Tag Archives: practice

Easy Writing⤴

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Nearly there


Nearly there flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license

People often tell me that they wished they found it as easy to write as I do – because, they think, it’s obvious that writing comes naturally to me. And, actually, they’re right – I do find writing easy. Whether I’m typing at a computer or (more often) writing with one of my many fountain pens, I don’t have a problem getting words onto paper.

What is much more difficult is letting go of those words. Often, once I’ve written a blog post I don’t think it’s worth publishing – because I write in order to understand what I am thinking, and once I know I don’t need it any more, and I don’t think anyone else will find it interesting. Other times the words I have written don’t feel like the right words to publish – probably because I was ranting to myself as I was writing (which is good, as it helps me to write the frustration and anger out of my head).

So, yeah – writing’s easy. But writing the right words – that’s harder.

That Digital Presence and Social Media Question⤴

from @ ...........Experimental Blog


We have become enthralled by the ceaseless hum of our electronic companions, those pocket-sized devices that have ensnared our attention and stolen our souls. We wander through life like sleepwalkers, heads bowed in reverence to the glowing altar of our screens, checking our social media, oblivious to the richness of the world that unfurls before us. 

Our digital avatars proliferate, each one a carefully constructed facade, a desperate attempt to assert our relevance in an increasingly disconnected world, and/or how you manage your digital presence actually matters. 

So, should you use; Twitter, Threads, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat , TikTok or Tumblr, or just walk away, or be simply terrified by social media.

And what about good old-fashioned blogging?

I've been using social media since it arrived. In the last century incidentally - though none of the platforms that existed then were actually called social media and they don't exist anymore. (ICQ, MySpace, Vine and many more etc)

I once set out what I use and why and I think given the recent proliferation of platforms perhaps time to do that again. Amusement too by overhearing a teaching colleague on the importance of online networking for learners, but not them ;-) 

Some past observations 

You do need to manage your online presence; it is a good thing to do. You can see 30 years of avatars on some of these sites.
  1. I am old and uncool, I use facebook with friends and family and try to keep it that way. If I don't know you really well, we won't be friends on facebook, sorry and no link with this item.
  2. LinkedIn for professional stuff - no chit chat or jokes - some links that reflect interesting things I am doing professionally, and I link with like-minded professionals. Always useful, I have had some very genuine job opportunities come along through LinkedIn. Be over familiar and or unbusinesslike and you're off my contact list. I only accept contact requests from folks that look relevant. So sorry not looking for a new life partner. Strangely now 6500 followers and over taking ..
  3. Twitter - controversial perhaps - but with #hashtags for topic searching and an established network 4500 followers approx. I post things that matter to me and use it as source of information and for networking. If you want to get the news first twitter is still best. Still a really useful tool. Anyone can follow me on twitter, and I think with one exception, a supporter of Russia's war in Ukraine, I've never blocked anyone. You may have concerns about new platform owner, but system still works well.
  4. Mastodon - I like the idea but seems to be lots of islands and I've had very few meaningful exchanges - has potential but not enough yet to get me to switch off my Twitter account. Usual suspects educational technologists seem to be first of my extended community here. It's too early as some have publicly done to ditch twitter account in favour of Mastodon. Academic posturing? is that a positive or a derogatory term?
  5. Threads even more esoteric. As it brought across everyone that I am linked to on Instagram looks like it may useful and I'm very popular - but the jury's out. No tag searching etc - I am just not sure.
  6. Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and Tumblr - I'm there - dig around and you will find me, but they are just not my thing. They are on my phone as my children wanted a look at these at some point. I can see appeal, but I am not making short video clips etc.
  7. Blogger and Blogging - Yes, I have my own domain and I can run instances of WordPress, but I stick to Blogger, it's simple and I've been posting since almost last century.  If you want to develop an idea and share it publicly, get a blog, would be my advice. You can do things just like this.
If you are a student or a teacher you really should have an awareness of how useful social media is - but it can make you or break you.  

What is your social media strategy ? Only you can figure this out but if done correctly it will help you personally and professionally.

And same sentiments mixed by Chat GPT 


Oh, the tangled web of social media! We've become prisoners of these pocket-sized devices that demand our constant attention, stealing our souls as we bow before their glowing altars. Life's a stroll in Slumberland, with our heads buried in screens, checking social media like clockwork, all while the world around us goes unnoticed.

Our digital avatars are multiplying like rabbits, each one carefully constructed to show off how relevant we are in this disconnected universe. Do we stay in this wild virtual dance, juggling Twitter, Threads, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat, TikTok, and Tumblr? Or do we pull the plug and walk away?

Good old blogging! I've been at it since before the dinosaurs roamed the web. Back in the day, we didn't call it social media, and now those platforms are as extinct as the dodo. Time to lay out my online empire.

First up, Facebook – that's where I hang with friends and family, no room for strangers on my digital porch. LinkedIn's my playground for the business world, strictly no chit chat or jokes here. It's all about connections with like-minded professionals, and maybe, just maybe, some job opportunities, if you're lucky. No unprofessional shenanigans allowed, folks!

Twitter, the land of hashtags and 4500 followers. Here, I post what matters to me, find all the juicy info, and hobnob with other birds of a feather. I'm not one to block, but if you're a fan of Russia's Ukrainian war, sorry, but we're not on tweeting terms.

Now, let's talk Mastodon – an intriguing concept, but feels like a bunch of little islands. I've had a few exchanges here, so it hasn't wooed me away from Twitter's snazzy nest just yet.

Threads? Oh, that's an enigma wrapped in a mystery. Since it imported all my Instagram friends, it appears I'm a superstar over there, but I'm not entirely sold on the whole shebang. Jury's still out on this one.

As for Instagram, SnapChat, TikTok, and Tumblr, they're just not my cup of tea. My kids dragged me into these realms, but I'm more of a bystander, not a performer in the short video circus.

Ah, Blogger, my trusty sidekick. It's simple, it's reliable, and I've been rambling on here since the digital dark ages. If you wanna share your thoughts with the world, get a blog – it's just like this ramble you're reading!

For students and teachers, social media can be your best friend or your worst enemy, so plan your strategy wisely. It can catapult you to greatness or crash your dreams like a runaway train. So, what's your social media game plan, folks? It's a wild digital ride out there!

HeyPressto, a conference on Twitter⤴

from @ Sharing and learning

Pat Lockley (of the pedagogical and technical outfitters Pgogy Webstuff) and I did a thing last week: HeyPressto, a WordPress and ClassicPress conference which happened only on Twitter.  That’s right, a conference on Twitter: presentations were a series of 15 Tweets, one per minute with the conference hashtag, in a scheduled time slot. Adding images, gifs or links to the tweets allows presenters to go into a bit more depth than Twitter’s character limit would suggest. Replies to tweets, and other forms of engagement, allow discussion to develop around the issues raised.  It was also semi-synchronous–or asynchronous after the event if you like: the tweets persist, they can be revisited, engagement can be continued. One way in which the tweets persist is that Pat turned all the presentations into Twitter moments, so first thing you should do if you missed the event is to go to the schedule page and look at some of the presentations that are linked from it.

Ethos

“We want to be the best we can” was a phrase Pat used in describing our efforts.

We wanted to be inclusive. Having the conference on Twitter faciliates this through removal of financial, geographic and logistical obstacles to participation. However, we know that Twitter’s not a great place for people from many groups, and so we felt that a code of conduct was important even though we doubt who has the authority to set and enforce such a code for an open-participation conference. Our code came originally from the Open Code of Conduct from the TODOGroup, and has been through a few other communities (such as #FemEdTech and Open Scotand), so thank you to them for providing a broader basis than we could manage ourselves. We also set ourselves goals for accessibility and privacy that I hope we lived up to. I was pleased that these were noticed and commented on more than once, I think they set a standard if nothing else.

We wanted participation from all around the world, and not just in English. It was clear that we wouldn’t deserve this if the call was only in English, so it had to be translated. It wasn’t easy to chose which languages to translate into: we looked at which are the most widely spoken languages, but also tried to take into account which languages were spoken by the people furthest from justice.  We were half successful. We had presentations from India, Africa, Europe and North America, but not in the proportions we would have liked and all in English. It’s hard to get out of your bubble, to do this properly we would have to start with more diversity on the organization side.

We wanted to value people’s work and the environment. We paid for what we used (translations, for example). Pat found the susty theme, which is incredibly lightweight  and so easier on the carbon footprint with the bonus that it is lightning fast (a cache slowed it down). We’ll be planting some trees to offset the carbon that we did use.

Organization

This isn’t the first conference Pat has done on Twitter, he and Natalie Lafferty have run the very successful PressEd conference on WordPress in Education for three years, indeed it was my helping out a little on last years PressEd that got Pat and me talking about HeyPressto. As well as experience of all the things that need doing, Pat has a WordPress plugin for running the conference that manages lots of the submission process, communication with authors, scheduling and creations of pages for each presentation. I found myself trying to be as useful as could be around the core activities that Pat had sussed.

Starting with initial discussions in April, we chose a name (a few hours of discussion, and then Pat’s partner coming up with the right name in an instant), set up social media accounts (Twitter mostly, obvs), set up a domain (thank you Reclaim), email address, and ko-fi account. Pat’s artistic skills gave us great visuals and our mascot Hopful Bunny. We drafted the call for proposals, spent quite a while trying to work out what languages to translate it into. The call went out at the end of July.

It’s hard getting a Twitter thing going from zero to conference in a couple of months. Our networks helped—thank you friends, it wouldn’t have happened without your support, amplification and participation—but one of the things that we wanted to do was to reach beyond our own social, cultural and geographic bubbles. We got picked up by a couple of podcast channels, so you can hear us talking about HeyPressto on Radio EduTalk and the Sentree blog Thank you John and Michelle. (I think these were the first podcast / internet radio things I have been on, I’ve been pretty good at refusing them until now, and they were nothing like as stressful as I had feared). We picked up followers, and some who supported us quite actively. I want to give a special shout out to @getClassicPress because the engagement from the ClassicPress community strongly contrasted with the blanking from the big noises in the  WordPress community.

Perhaps because we were going outside our own community, there were quite a few folk who didn’t seem to get what we were doing. We listened and re-doubled our efforts to explain, provide examples, respond to feedback on what was confusing. I’m proud of our efforts to fix things that weren’t clear.

The rest was smooth running. Proposals came in steadily. Presentations were scheduled. Advice given to presenters who were unfamiliar with the format. We continued to promote and made new friends who boosted our message. Time zones were a problem. Introductory Tweets were scheduled. Presentations were presented (mostly at the right time), and I think the day went really quite well.

Personal Highlights

I’ve mentioned some of my highlights in the process described above. I’ld also like to call out a few of the presenters that I personally appreciated, without prejudice to the others who also did a great job:

Jan Koch, our opening presenter, did a fine presentation but backed it up with a video version of great professionalism. Superb effort, Jan.

Frances Bell and Lorna M Campbell gave a great presentation on #FemEdTech that  absolutely hit the spot on a number of problematic issues such as being equitable, accessible & inclusive in a place that can be “driven by algorithms & plagued by bots”.

Chris Aldrich whose presentation gave a name and coherence to something that I have long wanted to try, and providing enough hints on how to do it that I might yet get there.

Many presenters (too many to list , it turns out, without just reproducing the schedule page) gave really useful hints on approaches they use, or stories of their experience in implementing them, and inspiration for what I want to try next.

Speaking of what I want to try next, the ClassicPress presentations (roughly covering “why” & “how“) deserve special mention for their engagement with this baffling thing that a conference on Twitter is.

Finally, I think the most important presentation of the day was from Ronald Huereca on Mental Illness in Tech

The post HeyPressto, a conference on Twitter appeared first on Sharing and learning.

Resolutions⤴

from

It took me a long time to start doing the Daily Create. I wanted to participate, but I was not sure I should, or could. Although it’s an open community, I still felt that I’d be an interloper, rudely bursting into a private conversation (and I’ve heard others say this about similar situations, so I know that this is an issue for open educators, but I am going to side step this for today). And the people participating all seemed so proficient – they seemed to do it all so expertly and effortlessly that I was sure that my feeble efforts would not be worthy (again, there’s lots here to tease out that I will pass over for now). Still, I finally took the plunge on March 19th 2016, and now I have 1148 submissions under my belt. For the last couple of years I have made sure to submit something every single day. Sometimes it takes me a few minutes to submit my daily create, other days it takes a few hours, but every day I make sure that I do something – it’s now part of my everyday practice. Sometimes it’s a real struggle to find the time, and sometimes I feel that I am not putting in the effort that I should, but doing something every day helps me in ways I don’t always recall at the time.

So this is my resolution for 2020 – to keep on keeping on. To submit to the daily create every day, to continue with my doodling challenges, and to rejoice in playful learning.

Reindoodle⤴

from

More doodling – a reindeer today. Again I searched Google images and scanned through to get an idea of the basic shapes I wanted to draw. Then I sketched, quickly, using a Tombow brush pen this time (lovely pen, I am enjoying drawing with this). I grabbed a read crayon and coloured in the noses and hats.

reindeer

Then, when the first piece of paper was full I grabbed a pad of plain paper and drew another reindeer, coloured it in with pencils and scanned both sheets to my PC. Uploaded the results to Flickr and her we are.

reindeer

Poinsettia⤴

from

poinsettia

One reason that I like participating in daily drawing challenges is that it encourages me to try to draw something new, rather than doodling the same shapes that have become familiar to me. So when I saw that it was a poinsettia for Thursday’s drawing I was a bit daunted, but luckily I had a few minutes before going into a workshop to do and image search. I searched for poinsettia outline and scrolled through the results to get a feel for the basic shapes. Then I grabbed some crayons and a notepad and headed off to the seminar room. As the prof spoke, I sketched some basic shapes in pencil without worrying too much what the end result was going to be – I wanted to get the shape of the petal/leaf right. Then, when I was confident drawing them freehand I got out my 0.5 micron pen (I usually have one of these in my bag) and drew the basic outline. Then I got out my crayons (I could sense at this point how envious the others at my table were that I had something to occupy my hands!) and coloured it in. The end result is not perfect – I’d meant to sketch some more leaf detail on the red petals, but the workshop was over.

Imagine how pleased I was to see this post by Sheri talking about how she’d taken inspiration from my drawing – this is connected learning at its best.

PS: tomorrow it’s a narwal. Um, eek?

Flying cars, digital literacy and the zone of possibility⤴

from @ Sharing and learning

Where’s my flying car? I was promised one in countless SF films from Metropolis through to Fifth Element. Well, they exist.  Thirty seconds on the search engine of your choice will find you a dozen of so working prototypes (here’s a YouTube video with five).

A fine and upright gentle man flying in a small helicopter like vehicle.
Jess Dixon’s flying automobile c. 1940. Public Domain, held by State Library and Archives of Florida, via Flickr.

They have existed for some time.  Come to think about it, the driving around on the road bit isn’t really the point. I mean, why would you drive when you could fly. I guess a small helicopter and somewhere to park would do.

So it’s not lack of technology that’s stopping me from flying to work. What’s more of an issue (apart from cost and environmental damage) is that flying is difficult. The slightest problem like an engine stall or bump with another vehicle tends to be fatal. So the reason I don’t fly to work is largely down to me not having learnt how to fly.

The zone of possibility

In 2010 Kathryn Dirkin studied how three professors taught using the same online learning environment, and found that they were very different. Not something that will surprise many people, but the paper (which unfortunately is still behind a paywall) is worth a read for the details of the analysis. What I liked from her conclusions was that how someone teaches online depends on the intersection of their knowledge of the content, beliefs about how it should be taught and understanding technology. She calls this intersection the zone of possibility. As with the flying car the online learning experience we want may already be technologically possible, we just need to learn how to fly it (and consider the cost and effect on the environment).

I have been thinking about Dirkin’s zone of possibility over the last few weeks. How can it be increased? Should it be increased? On the latter, let’s just say that if technology can enhance education, then yes it should (but let’s also be mindful about the costs and impact on the environment).

So how, as a learning technologist, to increase this intersection of content knowledge, pedagogy and understanding of technology? Teachers’ content knowledge I guess is a given, nothing that a learning technologist can do to change that. Also, I have come to the conclusion that pedagogy is off limits. No technology-as-a-Trojan-horse for improving pedagogy, please, that just doesn’t work. It’s not that pedagogic approaches can’t or don’t need to be improved, but conflating that with technology seems counter productive.  So that’s left me thinking about teachers’ (and learners’) understanding of technology. Certainly, the other week when I was playing with audio & video codecs and packaging formats that would work with HTML5 (keep repeating H264  and AAC in MPEG-4) I was aware of this. There seems to be three viable approaches: increase digital literacy, tools to simplify the technology and use learning technologists as intermediaries between teachers and technology. I leave it at that because it is not a choice of which, but of how much of each can be applied.

Does technology or pedagogy lead?

In terms of defining the”zone of possibility” I think that it is pretty clear that technology leads. Content knowledge and pedagogy change slowly compared to technology. I think that rate of change is reflected in most teachers understanding of those three factors. I would go as far as to say that it is counterfactual to suggest that our use of technology in HE has been led by anything other than technology. Innovation in educational technology usually involves exploration of new possibilities opened up by technological advances, not other factors. But having acknowledged this, it should also be clear that having explored the possibilities, a sensible choice of what to use when teaching will be based on pedagogy (as well as cost and the effect on the environment).

The post Flying cars, digital literacy and the zone of possibility appeared first on Sharing and learning.

New projects for me at Heriot-Watt⤴

from @ Sharing and learning

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I’ve been at Heriot-Watt University for many years now but haven’t really had much to do with the use of technology to enhance teaching and learning here. A couple of new projects might change that.

The Learning and Teaching Strategy for the School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences mentions using technology to create a more student centred approach to learning, and also reshaping the soft learning environment to meet challenges raised by things like delivering courses across campuses in Edinburgh, Dubai, Malaysia, and with learning partners around the world. So it references ideas like the use of khan-academy style videos where appropriate, effective use of formative assessment and feedback and use of the virtual learning environment to facilitate student interaction and collaboration across those different campuses.

To put this strategy into action the School has set up a working group, which I am convening. The approach will not to be prescriptive and dictatorial, that wouldn’t work; we want to focus on identifying, nurturing and disseminating within the School the existing practice that aligns with those strategic aims. We also want to bring in ideas from outwith the School that can be realised in our contexts, they will have to be practical ideas with demonstrable benefits (I’ll still do explorative researchy things, but through other work). We started work a couple of weeks ago, with two initial tasks: 1, a survey to identify what people are already doing that might be worth sharing and to identify what ideas they would like help progressing; and, 2, an internal show-and-tell event to discuss such ideas. I rather hope that the event isn’t a one-off, that it leads to other similar events, and also that the practice we find through it and the survey can be made open so that we can interact with all the other people doing similar at their own institutions.

Coincidently, I have also been asked to look at automated assessment, especially in exam scenarios in Computer Science. We have run electronic exams in the past, and many staff appreciated the automatic marking, but the system that we used until now is no longer available. So I shall be working with colleagues to try to find a replacement. I haven’t worked much with online assessment before, but I think there are three related but separate strands that will need following: 1, the software system, its functionality and usability; 2, policy issues such as security for high stakes assessment; 3, pedagogic issues. Clearly they are interdependent, for example if your pedagogic considerations lead you to decide that students should have access to the web during exams, then the security issues you need to consider change.  My feeling is that only an off-the-shelf system will be sustainable for us, so I’m looking at commercial and open source systems that have already been developed. However, Computer Science obviously has a very particular relationship with the use of computers in teaching and assessment that may not be exploited by general purpose computer aided assessment.

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Understanding large numbers in context, an exercise with socrative⤴

from @ Sharing and learning

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I came across an exercise that aimed to demonstrate that numbers are easier to understand when broken  down and put into context, it’s one of a number of really useful resources for the general public, journalists and teachers from the Royal Statistical Society. The idea is that large numbers associated with important government budgets–you know, a few billion here, a few billion there, pretty soon you’re dealing with large numbers–but such large numbers are difficult to get our heads around, whereas the same number expressed in a more familiar context, e.g. a person’s annual or weekly budget, should be easy to understand.  I wondered whether that exercise would work as an in-class exercise using socrative,–it’s the sort of thing that might be a relevant ice breaker for a critical thinking course that I teach.

A brief aside: Socrative is a free online student response system which “lets teachers engage and assess their students with educational activities on tablets, laptops and smartphones”. The teacher writes some multiple choice or short-response questions for students to answer, normally in-class. I’ve used it in some classes and students seem to appreciate the opportunity to think and reflect on what they’ve been learning; I find it useful in establishing a dialogue which reflects the response from the class as a whole, not just one or two students.

I put the questions from the Royal Stats. Soc. into socrative as multiple choice questions, with no feedback on whether the answer was right or wrong except for the final question, just some linking text to explain what I was asking about. I left it running in “student-paced” mode and asked friends on facebook to try it out over the next few days. Here’s a run through what they saw:

Screenshot from 2015-03-31 14:54:19Screenshot from 2015-03-31 14:55:13Screenshot from 2015-03-31 14:55:52Screenshot from 2015-03-31 14:56:40Screenshot from 2015-03-31 14:58:46Screenshot from 2015-03-31 14:59:21

 

Socrative lets you download the results as a spreadsheet showing the responses from each person to each question. A useful way to visualise the responses is as a sankey diagram:
sankeymatic_1200x1000 (1)

[I created that diagram with sankeymatic. It was quite painless, though I could have been more intelligent in how I got from the raw responses to the input format required.]

So did it work? What I was hoping to see was the initial answers being all over the place, but converging on the correct answer, that is not so many chosing £10B per annum for Q1 as £30 per person per week for the last question. That’s not really what I’m seeing. But I have some strange friends, a few people commented that they knew the answer for the big per annum number but either could or couldn’t do the arithmetic to get to the weekly figure. Also it’s possible that the question wording was misleading people into thinking about how much would it cost to treat a person for week in an NHS hospital. Finally I have some odd friends who are more interested in educational technology than in answering questions about statistics, who might just have been looking to see how socrative worked. So I’m still interested in trying out this question in class. Certainly socrative worked well for this, and one thing I learnt (somewhat by accident) is that you can leave a quiz running in socrative open for responses for several months.

 

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