Category Archives: edtech

Visualization for “Support in Using ICT”

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Yesterday, on the very easy-to-remember date of 09/09/09, we launched the ICT support web site for our Bachelor in Educational Sciences (BScE – Bachelor en Sciences de l’Education). This web site is an on-going project and will house guides and information to the (ed) tech tools we use in our study program. Currently, a quick start guide about our WordPress MU installation is online, and I am working on a quick start guide for our e-portfolio system Mahara.

Instead of making these materials only available within our Moodle installation, I can now publish them openly online. They may not be cutting edge because others have already written guides, tutorials etc. However, I do hope that students and faculty will find them helpful because they address our particular environments and I can add tips and information that they may need. All that in rather short guides as more extensive information can be found in the general resources for these systems or other user-created material online.

While setting up this support web site and revamping our portal site (now completely a blog) which announces our study program news and events throughout the academic year among others, I fell in love with the theme Atahualpa. It is extremely flexible and you can change almost anything to your liking through an administrator interface.

You can also have a (changing) custom header which brings me to the actual purpose of this post (finally ;-) ). I chose to take a photo of Lego building blocks that I arranged for the specific purpose of visualizing what support for using (ed) tech tools means to me.

My idea of how to visualize support

My idea of how to visualize "support for using ICT"

We use a number of electronic tools in our study program: Moodle as the default VLE for course-related work and for our coordinator team to communicate administrative stuff, Mahara for the student e-portfolios (launch for all students after a test run this winter semester), a CMAP server, WordPress MU (launch this semester), a Facebook group mainly for event announcements, and the YouTube channel BScE.tv with student videos about the study program. Teachers can also work with any other tool, e.g. GoogleDocs. Luckily, we are free in our choice and not bound to one single system. Furthermore, our students always document their research projects with video and / or audio and need to use editing / multimedia authoring software.

In the Lego model, these tools are represented by the big colored blocks. I did not bring in the weight of usage, e.g. represent Moodle with a number of blocks. Some tools are close to each other are used in conjunction. I put them next to each other in the model whereas others are not really connected and thus further away.

The narrow green blocks indicate that some of these tools are used within a walled garden, e.g. when they are installed on our server and access to the content is only possible when you have a (university) login.

The small Lego pieces (mainly in apple green and orange) represent individuals and the slightly bigger pieces represent groups of people. You can see that the individuals and groups use these tools (when they “sit on” them). Of course, they do not always just use one tool, but a varying number. Therefore, they can be seen “sitting on” different blocks.

As there is no support infrastructure for using tech tools in place at the university besides the technical administrative support for these sites, the users help each other and find like-minded people to seek advice. That’s why a couple of the smaller pieces (individuals and groups) are on top of each other. However, the majority of the people are on their own and try to find their way around.

Now the big white bottom part comes into play. That is the support that I envision to advance:

  • to provide up-to-date information on the tech tools we use
  • to make available how-to guides for the tools used by many students and faculty, not just written ones, but depending on the needs and purpose also short screencasts for example
  • to offer workshops on the use of selected tech tools on different needs levels – not merely on how to handle them, but how to use them for their learning and teaching
  • to have short sessions like the Open University’s “IET Technology Coffee Mornings” and ETH Zurich’s “NET à la carte” for letting people get their feet wet with tools / services they may have heard about, but have been reluctant to try yet
  • to have a central “somebody” who feels responsible for giving individual / group support and directing questions that s/he cannot answer to more knowledgeable people; too often people do not know whom to ask or the same issues are discussed multiple times without anybody knowing from the other

The red piece sticking out in the back beyond the white support blocks indicates that it will not be possible to provide support for everything.

The support web site that we just launched is only one little piece of the big white bottom, but it is a start.

Streaming a stream

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Alec Couros and Dean Shareski dueled today at #tatc09. Each of them presented their favorite web tools in the Cool Tools Duel which was broadcast live on Ustream. The audience – in the room as well as online could even vote for their favorite presenter. Both Alec and Dean presented great tools and the audience loved their duel.

Alec presented Ustream and thus he was streaming a stream and everybody could watch the stream in the stream streamed in the stream. ;-)

Streaming a Stream

Streaming a Stream

It was tough to decide whom to give my vote. In the end, Alec got it,but the irony is that I used two tools that Dean talked about to take the above picture. ;-) I took the screenshot with Skitch, a tool that I truely love to have on my Mac, and added the frame and the text with Picnik.

Thanx for sharing this presentation.

Walls Optional: Livestream, live chat, live fun

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On May 1, 2009, the mini conference Walls Optional took place at Camosun College in Victoria, British Columbia. Alec Couros was invited to give the keynote, A Tweet and a Poke, How Educators Can Harness the Power of Social Networks, at this one-day event. Luckily for everybody who could not make it to Canada, the keynote was streamed live. Unfortunately for me, I could not watch it because the stream would not want to come through without huge buffering problems.

Thus, I looked forward to the recording, but that also had problems. The only hope I had left was to contact tech support. Clint Lalonde, Distributed Education Web Specialist at the college, was incredibly kind and quickly replied that they worked on a solution to make the stream available somewhere else. Within a few days after the keynote, I received the link to the recording on blip.tv and could watch Alec’s presentation which was great. I had already downloaded the presentation file, read the notes, and knew what I was getting myself into watching the recording.

However, seeing the tour de force on video was something else. Time flew by quickly with the many examples of social networking and how we can benefit from it that Alec showed. He also dared to do a live presentation of Omegle, the chat-with-a-stranger, with which you never know what the stranger on the other end may say. The stranger Alec and the 120 people in the room chatted with was a good sport and actually wanted to get to know all the participants. ;-) He received the link to the stream, but it was never found out whether he watched it or not.

Alec made his point clear that building up a personal learning network is important and also very beneficial for learning and in particular for professional development.

Visual effects and meeting strangers with Alec Couros

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Alec Couros presented “Knock Down the Walls: Toward a Model of Open Teaching” at the MoodleMoot Canada 2009 today. Thanks to the organizers, his presentation was streamed live via Elluminate so that we, unfortunate to not have found our way to Edmonton, were still able to participate and see Alec in action.

As usual, his presentation was inspiring and filled with great examples of open education. However, Elluminate also provided a good deal of discussion in the backchannel for us who participated via it because it seemed that all of us had some issues with the application sharing. It slowed down Alec’s visuals considerably. On the upside, it thus provided for interesting effects:

Slow application sharing

Slow application sharing

Alec could not leave out Omegle, the “chat with a stranger” service that had made the news recently as I remarked a couple of days ago. He was brave to start a chat session at the conference live! And was lucky to have a good sport in his chat room. We will never know who that person was whose chat had been broadcast to all the presentation attendees in Edmonton and around the world.

Live chat in Omegle with 300 people watching

Live chat in Omegle with 300 people watching

You: how are you?
Stranger: fine
Stranger: how are you
You: where are you?
Stranger: belgium
You: how are things in belgium?
Stranger: As boring as usual
Stranger: where do you live
You: we are in edmonton, there are about 300 of us watching this… is that ok?
Stranger: sure
You: sorry, we better go.
You: thanks for the discussion
You: bye for now, take care.

But it did not stop there. Alec took brief glimpses at the change of mindset of teachers and students who participate in open teaching and learning scenarios as well as presented their advantages. When the discussion started and no presentation was needed anymore, all who were in Elluminate experienced a strange moment when we saw our Elluminate environment reflected back to us in Alec’s application sharing window.

Elluminated

Elluminated

It was a great way to ease out late Friday afternoon. Thanks again to everybody involved in making this stream possible.

Update: Alec shares relevant links in connection to his keynote in his blog post “Open/Networked Teaching Keynote at MoodleMoot”.