moodle features that I have come to realise many will not come to use. So how do I intend to breakdown the content into printed and video formats?

Printed format

• System settings and administration
  
• Labels and headings
  
• Editing facilities
  
• Managing files and folders
  
• Linking to resources
  
• Moodle Assignments
  
• Course presentation
  

Video Format

• Using Forums
  
• Using Chat
  
• Creating Glossaries in Moodle
  
• Managing the calendar events
  

Once I have these completed these I will make them available through this blog, so feel free to give them a test-drive and get back to me with any comments.

One more for the constructivist

For those of you who have been following this blog, you will recall that last academic year 05/06 I ran a trial with my HND Computer Systems Engineering students where I used the VLE to investigate the delivery of about 20% of the course material based around the Social Constructivist model. The particular framework that I chose for this was the ‘Community of Enquiry’ from Garrison, Anderson and Archer. Well as I said then, results looked promising but it needed more data and so here are the results from this years trail 06/07 for both percentages and grades as measured against 2002-2005. I think you will agree that it does look more than encouraging and I shall be featuring these outcomes in my Camel presentation at the college on the 2nd of July this year.

Self Evaluation

If like myself you are deploying much of your full time course delivery over Moodle , then you will no doubt also be realising that while there are many advantages to this for everyone regarding administration, are there any similar enhancement to outcomes? Well I have to say probably not, after all, good teaching, good notes and resources are exactly that whatever the medium you deliver them by. If you have been reading this blog then you will know that I have been trialing methodologoes such a 'Communities of Enquiry', with some success. Even so I still find myself trawling round for some realistic model for self evaluation, and thats when I came across this article that I find myself getting somewaht enthusiastic about. Of course the test is going to be can I implement this through Moodle in some way, well stay tuned for that one.

Video formats and storage

I received a request recently from a client to produce my Moodle training resources as a set of video files, which does make a lot of sense; I have also been using more video this year on the VLE. If you are finding this emerging trend, then you may like to have a look at a couple of resources for video conversion and storage. At the Yasasoft website you can download a limited free version, it will convert just about all format up to five minutes and its a really nice and easy to use piece of desktop software. I also came across a reasonable online media converter the other day at vixy.net, which seems to be worth having a look at. Of course with video comes the need for storage, and if yours I limited, then why not try storing it with blip.tv, they seem to be making an open invitation.

Thinking about your VLE

If like us here at Bromley College you have been deploying a VLE, then like me you may be wondering after having structured courses with all kinds of content from Word files to podcasts, where the technology is moving and what the outcomes have been. If you are thinking along these lines, then you will be interested in the findings of the JISC funded projects that are about to enter their second phase, you can find the site here. I read a summary in the May 2007 edition of Cilip Update, which seemed to promote the conclusion of student preference for social networking over pure VLE, with the suggestion that educators are becoming concerned about the future of the traditional VLE. For my part I have no real evidence that this is the case, have you, please feel free to post.

VLE's and poor attendance

I was surprised by the concerns expressed in the recent HE Forum about VLE’s leading to reduced attendance. And so an emailed was circulated to a national list, not by myself I must add, to see if this is generally seen as a problem. The responses indicate the opposite. You will find a link here to some of the responses that you may find useful. The question posted was:- Using a VLE might lead to a reduction in attendance. Does anybody on the list have to deal with this worry? Is it true? How do you counter it? Please feel free to inform us of your own views on this subject by replying to this post.

Project LEON

Starting Monday 12th March ULCC are running London's first Online Conference looking at Web2 Technologies supporting 'personalisation' called LEON (London e-Learning Online Network). There are a number of strands to this project,and my own here at Bromley is looking to the potential of Second Life, where students can share a 3D space and presence in real time. The current project features a library with access for individual or group study, links to web sites, pod casts, movies, documents and virtual page turning books. Presentations and lectures can be delivered to groups or individuals using white boards, media players all delivered by the lecturer. The potential improvements for social engagement above that offered by the more usual first world experience of synchronous, asynchronous chat and forum seem boundless. If you are interested in joining us the go to the website and contact Philip Butler for enrollment details.

VLE project 2 completed

Going by the transactions from the latest learning trial using Moodle, here at Bromley I feel certain that I will be looking at another successful outcome. There were 23 students taking part of which only 16 eventually completed the project and between them accounted for over 12,000 transactions in four weeks. For all those who did manage to stay the course, I presented feedback assessment for collaboration, and there is without doubt overwhelming support from them as well as a sense of achievement. However for students who’s engagement / attendance proved patchy before the project, the new approach seemed to be of little positive influence.