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Link roundup: March

James — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 21:37:35 +0000

Our World: Cracking Walls

The Iranian elections fast became a trending topic on Twitter last summer as Internet-savvy Iranians protested the inevitable re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. This is the first documentary I’ve seen that looks at the impact the Internet is having in the Middle East. From the blurb: “BBC reporter Jiyar Gol travels across Iraq to discover the extraordinary impact the internet is having politically and socially in the country.” Posted on the BBC iPlayer today, so it should be available for a month – well worth watching.

Making Sense of Privacy & Publicity – Danah Boyd

Danah Boyd gave an excellent keynote speech about privacy & publicity at SXSW earlier this month, discussing people’s perceptions of personal privacy in the context of Facebook, Twitter, et al. Well worth a read for anyone interested in the impact of ICT on society.

Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love – Ken Fisher, Ars Technica

It’s something we tend not to think about – certainly something we don’t feel bad about – but in this age of the freemium business model reigning supreme, using ad blocking software comes with a real cost to popular websites that don’t charge for their content.

The Myth of the Techno-Utopia – Evgeny Morozov, Wall Street Journal

A fascinating essay on the issue of freedom vs censorship online.

News roundup

Link roundup: September

Accessibility in e-learning

James — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 15:50:31 +0000

A recent US Department of Education report concluded that “on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction”. In the New York Times analysis of the report, Steve Lohr said:

Until fairly recently, online education amounted to little more than electronic versions of the old-line correspondence courses. That has changed with arrival of Web-based video, instant messaging and collaboration tools.

The study combined data from 99 studies with quantitative comparisons of online and classroom learning. The difference in grades was modest but meaningful enough to draw the conclusion, so many drew the conclusion that online > classroom learning.

I’d caution against this. As I said in a previous post, computer-based learning isn’t intrinsically more motivating, more engaging, or better than any other kind of learning, but that’s not to say that teachers shouldn’t be doing all they can to make online content accessible, engaging & useful.

Last month, I was asked by the Naace to review some online Moodle courses described as ICT Continual Professional Development resources. I realised once I started looking into them that they were essentially compendiums of links to other websites answering questions to general questions like “What is assessment?”

The entire page was set out like this, with 10 sections laid out with a header, a handful of separate pages giving nuggets of information about the topic, then some links to other websites. The overall effect was completely over facing. Yes, these courses were designed for adults, but the principles of good web design revolve around the central mantra of “keep it simple”, regardless of audience.

The standard setup in Moodle is a course broken down by weeks or topics. All resources need structure, but most students using a textbook wouldn’t start flicking through from page one in order to find the subject they’re looking for – they would flip to the index. If you’ve put together a webpage that’s double the height of a standard monitor (~2048 pixels), start your course with an overview, including learning objectives & outcomes – just as you would at the start of a lesson.

Wherever possible, embed information on the page, don’t link to it. Whether this is a paragraph of text, an image or a Youtube video, students might miss it if you hide it away in a link.

This leads me on to my favourite discovery of last year; Adobe Presenter. Every Moodle course I set up now starts with a simple presentation that introduces the subject. Because it’s more attractive than standard text, and comes with an element of interactivity in the forward & back buttons, students are more likely to take the information in.

Embed these presentations by publishing them online and inserting an iframe to a label on your course.

“A modern paradox is that it’s simpler to create complex interfaces because it’s so complex to simplify them.”

Pär Almqvist

Softening the edges of a Moodle course takes time. Softening the edges of an entire Moodle installation takes even longer, but the benefits are potentially far greater. My school is in the process of switching from the almost impenetrable course list to departmental landing pages as the main way for students to access information.

5 rules for designing a good elearning course

1. Make it active & thought-provoking

Don’t just use your VLE to present information to students. Put activities on it to encourage them to engage with the content. Hot Potatoes quizzes, Flash-based activities, crosswords, etc.

2. Encourage collaboration

Include activities that require students to collaborate with others. “In 60 seconds, write down all the words you know related to e-safety. When you have done, swap your list with a neighbour and see if there are any words you don’t know. Together write a short definition of each word from both of your lists, using formatting & images to help.”

3. Guide your students with structure

Break Moodle courses into suitable chunks – lessons, topics – using headings, subheadings & indentation to show flow of information.

4. Embed, don’t link

Wherever possible, embed information in the body of your course rather than linking to it. If you have the equivalent of a page of text, link to it, but include anything shorter to improve readability. Having to have a dozen tabs open to read all of the information on a course is not usability in action.

5. Edit your copy

Textbooks rarely contain spelling mistakes. Not so for websites. With the increasing push to electronic media replacing textbooks, it is essential to retain quality & reliability. Read through the text on your courses, check the links, and if possible have someone else do it too.

New look

James — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 00:59:10 +0000

Regular visitors will notice the site no longer looks as it did. I changed the theme out of necessity, as anyone who clicked on a tag from the cloud on the sidebar would only see the last three posts with that tag, with no option to see older posts. As a result, my older posts were completely inaccessible bar schlepping through 8 pages… not exactly a model of usability from someone with a pretty extensive post on making VLE courses usable!

Please do let me know via a comment or email if you spot anything that I haven’t fixed – the next couple of days will be spent tinkering, tweaking, and (the biggest job) putting together excerpts of each post, again in an effort to make the site more accessible. Any suggestions would be appreciated!

Housekeeping, subscribing & collaborating

That’s bloody brilliant

James — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 19:23:00 +0000

As I said in my very first post, a whole four posts ago, I tend to ignore new, trendy web-based stuff until I’m clubbed over the head with it. On the off chance that there are other tech savvy Luddites out there, I thought I’d put together a collection of my latest discoveries in list format, because as we all know – everybody loves lists.

So, without little further ado, and in no particular order:

#5: Twitter (and Tweetdeck)

Ridiculous, isn’t it? Someone plugging Twitter a good eighteen months too late. “And the last horse finally crosses the finishing line,” they all say, but the hell with you. It’s great, and if you don’t know why, try it out. Once you get past the idea of people posting world-changing events like below, you’ll see the possibility for sharing ideas is enormous.

#4: Etherpad

Etherpad is a really handy website that allows up to 8 people to edit a document at once, and see their changes reflected in real time. To create a new pad, just type http://etherpad.com/makeupapadname, and it will automatically set up a pad for you. Drawbacks: no rich formatting, no moderation control, needs direction or patience once two people start editing the same section, but very small cons for an awfully large pro. I used this on an Inset day for colleagues to get to grips with putting levels into pupil speak.

#3: Google Docs

I’m not one for hyperbole unless something is just so cool that it makes me want to whittle out a megaphone from a tree stump, but Google Docs really has changed the way I mark coursework and give kids feedback. Combined with our VLE for comments, I use a Google Docs spreadsheet to traffic light coursework, ensuring that everything has been done. Okay, we’re doing OCR Nationals, and it might not work so well for other courses/subjects, but it’s been a godsend for me this year.

Obviously it comes with the standard spreadsheet fare of conditional formatting & IF statements, which makes visualising progress much easier. Also, being able to publish as a webpage the kids can all access is a huge plus; it’s now common practice for early arrivals to start my lessons by checking their feedback & progress using the spreadsheet.

Doing this means we’re covering the inevitable joining of dots that comes with a course like the Nationals, and leaves me with plenty of time to do something radical like… teach.

These spreadsheets are available for use here.

#2: Wordpress

I decided when I felt the urge to get a personal website/blog going again that I’d use Joomla to power it, but there was far more to that than I needed, and stripping it down to the bare bones for a site as simple as this would have been more trouble than it was worth.

Wordpress on the other hand is eminently usable. From installation through to adding plugins, I actually don’t have to do anything. I’ve had Filezilla open maybe twice to FTP some images up, and that was mainly because the theme I chose was a bit slapdash. Since its early days as a bare bones blog engine, Wordpress is now a fully fledged CMS, capable of powering any number of sites. I tend not to gush about companies online, but sweet voodoo Jesus it’s good. With the number of addons also available, I’ve decided to use it to power my new model assignment website, Some Rights Reserved. The Flash video player & MP3 embedding addon make it a simple task of content creation, rather than having to wrangle the medium into shape first.

#1: Hmm… could only think of four

Anticlimactic, I know, but people expect a nice round number to start out… starting with four would have been disappointing for all concerned. Who knows, maybe I’ll stumble upon something else that everyone knows about and tell you about it later.

No related posts.

Well, I’ve done it now…

James — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 00:14:37 +0000

I suppose I’ve tried it two or three times since blogging became a craze a few years ago, but always with very little idea of why, and even less conviction to do a decent job of it. Recently, though, my involvement with Twitter has introduced me to a growing community of professionals interested in technology & education, and I’ve become acutely aware of how beneficial sharing ideas with these people can be.

I’m very fortunate to work in a school where new technologies are embraced, and that we have a core group of people from different backgrounds, teaching different subjects, eager to share ideas. Compared to many schools, we have regular informal meetings where we would try to collaborate on some activity or other.

Working on things like this – a project, a club, a link between departments – offers the opportunity to expand your field of vision beyond the limitations of your subject as well as giving the opportunity to reflect on your own teaching, but as with so many things in teaching the biggest obstacle is time.

Inter-departmental projects are often rewarding, but finding the time to put one together can be far more difficult than it would seem at first glance. Recently, our leaders of learning (lol) and senior leadership team (sadly there’s no way to turn that into rofl) decided there should be themed homework projects across departments for next year’s year 7 cohort. Topics included “who am I?”, plots and protests, the world about us, etc – nothing too restrictive, yet some kind of over arcing theme.

I took on plots and protests, deciding to make a project based on cryptography. I started with some historical information about the Babington plot to oust Elizabeth I by using coded messages shuttled back and forth between Anthony Babington & the prison where Mary, Queen of Scots was being held in the cork of a beer barrel for some good historical background. I then moved on to introduce simple substitution (Caesar) cyphers using the excellent Cryptoclub website, and ended with a choice of research questions:

Describe how important encryption of information is on the Internet, or
Describe how complex the maths behind cryptography can get once you apply the power of computers.

Lovely. I sat back and marveled at what had turned out to be four hours of (thoroughly interesting) work to put together one-and-a-quarter-A4-pages-that-I-knew-I’d-be-told-to-cut-down-to-one-page-but-didn’t-have-a-clue-how.

Then I remembered… it was for year 7s. Alright, I wasn’t asking for them to crack 128-bit encryption, I was asking for an explanation of why the process was difficult, but yeah… kind of silly, really.

Back to the point of this post, taking me out of my comfort zone of spreadsheets, databases and Photoshoppery, I put on a history teacher’s deerstalker for an afternoon and learnt a hell of a lot. Several web-based resources made that process much easier; the excellent resources section of the Bletchley Park website, the Cryptoclub website mentioned earlier, Simon Singh’s Cracking Code Book, and – most importantly – a handful of people on Twitter, including the head of Humanities at my own school.

Good advice, and a couple of hours later, I had my homework project complete, ready for the little cherubs come January. The point I’m trying (a little too hard, maybe) to make is that the biggest part of CPD is reflection. Through something as simple as planning a homework activity a little outside my comfort zone, with the help of other teachers, I spent an afternoon doing little else.

While I’m not sure exactly whether, or how, I’d integrate Twitter into my classroom in a major way, the potential for sharing good practice and getting help from a large and still growing community of professionals worldwide is huge. If you haven’t taken advantage of it yet, do.

“So why aren’t you saying this there, you wordy bastard?” you ask… well, I’m on 653 words so far. Try get that into 140 characters, I dare you.