Reasons for studying H817

Hi there,
I'm studying this course as I'm completely mystified about MOOCs and how they work, particularly how collaboration and support and accreditation take place in the MOOC environment.
Background - teacher wanting to keep at the cutting edge of developments in technology-enhanced learning.

Significant new technologies

Significant new technologies

Technology	How long used for educational purposes by my organisation	How long used for educational purposes by me
Cloud computing	X	X
Mobile/cell phone	X	X
Open content	2 years	2 years
Tablet computing	2 years	2 years
Game-based learning	X	X
Learning analytics	X	X
New scholarship	X	X
Semantic applications	X	X
Augmented reality	X	X
Collective intelligence	3 years	3 years
Smart objects	X	X
Telepresence	X	X

3 technologies I would like my organization to adopt

Mobile ‘phones

·      Great tools, increasingly ubiquitous, and the organization does not have to buy them a learners increasingly have their own.

·      For English language learning they offer some innovative new pedagogical approaches – e.g. take a photo representing a classic English idiom and post to the class blog for peer-review and comments from fellow learners.

Game-based Learning

·      Most of my students are children or teenagers.

·      The male ones do nothing but play computer games.

·      My efforts to inspire them in the joys of reading are not gaining much traction.

·      Therefore I would love to channel their enthusiasms for gaming towards things that will help them learn.

·      I’m not so interested in simulating real-life environments, I’m more interested on how your average teenager with a passion for Halo inadvertently improves his English whilst playing.

Learning Analytics

·      This whole area intuitively excites me.

·      I think I read somewhere that it already applies quite well in language learning environments.

·      Well, I haven’t used them at all, so I’d like to learn more – seems very useful if it enables students to identify which areas they are weak in, and to focus on improving those areas.

Online collaboration - lessons learned from Activity 15

Like many people have commented, it’s been enjoyable, surprising and gratifying to see what we produced in this activity.

And in the end we have a co-authored document amongst many people within a tight deadline, so whatever we did has worked.

That’s great and it’s been fascinating to be part of the process.

 For myself, it’s also given me a lot of food for thought, and I’ve been asking myself whether we’d do it the same way next time or do anything differently.

Some of the things I’ve been asking myself:-

·      Spontaneous / fluctuating leadership roles. I really like the fact that we didn’t replicate the classic project management structure by nominating a single coordinator. Coordination roles seemed to move from one person to another at different times quite spontaneously. I enjoyed that, but I also noticed there were points of confusion and a lot of us felt a bit lost at times – would we adopt the same approach re ‘spontaneous leadership’ next time, or would we do anything differently?

·      The proliferation of threads was hard to manage. It was really hard at times to know which thread to follow – David A’s reclarifying of deadlines was a big help, and Nicola’s ‘STOP! LOOK! One place Activity 15!’ thread was also quite a relief, but even then we all continued to post to a lot of different threads. Would we do this differently another time?

·      Final editorship rights. We had no-one owning final editorship rights – was this a problem? Did we produce the best document this way? (I’m really happy with the final document, but I felt quite involved in producing it – I wonder if we all felt the same way?)

·      Inclusion / leveraging the whole team. Did everyone feel as involved and connected, or did some people feel excluded? Timing-wise, I know if I am late to join an activity it is very demotivating and difficult to join in. I’ve been asking myself if group dynamics require ways of positively reaching out to people joining at different times to get involved.

·      Is synchronous communication the best approach? We seemed to embrace opportunities for real-time, synchronous communication (Elluminate or the chat function in etherpad). For a small team that is understandable, but if part of the power of groupwork on the internet is to involve large groups of people (hundreds or thousands?) then don’t you need to have ways of managing asynchronous communications in a way that people equally appreciate? I wonder how open-source programmers like those involved in Linux and Moodle do it.

·      Coordinating with the whole cohort. Felt to me like this didn’t happen much at all – our thread in Student Café didn’t attract much interaction. Could we do this a different way next time?

Technologies that peers are using that I need to have a look at

Technologies I need to come back to – no time to explore them now: -

·      Doodle

·      Screencast-o-matic – marking by recording a talk through an uploaded script.

·      Vodcasting

·      Jing (something Trish uses to mark)

·      Camstudio (screen capture software – David’s preference)

·      Google Hangout

·      Peermark from Turnitin (peer marking)

·      ePortfolios (not sure how these differ from blogs really)

·      Wriggle 1.1 – digital schoolbags

·      Scoopit (Trish is curating a couple of topics there)

·      Diigo (there is an H817 group)

E-portfolios - worth looking at in more detail later

e-Portfolios: Policy context

e-Portfolios and personal development planning have been prominent concepts in a number of national policy initiatives, including:  

         DfES e-Strategy  (2005) proposes a personal online learning space for every learner, which will contribute to an electronic portfolio, building a record of achievement for lifelong learning

         HEFCE strategy for e-learning  (2005) includes an objective to encourage electronic support for describing learning achievement and personal development planning (PDP)

         DfES review of fair admissions to HE  (2004) includes a definition of 'fair admissions' drawing on e-portfolios for richer applicant information

         Burgess scoping report (2004) envisages all HE students using an e-portfolio in the medium term, with students themselves as the translators and conveyors of information about their learning and achievement

         Burgess final report (2007) recommends the development of a Higher Education Achievement Report (HEAR) as the main vehicle for recording student achievement, which is based on the current academic transcript, and incorporates the European Diploma Supplement.

         QCA blueprint for e-Assessment (2004) proposes by 2009 all awarding bodies should be set up to accept and assess e-portfolios

         Leitch review of skills  (2006) discusses the need for higher level skills for all, and the provision of a free 'skills health check'

         Guidelines for HE Progress Files  (2001) prepared by Universities UK, Universities Scotland, the Standing Conference of Principals, the Learning and Teaching Support Network and the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education. They propose the PDP element should be operational across the whole HE system and for all HE awards by 2005/6

Lifelong and personalised learning policy drivers propose that all learners should be able to (electronically) develop, record, repurpose and transfer a wide range of information about themselves as they progress through different levels and episoldes of learning, training and employment.

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/eportfolios/policycontext.aspx

Doodle Polls - an example of data mining creating new knowledge

Doodle polls reveal how culture impacts online collaboration

February 20, 2013

A recent research project by representatives from Harvard and the University of Zurich has uncovered some interesting details about the way in which various cultures impact international collaboration on the Internet.

To investigate the influence of national culture on people’s scheduling behavior, the team analyzed more than 1.5 million anonymized  meeting polls from 211 countries that were initiated on Doodle.

Here are just some of the highlights from the comprehensive project:

         People from countries with strong economies schedule more meetings.

         Countries that plan their events far in advance (such as Switzerland and Germany) take the most time to respond and decide on a time.

         In comparison to individualist societies (such as the US), community-oriented countries (such as China and Japan) respond to meeting polls earlier and make more of an effort to select times that will work for the entire group.

         Only 2% of meeting polls contain 5, 10, or 15 minute meeting time options (such as 4:15 PM).

The full report can be viewed at http://tinyurl.com/DoodlePaper-pdf.

Learning Journal 6 March 2013

Asynchronous decision-making – fascinating to participate in the process of deciding a technology to focus on for Activity 15.

·      Clear instructions in the activity are crucial if there is a tight deadline – otherwise it is easy for people to misunderstand / go off on unnecessary tangents. Also, it is easy for people to get stressed and panic if they are not clear on what needs doing.

·      The group dynamics are also fascinating – in the absence of a nominated person to be in charge, we can observe how we handle coordination. There are none of the cues we would get if we were all in a room together. People are courteous, my sense is that no-one wants to be directive or bossy – we would all clearly rather trade some efficiency in the interests of maintaining a democratic approach.

·      Doodle for voting is a new discovery for me – I like it. But again it risks over-simplifying the decision-making dynamics. There are implications for our choice of technology that impact on the second stage of the activity – in a face-to-face environment we would naturally expect some people to argue ‘for’ their chosen technologies, and we would have a natural expectation that by doing so, those people would be accepting some responsibility to see through the whole activity. But that doesn’t happen so obviously in an asynchronous online environment.

Engaging with forums

I notice that I can read entire forum threads and be left with no sense of what I just read.

When I have a specific task or activity to do that requires me to read the threads, then I get a lot more understanding from them.

E.g. I’m just trying to understand Activity 15 part 1 – I’m trying to draw an overview of everyone’s comments. I’m also noting technologies I want to return to later when I have more time – it is very enriching that people mention different technologies in their posts, but given the lack of time it feels impossible to look into them all now. Reading the posts with this in mind, all sorts of things now become apparent that I didn’t pick up at all when I just read them.