Ronseal sites for educators

This is my little collection of Ronseal sites - sites that do exactly what you want, just when you want them to.  It's hard to know how to categorise the following other than they're 'sites that once you know about them you'll find them pretty darned useful even if you didn't realise you needed them'.  And they're especially useful for educators because part of the battle of working online / blending face-to-face with online is trying to manage your time, so anything that can help make the online bit easier is all good by me.  So, here they are.  My top five Ronseal sites:

1.  http://ifttt.com
I've gone on about this before but it's a brilliantly simple idea - If this then that.  You create recipes from tasks which are associated with services - the recipes basically trigger things to happen automatically.  For example, when a new blog post occurs here, create a note in Evernote there.  When I favourite a tweet here, create a bookmark in Diigo there.  There are so many combinations and 'recipes' other people have created before which you can use / adapt yourself to get you started.  Definitely one of those 'didn't realise that would do what I wanted' sites.

2.  http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/
Down for everyone or just me - I barely need to explain this one.  If you want to use a site and it doesn't appear when you go to visit it, it can be extremely frustrating.  That's where this site comes in.  Just enter the address and you'll know straight away if the problem is yours or not.  Very handy to know about.

3.  http://www.moreofit.com/
More of it is a hidden gem - I only discovered it recently but there are plenty of uses for it.  For example, the classic of a particular website or service being blocked (YouTube is frequently victim of the web filter police within education) is frustrating, but all you need to do is go to 'more of it' and enter the name of the site you're wanting to find similar sites to, and it'll suggest some.  Great simple idea.

4.  http://www.google.com/analytics/
Google Analytics are absolutely fantastic - and free.  The reason they're so useful is that once you've installed the simple little tracking code you get access to a whole load of stats about how your content is being used.  If you've created a wiki or a blog for use with your students, then knowing how and when they're accessing it / knowing what they're looking at and how long for can give you great immediate feedback and food for thought with designing your content.  Don't be put off by the need to install a tracking code - it's straightforward and with things like Google Sites or Blogger, it's just a copy and paste exercise and you're away.

5.  http://alternativeto.net/
Very like 'more of it', but this time with applications / software.  You can choose free, open source, commercial alternatives to just about anything you can think of.  Again, very handy for the educator who might not have the biggest budget when it comes to getting software and needs to know what options are out there.

Stabilisers vs. balance bike...

I had a thought this morning... and it came off the back of a conversation about my kids learning to ride their bikes.  With my daughter, we dutifully bought a bike with stabilisers - because that's what you did. She would pedal furiously to get herself going - backwards.  And go nowhere very fast.  When she did get herself going, if the road was at all bumpy, she would wobble and scare herself and stop.  Or, the stabilisers would form a stubborn bridge, suspending the wheel in the middle so that it could gain no friction to get her moving.  Going up hills was torture.  And the noise of the plasticky wheel on the ground.  Eurgh!

When my son was about three, rather than getting him a bike with stabilisers we bought him a balance bike.  How much fun did he have on that?  And the speed he got up to!  And the independence!  And the freedom... for him and us.  It was brilliant.  Rough surfaces he scooted over with ease.  Slopes were walked up and were simple.  And it was quiet.  We could go walks with the children and they would whizz ahead on their bikes, scooping up the space ahead of them with gusto.  Co-incidentally, one of our friends had also bought my son a balance bike for his birthday, so we had two - which meant one each for the children and my daughter discovered how much fun riding could be as well.

One day, when he was four, we were walking around a lake with him on his scoot bike and my daughter, by now aged 6 and riding a 'proper' bike.  Out of curiosity I said to my son, 'do you fancy having a go on her bike?'.  'Yes', he said.  And we swapped the children over.  I held the saddle, he sat on it.  And started to pedal... and that was it.  He rode the rest of the way, pedalling happily and never ever fell off once.

My thought this morning was about the way people learn and how it relates to those two different approaches to supporting their learning.  The first, provided a rigid scaffold which is then removed.  The second, a far more authentic experience of bike riding - attain balance and experience, then move to pedals later.  Stabilisers present the bike as a given, and then add on the metal struts and wheels to support it.  A balance bike strips back the experience of learning a bike to the most important bits - getting your balance and feeling the freedom of riding.

I'm wondering whether scaffolding students' learning is the wrong approach.

I'm wondering whether we're approaching things by saying 'this is the whole and I want you to get there... I'll support you en route' rather than 'this is how it truly feels to be competent in this area, I'm going to light that fire of enjoyment which gets you to take it further'.

This really is just half a thought.  I just wanted to record it before it slipped away.  Does any of what I've written strike a chord with anyone?  Or even vaguely make sense?

Print to digital... the Britannica moves on

The final print version of the Encyclopedia Britannica was announced this week and it seemed worth a little ponder. And this little quote in The Guardian stood out to me...

Online or in print, the Encyclopedia Britannica is worth treasuring | From the Guardian | guardian.co.uk: "There was a certain romance to the ritual of making the physical effort of pulling the volume from the shelves, finding a reference, enquiring further and being led from one volume to another.

But that was another era, when there was a more leisurely way of doing things. People had time to wander into the library to do a bit of research, have a chat, and enjoy the serendipitous nature of flicking through the pages."

'via Blog this'

That was another era.  It was, wasn't it?  When I was little, I remember the encyclopaedias shut away in a glass cabinet.  A cabinet all to themselves.  Distinct.  Apart.  Special.  When... if... you were able to look at them, it was like going on a journey.  One entry leading you to the next.  Tracking down the page / chapter references and finding out new stuff.  Only, it wasn't really new stuff at all.  It was old stuff.  And the longer the books gathered dust in their cabinet, the older that 'new stuff' became.

The end always was on the cards for the Britannica once the 'no going back' moment of the internet came at the turn of the century.  I don't think it was just having an electronic version of the information, as Microsoft's Encarta managed - though that in itself was a novelty when it first appeared.  But the ability to search an unknown quantity of information via the web.  Now *that* really was something special.  And then, web 2.0 and wikis... and that 'new stuff' could become dynamically changing and evolving 'new stuff'.  It really was new.  And that ability to keep things fresh and vibrant changed the landscape again.

Though my own children will discover things as they read books, when they want to find something out, it's an electronic world which holds the key.  'Can't you just Google it, Mummy?', they'll say.  And these are from children who really don't have very much direct exposure to computers.  The idea that the sum of all knowledge could ever have been locked up in a finite number of books would be a strange concept to them, I think.

I wonder whether we design online courses for students with a print Britannica mindset though?  We put them together and then they sit there. In a glass case to be admired.  Removed once in a while for a quick leaf through.  And then put back.  The energy and effort goes into collating and collecting.  But it's done in fits and starts and doesn't quite managed to harness the potential of the digital environment in which it now exists.  I wonder what would happen if you took that old knowledge exploring spirit of going reference to reference in the old print Britannica... and transformed that into allowing students to create their own pathways, making their own connections and build their own learning?

What has Higher Education and online / blended education has to learn from the experience of the printed Britannica Encyclopaedia?  We can't peddle chunks of rarified knowledge anymore.  That much I know.

Exiting Facebook

Recently, I thought I'd close my personal Facebook account (I have another I use for work purposes).  For a variety of reasons really.  But the decision to close it had been reached.  So, I went to get rid of it.

Now, bearing in mind I've been on Facebook for the best part of five years, there was a lot of baggage to leave behind.  Rather than going cold turkey and hitting the delete button, I decided to deactivate it.  I didn't tell anyone that's what I was doing.  I just did it.  The way different people reacted to that was a lesson in fascination.  Most, I presume, didn't notice.  But definitely not all.  The reaction from the 'not all' group gave me lots of food for thought!

Anyway, it turned out that by getting rid of my Facebook account, I was causing myself no end of grief because I'd forgotten that I'd used it to log in to a range of services over the past few years.  Services I may only periodically have remembered I had.  Stuff I didn't even notice I needed.  Until I needed it.  And then I couldn't log in because my Facebook account wasn't around.

In the end, I reactivated it.  I haven't actively used it since then, I just want to have the account to simplify getting into the various services I need until the point at which I've nailed all of them and reset the account details.  It has all the privacy settings turned up to the strongest level I can manage while I'm gradually extracting myself from it.  It could be a VERY long process.

Aaargh!

It turns out that we're not involved in social networks anymore so much as a form of social wool which has knitted and knotted itself together and is darned difficult to untangle yourself from.

What's in a name?

A few days ago, I had an interesting discussion over on Google+ (think this may be the first time I've ever said that!) with A.J. Cann - which we both wanted to share publicly but resharing would lose the conversation we'd had... so... here it is.  He'd commented on a blog post I'd made and in return I'd asked him what he would rename virtual learning environments if he could and the exchange went as follows:

A.J. Cann  -  Virtual? So 1980s :-)
Learning? That debate's going to run a while...
Environment?

Let's ask ourselves:
a) What would students call it unprompted (generic, not brand)?
b) What message do we want to send to staff who will use it?

6 Mar 2012   

Sarah Horrigan  -  Okay - terminology... what would a student call it? They probably wouldn't. It isn't really a thing, they're just going to do the thing they're doing. I'm not 'facebooking', I'm 'chatting with friends / sharing a photo / playing a game'. They don't say they're going to use the 'Office Productivity Suite', they write a document. I wonder if the name is actually relevant to students in any way? VLE certainly implies that learning will magically happen in the 'environment'.

Will return to that thought in a bit... (meeting interruptus)...

6 Mar 2012  -  Edit   

A.J. Cann  -  I think it needs a label. Facebook is now a verb.
I'm into positive psychology here. "Learning Space" is too twee. Are we headed back to Nathan Bodington here?

6 Mar 2012 (edited)   

Sarah Horrigan  -  Please let it not be the Nathan Bodington Building! Learning space is twee - but increasingly it seems to be what 'they' are calling buildings / rooms at universities anyway. In some ways I've often thought that calling VLEs 'Content Management Systems' is more honest than implying that they are doing much more than helping to administer what may or may not be going on inside them. You have got me thinking though. Is a VLE a 'thing that needs a name' at all? And what is it that we're naming? Why does something that so routinely strips all learning from learning need us to get hung up on its name. Aren't we at the 'next please!' stage already?

6 Mar 2012  -  Edit   

A.J. Cann  -  Let's come at this from another angle:
What's the difference between Blackboard and WordPress?

We never got round to finishing the discussion but it has made me think about what exactly *is* a VLE?  I suppose I'm coming round to the point of view that the name things are given can matter greatly if they're given the wrong name.  Or a name which implies they do something automatically.  For example, I could call my daughter's bedroom a 'domestic learning environment' (DLE - I do like a new acronym!) because she loves to spend hours reading books up there.  But that doesn't make *all* bedrooms DLEs.  Just as with VLEs, you might well have learning which goes on in them, but the name doesn't magically transform them into centres of educational excellence or negate the fact that learning may never happen there.

Back to the question of the difference between Blackboard and WordPress.  Okay, so there are lots of differences.  However, there are a few which stand out:

1.  I stand a chance of being the designer and creator of a WordPress-powered site.  If I'm a student, that won't happen where Blackboard's concerned.
2.  I can customise WordPress the way I want within broad limits, Blackboard is customisable only within narrow limits.  And not in any truly meaningful way if I'm a student.
3.  With WordPress, I am the creator of the content.  As a student, I am the recipient of Blackboard content - and any content I do create is within the artificial bounds of the 'learning journey'.
4.  WordPress, my content is open.  Blackboard, my content is closed.
5.  WordPress, I create the account / install WordPress.  Blackboard, *you* create the account for me... and close it again when you say we're done.
6.  WordPress = mine.  Blackboard = yours.

So.  What is a virtual learning environment?  If you're a distance learning student, the VLE *is* the university.  It's attending class. It's discussing things with your classmates.  It's a centre of administration.  It's a place to get help and support.  If you're a campus-based student, the VLE is just another computer system that they use.  The name of it can quite happily be the name the institution has bestowed on it (at the University of Sheffield, for example, our VLE is called MOLE - My Online Learning Environment).  Just as when talking about cleaning the carpets and the words vacuum cleaner and Hoover are interchangeable.  When I talk about 'doing the hoovering' you know what I'm talking about.  The context of the use and terminology is more important than the overall label where students are concerned.

For staff, the name 'Virtual Learning Environment' allows us to exist in a blissful state of positivist ignorance.  Otherwise, we'd call our institutional VLEs 'Document Dumping Grounds' and congratulate ourselves on our brutal honesty.  Have you been on your institutional DDG lately?

Otherwise... Computerised Learning Administration Support System.  CLASS.  What happens in CLASS varies according to the teacher / student mix that meet within its digital walls.

What's hot is NOT hot... disabling 'What's hot' in Google+

... otherwise known as 'how do I get rid of the unwanted rubbish that's appearing in my Google+ stream???'

I'm currently trying to get my head around using Google+ and it's turning out to be most useful as a professional tool.  Which is fine, apart from the fact that by default Google have a seriously annoying 'what's hot' feature which pushes random content into your stream, disrupting the flow of conversation / ideas and essentially spamming you with nonsense.  Now, I can hear my inner fuddy-duddy shouting that last sentence out, but it really isn't a helpful feature at all.  I had a penny drop moment the other day when someone described Google+ as having the advantage of being 'curated' content, i.e. people choose to share stuff there rather than it automatically happening.  What's hot doesn't fit in with that sense of the curatorial at all... but getting rid of it is not as easy as it should be.

So, since I've just been through the process, I thought I'd describe the three easy (but not obvious!) steps to clearing your Google+ stream of twaddle.

1.  Click on the 'What's hot' link on the left hand side of your Google+ page

2.  Find the slider at the top of the 'What's hot' page which allows you to select how much of that content is shown on your stream - it's not obvious, it's a little grey circle on top of a faint grey line

3.  Click on the slider and drag it to the left.  This changes it to 'Show nothing from what's hot in your stream' - which de-clutters things nicely.

Oh, and this doesn't mean I've completely warmed to Google+ yet - it still feels like wandering into a cavernous room and trying to start up a conversation by just talking into the sparsely populated space... then wondering if you're in the right room at all.  But, I'm getting closer to getting it...

Creativity and potential...

Just seen the following quote on Steve Wheeler's excellent blog:

Learning with 'e's: Content is a tyrant...: "The internet is better as a creative space that it is as a repository. This is due in no small part to the gradual evolution of so called Web 2.0 tools and services, the majority of which are richly social and participatory in nature. The capability of social networks to connect people with similar interests from across the globe also promotes the need to create, organise, share and consume content within appropriate contexts. As a society, and within our communities of practice, we need to be able to discern the good content from the bad content."

I think this could easily be applied to virtual learning environments too. The traditional 'document dump' use of a virtual learning environment is the equivalent of giving sawdust to a parched man. When people crave interesting, engaging, exciting, inspiring... and what they get instead are PowerPoints and pdfs... the potential of that creative space disappears in an instant.

Doing more than the simple repository version of online education is quite a feat, however. The structure of a virtual learning environment isn't the structure of the learner. When I browse the internet for content, I move around making connections which suit me. So often this isn't the case in institutional online spaces. Adaptive release forces learners into the predefined processes of the author. Chronological chunking drip feeds learning in pieces which don't encourage the flow of the motivated learner. The technological complexity of constructing a well-designed activity is a hurdle too high for many time-pushed academics.

If web 2.0 is about user-generated content, creativity and connection... how can we turn the spaces we've got - the institutional VLE into a place where real learning happens? What would be the elements which went into the transformation of online / blended learning from the mundane to the magical?

Y'know. I really don't know. I know there are lots of different approaches I'm trying. From solid support for the basics to helping people to connect with one another to develop their innovative practices. Being responsive. Being flexible. Keeping in mind the bigger picture and all that stuff. But it never quite feels like it's enough. I go to conferences and every time get that same sense of déjà vue as the same problems and the same attempts at the same solutions are presented.

The VLE is better as a creative space than a repository. Right?

There just has to be a better way...

If this then that...

I don't see many people mentioning this, but it's something I came across a while ago and it is brilliant.

'It' being the website ifttt

Okay, so brilliant is a nerdy kind of brilliance but nevertheless for helping to make connections between bits of yourself on the web, it's fabulous.  The basic premise is built on the idea of recipes.  You combine tasks to create recipes.  And the tasks are attached to various services - called channels - from Twitter to Facebook, SMS to email.

You then use the formula 'if this then that' (if this then that = ifttt - geddit?) to combine those tasks to get it to do brilliant stuff.

For example, whenever I post something to this blog, I want it to appear on Twitter.  I just set up a recipe that says 'when there's a new entry on the RSS feed... put out a Tweet that looks like that' and away it goes.  I want to know when it's going to rain... I create a recipe that says 'when this website says it's going to rain tomorrow in my region... send me a text message to remind me to take a brolly'.  Favourite a Tweet and the link automatically gets saved to your Diigo account etc... save something on Diigo with a particular tag and a Tweet broadcasts it or it appears on your Facebook page.  Want to backup your Instagram photos to Dropbox then ifttt can do that automatically.  Got the idea?

Blogging is a bit like an ifttt recipe - if I see something I want to share then I'm going to blog about it - only ifttt automates the bit in the middle! It's the combining of services and tasks which makes this just a genius little site.  Oh, and you don't even have to do the combining yourself... people also publish 'recipes' which you can reuse / tweak.

'if this then that' - a little combination of words I never knew I needed until I started using them!

All that caught my eye...

Image from paul (dex), available under

CC Attribution license

... this week anyway!

I'm always on the look out for interesting ideas / trends where learning technologies are concerned and I'm often asked what's out there,  so I thought it would be useful to share some of the pages which caught my eye each week.

Here goes with the first set of links:

• 'Google privacy policy: a stranglehold most users are happy to be held in' - good article from The Guardian which comes in the week where Google changed its privacy policy.

• 'Google's privacy settings - controlling your settings' - again, from The Guardian, this article looks at how users can adjust their privacy and take a bit of control.  Short of not using Google, however, there will always be issues to consider where your data and using services like Google are concerned though.

• 'RSA Animate - Drive' - the animations from RSA are great anyway, but Dan Pink's work on motivation is given an added twist by the RSA treatment

• 'Ten videos every educator should watch' - if the rest of the ten are as good as the ones I've already seen, then these are a source of handy inspiration

• 'Review of University Business Collaboration' - the Wilson review was released this week... some interesting times ahead where collaboration between business and universities is concerned, I think!

• '10 Education Technology Implementation Pitfalls and how to avoid them' - a list of pitfalls which, if you've worked in learning technology for a while, will have you nodding along.  Number 10 is especially true (and one of the biggest reasons so many projects fail to achieve sustainability)

• 'What technologies will shape the future of education' - from ZDNet this reports on the NMC Horizons Report.  So... what technologies to look out for?  The themes which emerge are mobile, personal, information heavy, flexible, active, the cloud and games-based learning - I can imagine that some of these will be difficult challenges for institutions as they untangle the policies, standards, processes and strategies to accommodate the impact of these.  Yes, more interesting times to look forward to!

Wonder what other things have caught everyone else's eye this week?

How not to use social media for customer service...

I saw this series of tweets by chance this morning...

Now, as I did... I'm sure you can see that a quick response was needed.  It would have been the right thing to do.  It would have been the humane thing to do.  You only have to read the tweets to see how urgent things were... to find out more... following a link or two would have given you a deeper glimpse of the story behind it.  A wife with her husband (and father of her two small children) dying in hospital just before Christmas.

You know what the response was from Vodafone?  Silence.  When pushed by another person... what was their response?

This:

'We answer our tweets in a chronological order'

And it took them 6 hours to make that response.  The same generic response they gave to someone else in their very next tweet.  They still haven't responded to @rachelacj as of 8 hours after her original tweets.  An opportunity to do the right thing and offer true customer service at a time where it would have made a big difference?  Missed completely. 

The lessons from this:

1.  Be a human being if you're providing a human service on Twitter

2.  Prioritise using whatever method you want... but be flexible when appropriate

3.  Remember the world is watching

4.  Make a difference where it matters.

Sad, sad bit of customer service on the day before Christmas Eve.

Thoughts are with rachelacj.  For some reason, though I brushed up against these tweets by chance this morning they've lodged themselves in my head.