29/02/2008 by nicola.

There is a migration of our hosting platform which will be performed between 03/03/2008 and 04/03/2008, from 11pm to 5am GMT

During this period, our websites / servers etc will be temporarily unavailable for approx. 15 minutes

Apologies for any inconvenience

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29/02/2008 by nicola.

As seen on Julia Roy’s blog - Wow

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28/02/2008 by nicola.

Hi, have done a draft of an overview of MUVEs for an internal paper at work, if useful, please feel free to read (but not distribute yet please) and any edits/comments welcomed. Will hopefully have a more exciting title. Have not completed conclusions, format of reference, footnotes, glossary and appendix so please feel free to ignore.

If already very VW familiar then probably not anything particularly new in here - it has a bias in the examples towards the types of faculties Surrey has. If you are VW familiar and not seen the recent Sun stream from their conference about the NMC/SUn open virtual world project - is now on uStream

pedagogical-benefits-of-multi-user-virtual-environments-v05-2008-02-28.doc

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24/02/2008 by nicola.

Difficult to manage time this week and tired from the amount of time I have spent in front of a pc, will definitely do less next week. Self-defeating anyway, in that the more time you spend in front of a screen makes you tired in itself.

Online Tutor Course
Participating in online tutor course took on a new flavour this week as we were divided into 2 small groups and asked to put an argument together along the lines of whether participation should be compulsory or not. We were then tasked with putting a small presentation together on a wiki. Within my group I think that I was the only one who had edited a wiki before so I think for some of the group - have managed to find their way around a VLE and getting used to feeling part of a community - being able to post some comments in a discussion - then asked to go further and try and manage this via a wiki…

Its difficult to remember how I felt when I first used a wiki, one of our group remarked that it felt intrusive to be editing someone else’s entries. It is true and because you are using editing a document, you can’t explain to the person whose entry you are editing, your justification for doing so - you just do it. Its good that in just over two weeks, the community is able to respond to each other and even able to do some very basic wiki editing is great.

So should participation be compulsory? We didn’t come to a conclusion on this. People participate online in different ways, logging in and looking at discussions or reading is participating. Also observing others behaviour and then applying it to future practices is a form of participation. These more reflective forms of participation are impossible to assess and do you even need to assess participation? We have a ‘backup’ on this course which is recording your thoughts on the week in a log (which I am doing here) so a course tutor could go and analyse from any personal contributions on their log.

I don’t think you need to ‘assess’ participation in a formal sense - but that is difficult for tutors who are making an online element a key area of the course, it stems from - we want to help people find their way around an online environment, we want them to have a go at actively participating because we have seen benefits for ourselves, but it comes down to their motivation for studying and probably how much time they are prepared to study. Some of this also comes down to money - when I did my CIW, I funded it myself so did participate very actively because I needed to justify the investment to myself, even if I did lose the majority of evenings and weekends for over a year.

This week, Stewart Mader has continued his wiki adoption in 21 days series and is asking whether wiki patterns and anti-patterns apply elsewhere - I think they do apply across a range of online experiences. I am ‘guilty’ of both anti and positive wiki patterns myself when struggling to find the balance between intervention and letting things flow against a timeline. However I do not believe that online patterns of behaviour e.g. on a wiki or other online ‘thing’ are a permanent state of affairs, yet again, some of these simply arise from using an environment and technology to get online for the first time e.g.

“Antipatterns are patterns that represent a negative behaviour or consequence. They describe situations that you’d rather didn’t occur, but that are common nonetheless.

The most important part of an Antipattern is the refactored solution, which answers the question: “If we find ourselves in this situation, how best can we extricate ourselves from it and get back on track?”

Second Life and MUVEs
Attended the ALT labs group open day this week where there were some demos and discussion around virtual worlds, serious games. I am currently putting together a small paper on pedagogical benefits of MUVEs and it does seem to date that Second Life is where most educators have experience to date. In order to find, understand something like Second Life, there is a huge amount of information out there - videos, wikis, blogs, papers - but it takes AGES AND AGES to scroll through lists of resources and look at them, then go to another list of resources and go through them. You could easily spend an entire year and that’s just Second Life. I only discovered the Salamander wiki project this week, which I wish I had found 3 weeks ago - but they are finding what they are calling learning materials objects in Second life and categorising them by learner engagement types. Its a brilliant resource which I have only just started to peek into, if you are trying to find out about learning experiences this is a good place to start before attempting to wade through everything else.

I attended my first small group meeting in Second Life, it was quite mad meeting one of the students who is here at Surrey, for the first time online instead of F2F or whatever. In terms of others MUVEs I personally have found it difficult to find much evidence of other educators doing things - some corporate learning is being done using Olive (recently received an IEEE award, I saw at Serious Virtual Worlds and it is great), and I guess very soon with IBM’s Active Worlds, but am continuing this over next week to try and find out some more.

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19/02/2008 by nicola.

Only test posts in there at the moment, so I wouldn’t bother looking at. Using an app called BlogHud which at the moment is appearing on a separate blog. I am attempting to link it to my regular blog, but this will also wait until I can spend more time in there, but if you are interested in following anything I am going to be up to in SL may be worth getting a feed or checking in once a week, something like that.

Am also able to now ‘tweet’ in and out of Second Life using an app called Twitterbox. It only took a few mins to find and set up - but part of it does involve looking at a piece of code (for anyone who has never coded anything and finds the idea terrifying) and sticking in your twitter details. the instructions are very very easy to follow and it simply won’t accept your details if you either stick them in the wrong place or think you might have deleted something by mistake, so you can’t really go too far wrong

Have posted elsewhere but this can be very useful for a backup, if you are with a bunch of people who have not used Second Life for the first time and you have arranged an event/meeting in-world, if they are either running late, experiencing technical difficulties / logging in/ can’t figure out how to move / have teleported to a different location by mistake and / or lost, they could use either their phone or open a web page, to send a tweet through to you, which you can pick up.
Getting in and finding way around can be a big learning curve and if this is their first experience, it could put them off, but finding a back up plan - such as twitter, can help them overcome ‘perceived’ hurdles.

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17/02/2008 by nicola.

This has been a very demanding week - with technology challenges including - presenting my first 2 F2F training sessions to staff on how to use the VLE, some of whom had never heard of eLearning before; and the VLE had random problems throughout the session with different odd things happening with every activity.

On the followup day, the system continued misbehaving and we also use a tutor/presenter pc where you can control all the pcs in the room so instead of everyone having to look towards the front, they can see e.g. a PowerPoint on their own screen - this started behaving strangely with individual pcs ‘dropping out’ of the connection - so trying to present and reboot individual connections - then we finally got what is known in IT terms as the ‘blue screen of death’ on this pc - fortunately everyone was laughing about it.

We borrowed a laptop for remainder of session and somehow managed to use the VLE to complete some designing / course building activities, but I was very concerned at the time that I was presenting in order to try and persuade people who are not that comfortable with technology, that using it is a good thing !

The email servers went down all day on Wednesday and I tried to set up a new laptop at home and I also got a random ‘blue screen of death’ the second I switched it on - but after seeing one earlier this week (haven’t seen one in maybe 5/6 yrs) decided I wasn’t having any of it - and rebooted and it worked. I am also getting the odd random message on booting up to say things like - it can’t find an operating system but again I’ve decided to ignore it - and try again - before packing it up and sending it back to the supplier… and my learning point from this is that sometimes computers like humans send out ‘dramatic’ messages but also equally like humans, they just need to take a few moments to sort themselves out.

Fortunately its all behaving now - am typing from it at this moment. Getting used to my new phone has equally been fun - its just like when you first start a new job, you may get a laptop, phone or whatever on day 1 and you need to start communicating immediately…can all be good fun and games.

On the last two days of the week, 2 of the servers supporting our VLE - melted too so people were reporting either no or random access to their courses.

On my online course, its been great to be involved this week - its really nice to see a course from the point of view of a learner, because I can experience the same ‘getting used to a new system’ feelings again as well as ‘getting used to joining a new community’, it is easy to forget experiences or challenges which at the time can cause a lot of stress for students, the more time you spend away from studying. Using social media provides similar experiences too. Also, in the virtual worlds, its not that much different, there may be slightly different challenges to face, but those ‘getting started’ feelings replicate across whatever online experience you have.

Compiling ideas for icebreakers is fantastic, its so helpful to get other ideas and putting it in a discussion forum or wiki or similar community ‘page’ is a really good way to share ideas about what can work and/or not. For anyone who is new to eLearning or contributing anything online, the more fun you can make it, again, finding the balance between helping students get going and then letting them shape it - is the same whether you are learning using a VLE, virtual 3D world, wiki etc Except that in a 3D virtual world, you can be much more flexible with your environment, your discussion forums are not a custom option to choose when designing, a facility within a system that manages them in one place. You can record discussions in a virtual world e.g. Second Life, anywhere ( I think, need to investigate more ).

My overall reflection on the week, is that technology does go wrong, but I think that if you make that assumption when you are first planning out a course/session, giving people an area to report technical difficulties so they can get help, encouraging others to share experiences - and provide ‘old fashioned’ backups such as contact tel nos (e.g starting / help / preparation info) all makes it less stressful. I don’t have any great insights here but its been a nice series of gentle reminders that peoples’ concerns may be different every time you have - new members of a community, new student cohorts etc because everyone may be using different versions of everything and we are no longer limited to one device; allowing people to explore the technology so that they are not overwhelmed by it and providing ‘escape routes’ when things don’t go as planned.

Its nice to think that a few years ago, these kinds of frustrations would have bothered me a lot more, would have been much quicker to ring IT support, more inclined to send an electronic device back when I can’t figure out something - now it just feels like problems are never either too difficult to sort and/or temporary….here’s hoping

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15/02/2008 by nicola.

Adam Broitman of Amediacirc.us is asking for students to submit ideas on the future of education - more details on this page and video Its for PodcampNYC as part of a special focus on education. Contact Adam for more details.

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15/02/2008 by nicola.

Just tried to look for first time, I have yet to write a mobile version of the site but on the N73 with the xhtml & css I had used, it seemed to display ok. Not so with the N82 - it appears displays all the elements but the header graphic is large and you have to do horizontal scrolling which is a complete disaster in terms of good web design. My blog is an add-in so I have no control over the code and formatting of it, is also the same, it displays all the information but the header graphic means you have to scroll across or zoom in.
I tried another site like BBC, they have a text only mobile site that it automatically goes to so not an issue for them. Hmmm - looks like going to be fun to try and sort out !

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15/02/2008 by nicola.

Malinka Ivanova who is a lecturer at the Technical University of Sofia, has written a great post about social software and its presentation. She mentions different tools for representing data found in social sites such as del.icio.us with a tool from Joris Klerkx at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. This is the result of using the Java applet tool, when I added myself and it auto added my network, using a search on the tags 3D and virtual worlds:

There is also a Social Circles tool from Maramushi to reveal some of the social networks emerging from mailing lists; this can be very useful if you subscribe to a number of mailing lists and want an overview. I didn’t get my own list at the first attempt but going to try again later.

If there is a way that you can create a dynamic ‘mashup’ as a visual representation of relationships from a variety of social networks that you use, that would be great to have, provided you can amend it on the front end, e.g. if one of your relationships changes such as following or stopping following someone on Twitter, it would be useful to click on it and delete/add relationship - and the data is then transferred back to Twitter, without you needing to log into Twitter separately. Tony Karrer has a post about relationships in social networking and the development of the Social Graph API

It also needs relevant coding to filter out irrelevant results so that your graph is not unmanageable to look at (without 3D glasses !)

SearchCrystal has started to look at ways of visualising data but has separate tabs for images or mashups, so you can’t see text and images on the same visual ‘graph’ but the tabs are quick and easy to use. I do not have the ability to be able to code an application to do this, but I do have ideas about what I would like to see on it. I am probably starting a project around April to look at this for one of Unis student websites. If anyone knows anyone who is interested in this or has other research in this area, I would love to hear from them.

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10/02/2008 by nicola.

If you already know me you may well want to skip this post.

Have just started an online course and having posted a link to my blog, thought it was an opportunity for a re-introduction. I started my career as a primary teacher at a college at Southampton University with my very first lesson that I taught about capacity, which turned into a hands-on measurement of how much water I could fill the classroom with, having knocked over the various kettles, buckets and various other objects which I had provided as visual aids, in the first 5 minutes

I taught in London near Wimbledon for a couple of years which was lovely. They used to film The Bill on the road outside the school, which made day trips with 35 excited 4/5 yr olds even more adventurous, with cameras on those tracks/trolley things rolling up and down the street. In terms of learning, we had a flexible day with the children opting to choose the order in which they completed 3 core activities relating to maths, writing, reading and then whatever else we could squeeze in.

For some of them, it was the first time they had spent a significant amount of time away from their home and/or their first major social experiences, so understanding how to play and work together, strategies for co-operating whether in pairs, small or large groups; as well as the more practical discovery of picking things up and finding out how they worked. Even then as a teacher, the role was that of a guided facilitator, setting up an environment of exploration and investigation, facilitator of behaviour manipulation/management through agreed strategies in order to improve learning experiences.

Then went to Turkey and did some private EFL teaching and travelling. Met Mustafa and we moved to Bodrum on the Aegean coast and set up a partnership in clothes/gift shop. It was very informal and I spent most of the day talking to people on the street, which was great, mostly tourists from Europe and UK who used to tell me about how they were enjoying their holidays but felt that Turkish hotels had not got the hang of both ‘towels’ and ‘laundry’ (can verify this having often received socks back in my laundry and I didn’t own a pair but I digress).It was a great learning experience - summer / tourist businesses operating very differently to the UK, e.g. if you wanted to get someone to work in the shop, you don’t recruit/advertise - you could just go and have a tea with someone and mention it. Mustafa used to say, there are a lot of walking radios in Bodrum

Also did some EFL in the UK, but I never really took to it too much, after doing primary, I found it harder to get inspired about teaching a language,I enjoyed the actual teaching sessions but it took a lot of thinking to try and prepare for them. I taught sessions using things like - chocolate - and adults seemed to respond in the same way as when I had taught primary. I started working in the ‘eWorld’. EFL seemed to be leading the way in terms of learning technology, where listening to, pronouncing, practising the language e.g Auralog as well as some of the first communities (that I noticed) to be using discussion forums across different countries. I worked in a hospital - training medical staff how to use the internet and online databases. Some of these were surgeons and they used to come along and say,I haven’t got time to do this, I need to go and save lives - but when they saw that they could access more articles with in-depth detals or operating procedures, up to the minute information about the latest clinical trials and new medicines, they realised the benefits.

I continued down the e route for several years including eHR rollouts, some more eLearning and eGovernment, I also completed a web design qualification which covered basic computing, site design/development and eCommerce. I originally decided to do this qualification because having done some eLearning work,I felt that on projects there were significant gaps in my understanding of why things were working / not working and I thought that focusing on the technical aspects would help. I returned to eLearning in a learning technology role, seeing differences in how technology is being used at global or territory level and how in a large corporation, it is very easy for ‘knowledge’ to disappear down black holes, but social media has started to change that. As of 2008, with discussion forums extending into online communities, wikis, blogs, learners are no longer inside one closed area or ‘room’ and they can find, ask, contribute ideas and information across communities and sites.

Having now worked for a month at Surrey, it is interesting trying to discover the various motivations for online learning whether in research or teaching. There are a lot of parallels with my previous role , universities need to justify their existence on a commercial level too. Very interested in discovering how, where, if an online tutor role will fit in. I think it will also be guided facilitation.One interesting thing about experimentation with virtual worlds is even though there are huge opportunities for informal learning, the concept of islands is not really that much different to rooms, you are inviting people to discuss/ collaborate in one area and potentially limiting their experience as a result (Security, privacy issues for younger learners etc). Same for businesses operating in them, if you either build or rent your own world, or build/rent a specific area of another world, how realistic can you develop/design the conditions (if you even have that choice) so that someone can learn about e.g. how to address a significant client issue.

Just as a practical note, you can also find me on Twitter, various communities on Ning including InternetTime, and I like to see and save news onDel.icio.us and Pageflakes

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