In Wikipedia, the definition for take-out (takeaway) is “food purchased at a restaurant for the purpose of being eaten elsewhere. The restaurant may or may not provide table service.” So what would that make a Takeaway University?

Is it a university where the education is purchased for the purpose of being consumed somewhere else, but maybe also on university grounds?

Lots of takeaway food is fast food: cheap and with a questionable health aspect. Does that mean that you get a cheap education at the Takeaway University, but one that is also of inferior quality?

At the Takeaway University you should be able to order anything that’s on the menu in any order and also multiple times.

Are there different Takeaway Universities specializing in certain menus, i.e. study programs?

Is the Takeaway University a university on demand?

Does the Takeaway University deliver content in bite-sized servings for quick consumption during a short break?

Takeaway University

On October 9, 2009, Bob Reuter and I held our first TechLunch on Campus Walferdange (Faculty of Language and Literature, Humanities, Arts and Education – FLSHASE) of the University of Luxembourg. We had initiated this informal lunchtime session to give students, teachers, and researchers the opportunity to learn about digital technologies in a relaxed setting. Often, people at university do not have a lot of time to participate in workshops. Furthermore, 3- or 4-hour workshops are not always the right format to whet the appetite for a topic. To get people interested in something, we thought that a shorter session could be more beneficial. Participants would not have to invest much because they could eat their lunch at the same time. Thus, TechLunch war born.

We planned to hold it approximately twice a month also depending a bit on the internship schedule of the BScE (Bachelor in Educational Sciences) students who are a primary target group for us as we are both involved in that study program. However, we also welcome anybody else from the university, i.e. students, researchers, teachers, and staff from all 3 campuses, to join us. We have had 4 sessions up to now with 4 to 12 participants. All sessions are video recorded and uploaded to YouTube in case anybody who could not attend the sessions wanted to review them.

Although we are happy that anybody shows up, we would, of course, like to have a larger audience.

TechLunch survey

We set up a questionnaire to find out what further topics would be interesting to our potential audience now that they may have already heard about TechLunch or even attended one. Within the last 4 days we have received 23 responses. Now that everybody is in holiday mood and preparing for the festivities, I do not think that we will receive many more responses, but we will keep the questionnaire open.

Out of these 23 people, 5 had already attended a TechLunch. We also already have a couple of regulars who have come to 2 and 1 already to 3 TechLunches.

TechLunch time

One concern of ours is the time to offer TechLunch. With students not having classes every day, researchers and teachers also being on campus often irregularly, it is very difficult to come up with a time that would suit most. We had opted for Friday 12:00-12:45 p.m., but wanted to see if other times might be more convenient.

Friday does not seem to be too bad, but our preferred time was not among the ones chosen most (only 3 people agreed with that time).

• 6 participants preferred Friday, 1:00-1:45 p.m.
• 5 participants opted for Wednesday, 12:30-1:15 p.m.
• 4 participants each voted for Monday, 1:30-2:15 p.m., and Thursday 1:30-2:15 p.m.

One person suggested to offer a date with several time slots before each TechLunch and see which one is the most popular. In theory that might be a good idea, but bringing in a sign-up process would complicate everything. We had asked people to sign up for the first TechLunch (Zotero for Beginners) because we knew the topic was a favorite for our students, but it generated more emails than people actually came to the session because some could not come in the end and apologized or asked if they could come late etc. Having the sign-up process also feels as if it is something formal whereas we want to keep TechLunch open and just as a gathering to exchange ideas and opinions about using digital technologies for learning, studying, teaching, and researching.

TechLunch topics

Before planning the coming “summer” semester (it starts in mid-February ), we wanted to get an idea if the topics that Bob and I would offer would also be of interest. We proposed 13 topics:

• Bookmarking: synchronization and sharing with others
• Electronic notetaking
• Advanced features of Zotero
• Facebook and Twitter
• Alternatives to PowerPoint
• Setting up a personalized start page in a browser
• Mahara [this eportfolio system doubles as social network and is in use in the BScE] as social network
• Creating cartoons online
• Open Educational Resources: What’s that?
• How do I find photos online that I can use?
• Why should I have a blog?
• How can I subscribe to online content and view it easily?
• Password management

Only “Creating cartoons online” got less than 5 votes. Maybe we should have added “… for learning purposes / with kids in the classroom” or something like that.

The top 3 topics with 14+ votes are:

• Alternatives to PowerPoint (17)
• Open Educational Resources (15)
• Using online images legally (14)

Interest in proposed TechLunch topics

Some people also provided their own suggestions for future TechLunch topics:

• Troubleshooting common error messages on a Mac (I guess, also Windows computer owners could find some); unfortunately, no examples were provided and also no email address to contact the commenter
• Chrome OS
• Cloud Computing
• Privacy Issues
• Image, audio and video editing
• Using Word optimally
• Google Wave (that was already on our list, but we did not put it forth because it is not out yet for everybody)
• iTunes U
• Zotero for beginners (two times)
• OpenOffice (two times)
• R as alternative to SPSS
• SPSS
• Creating online surveys with tools other than Grafstat
• Tools for creating handouts (which tools are there? compatibility PC-Mac, preferably free)

We also asked if anybody would be interested in leading a TechLunch. Although up until now we have led all 4 TechLunches that doesn’t mean that that needs to stay that way. We welcome others who want to share their experiences and use of software or online services. Two people were interested in doing just that. Yeah.

Comments in the survey

In the general comment text field we received encouraging comments to keep up with TechLunch. However, we need to make it clear that the language in which TechLunch will be offered will depend partly on the audience. The first posters were in German thus discouraging some people to attend. However, the last two sessions were conducted in English as we had some non-German speakers in them. Thus, we can be flexible, but it must be clear to our audience. Initially, we used German to encourage the BScE students to attend. The language issue is a bit complicated because the University of Luxembourg has three official languages: English, French, and German.

Originally, we intended TechLunch for students, researchers, and teachers. However, administrative staff can also benefit from some of the sessions. Therefore, TechLunch really is for anybody at the university.

Where to go from here?

So how will we continue? Well, the last session for winter semester 2009/10 will be held on January 15 (time to be announced) and we will look into using polls in the classroom and for research. The online service PollEverywhere will be introduced. Then there will be a brief semester break and TechLunch will be back in summer semester 2010. We will come up with a schedule and take all the topic suggestions as well as preferred times into account to allow more people to join us.

The 3rd eLearning Charter Conference was held at the University of Luxembourg on 30 October 2009. We had decided to videotape the four presentations to allow the other members of the Charter Universities who could not be present to see them and also other interested parties. A result of this meeting was also that we set up a site to gather further discussions and resources.

I delivered the contribution of the University of Luxembourg with Charles Max and Bob Reuter as co-authors. Our presentation was entitled “Integrating Mahara as e-portfolio system and social network in the BScE”. The BScE is the Bachelor en Sciences de l’Education (Bachelor in Educational Sciences), a 4-year study program at the University of Luxembourg. A recording is available (may not show up in feed readers).

Serendipity. Gráinne Conole used that word a few times in her virtual field trip on Cloudworks today / tonight. And it was really serendipity for me that I learned about that field trip from the comfort of my home. Bob Reuter, a colleague of mine, wrote a brief blog post about Cloudworks earlier in the evening. Not too long after I saw the tweet about it, I read a tweet from @scope_community about Gráinne Conole presenting on the very same subject tonight taking us on a Virtual Field Trip Visiting Cloudworks (recording). She also set up a cloud for the field trip.

Cloudworks is an initiative by the Open University offering “a place to share, find and discuss learning and teaching ideas and experiences”. Gráinne spoke about Cloudworks in CCK08 last year. But back then, it was still fuzzy and not so easy to grasp as there was not much activity going on.

I have not yet had an account in Cloudworks (changed a few minutes ago), but had already taken a few looks at it a couple of months ago and was very impressed about the amount of discussion and activity in general going on.

It is great to see so many ideas in the open space. However, I asked the question in the session if it were possible to install the system on a server for a closed community. In the tech group of our bachelor program, the question came up how to make good student work accessible to others within the BScE. After mulling things over in my head and discarding a database in Moodle, I thought of Cloudworks and Alan Levine‘s Maricopa Learning eXchange (from a different web area, simpler, but still serves its purpose).

Our students produce a lot of research, data, teaching material, portfolio reflections and so on, but nobody in the program knows about them when you are not involved with the students producing these great things. Therefore, it would be useful to have a system where teachers, and I think also fellow students, could nominate works to be put into a repository for all students to check out. The nomination part is not exactly Cloudworks, but I believe good to show the students that their work is appreciated by others (besides receiving comments).

A lot of the artifacts our students create could be made openly available. But some of them not because they may contain videos or images of children from their internship classes. The parents only agree to having these displayed in password-protected areas of the university. It would be much harder to get the consent for open online publishing. Students may also feel comfortable with showing their work or also portfolio reflections to fellow students and teachers, but not to everybody.

Of course, being open has a lot of potentials, e.g. the artifacts can generate comments and / or discussions that may have never surfaced in a closed system, students would produce for a potentially larger audience and not just for themselves / their group / class.

Therefore, I am torn between openness and the walled garden. Maybe a combination will evolve where certain things would only be found on our server (then the problem persists of how to do that) and others in an open system. Before trying to find a system that would be useful on our server, I would jump in on the deep end and try Cloudworks with some of the work that students and teachers have done because

• it will be a good trial to open up more and to make the work done in the BScE more visible
• the system offers a number of possibilities for uploading, aggregating, interaction
• it would be a good experience for the students and teachers involved to learn how to manage in such an open space

And, we may be surprised to find out “how many people are open to openness” as Gráinne said.

For the Winter Semester 2009/10 (which already started in mid-September – go figure) it was decided that all students enrolled in the Bachelor in Educational Sciences (BScE – Bachelor en Sciences de l’Education) at the University of Luxembourg use the open source e-portfolio system Mahara for their electronic developmental portfolio. This system had already been in use with about 120 students the previous year in a pilot and now it was to be used for all our 480 something students.

Thus, we organized workshops for the students and their respective tutors. One reason why we had chosen Mahara was its ease of use. Students can create their e-portfolio very quickly without needing to know HTML or web design. They simply upload or create their artefacts online, drag & drop them into their portfolio sections, arrange them, and they are done. The part that should take them the longest is the actual reflection but not the technical side. Although this procedure is not that difficult in general, we offered the students an introductory workshop in which they could touch upon all these things and acquaint themselves with the system because not everyone of them is a tech buff and feels comfortable with any new technology that is thrown at them.

Being the one who had the most knowledge in using Mahara as I had tested it, I kind of became the default workshop facilitator. I also wanted to have these workshops because I knew that not everybody would be thrilled by having to use a new system. Thus, I came up with a plan for a 3-hour introductory workshop for our students in which I repeat the principles of our portfolio approach and then guided them through the collection and creation of artefacts, the process of creating their own portfolios, and how they can share their portfolios with others, receive feedback etc. I knew from the start that this workshop would be very technology-oriented to acquaint the students with the system and not to talk about their already existing portfolios and how they can be brought into Mahara. I missed this part because the workshop stayed rather abstract and disconnected to the portfolio topic in some ways.

But I needed a way of how to familiarize about 480 students with our new portfolio system in a workshop setting taking into account that

• all students had to participate,
• the workshop should preferably take place before their first internship period in the 3rd week of October when they would start to work more in their portfolio,
• the tech savviness of the students ranged from 2 to 10,
• every student should be able to try things out -> no auditorium-like demonstration,
• they only get this one session.

The first thing I did was start early. And by early I mean really early – way back in June. We knew that our 4th-year students would have a tough year ahead of them with a longer internship, additional time in their internship classes beyond the internship, and their final project. Thus, we did not want to bring all new stuff in the first few weeks of the semester, but allow them to make themselves familiar with the new tool over the summer break. Those who wanted to take the time to make the move to Mahara over the summer could do so and would not have to cram that into the regular semester schedule.

I had scheduled four workshops in June. Due to the schedule of the students and my own, these workshops ended up on two days within a short time span. The other 13 workshops took place between 18 September 2009 and 16 October 2009, generally three to four per week. Thus, I had a tour through our entire bachelor program from the 1st-year to the 4th-year students seeing 428 students altogether. The ones I did not have in the workshops were students who are spending their semester abroad currently and who had already departed for their new university.

In addition to these student workshops I also gave four workshops for faculty with a different angle to the topic.

Facilitating such a large number of basically identical workshops within a short time was an interesting experience for me. At first I thought I could not tell the same thing to the second or third group that I had already told the first one until I remembered that they knew nothing about the topic and had not been in the workshop of the first group. No workshop turned out like another for several reasons:

• the students were different
• I added details right away that I had said in passing earlier
• I left out details when I realized they were of a minor nature
• I became more relaxed with time and could open my senses more to what was going on around me
• I learned to look more closely for hints when students got bored or were struggling

I tried to approach each workshop with a sense of newness because I did not want to come across as having learned my spiel by heart and just reciting everything without being really engaged. I wanted to be excited about the topic 17 times to hopefully also spark some excitement about the capabilities the tool offers in the students. I also wanted to be excited each time to make the workshop interesting to me and to not get bored myself. In the course of the workshop I also learned a few new things about Mahara because students approached the software differently and thus found other ways of coming up with the answer to a question.

Of course, I did my share of comparisons, but they also helped me. After the first three workshops in September, I realized that I kept stretching the introductory part more and more by adding not unimportant details that I had only thrown in earlier in passing thus making this a really long part where the students were basically passive. Later I tried to avoid rambling and ultimately had more time for the practice parts. In some workshops I could get on much faster than in others, some student groups had lots of questions whereas in others I had to provide the questions and answer them.

During the workshop, I did not use any handouts because I wanted them to explore the system’s features without being glued to a piece of paper and to realize that many things followed the same procedure (like give it a title, provide a description / text, tag it, save it, click a radio button to put it into a portfolio section). However, I did make a quick start guide for Mahara which can be extended over time to include solutions to questions the students had / will have. This guide is housed on our ICT support web site that is openly accessible.

There was one moment in every single workshop which was the same, when I told the students they would need a new password for Mahara. There was always a very audible “Oh no. Why another password?” However, this moment when the mood of the students plummeted to zero lasted only a short time because I could lift their mood by explaining that they did not need to remember that password. Mahara allows for networking with Moodle. Thus, when students log in to Moodle, they are immediately logged in to Mahara. To set up this connection to their Moodle accounts, they do need to provide a new password for Mahara. But as they can always log in via Moodle, they don’t need to remember it. Complicated and simple at the same time.

This workshop was an additional seminar for students in their 2nd, 3rd and 4th year. We integrated it into a regular seminar for the 1st-year students as they start out new with the portfolio. They have a seminar dedicated to everything portfolio during the 1st and 2nd semester. In the 2nd semester, there will be a hybrid seminar combining content discussions with discussions of how Mahara can be used for achieving what they want to do in their portfolio.

I am looking forward to hearing the reactions of the students towards the end of the semester when they will have had time to use Mahara and integrate it into their study work flow.

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 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.

On Wednesday, February 4, 2009, we had a research lab meeting in which we wanted to talk about the vision for our lab and what we want it to be. The first exercise we did was to visualize our personal vision of our lab using Lego building blocks.

In order for me to have a vision for the future, I needed to examine the current situation and make sense of it first. The result of the state of the affairs is the following:

State of the affairs

The basis for our existence as research lab is the university represented by the bottom white, red and blue blocks (the university colors). On top of that our research lab consists of smaller and bigger units, mainly projects or research initiatives. They can be close to each other, (almost) touching depending on their research objectives, or they can be rather far apart.

These projects or initiatives could not live without the various people who work in / on them. They are represented by the tiny Lego pieces (I had never seen those before) of various colors stating that each researcher is an individual. These researchers are sometimes also close to each other and at other times not because not everybody has the same research agenda or looks at the same topics. Some of the people blocks are taller representing research lab and project leaders.

Our research lab cannot function in a vacuum and thus there is a green block going outside of the lab symbolizing the bridge to our research unit of which we are a part. The white building block is the research facilitator of our research unit.

The only non-Lego parts are the cake crumbles that luckily happened to be there because one colleague had made a banana cake for this session. They represent the nourishment that we need in order to keep up with the daily tasks. Nourishment is not only meant in the sense of actual food and drink, but also intellectual nourishment in the sense of attending conferences, organizing lectures, discussing issues, attending workshops etc.

What I am currently missing is the umbrella that holds everything together and makes me really see that we are a lab thriving for the same thing. My representation of our lab is pretty colorful meaning that a lot of different things are going on and that there is not really a common denominator. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The University of Luxembourg is not constructed according to common university structure. All research units (there are no departments) are multidisciplinary so that we do not look at the same thing through the same glasses. However, that may work for a research unit where there are 30+ people in it. In our research lab, which is smaller, I am still looking for an overarching commonality that makes me see the difference to our research unit. I hope that we will be able to define what that common thing. It should not be some very abstract notion of “We all look at learning” because then you can fit almost everybody in there. It should be more refined and detailed. I am looking forward to our future discussions.

Vision for the future of our research lab

At the beginning of October I read Michele Martin’s blog post “The Social Media Game – Remixed and Some Comments” in which she shares her material and experience of playing that game at a conference. As I had just started teaching an optional module in our bachelor on “(Peer) Tutoring for the Learning with New Media”, I wanted to play it with my students if time permitted.

Yesterday, during our last of the five 3-hour sessions, I had planned 30 minutes for the game as we had already looked at some of the tools mentioned in the game and thus skipped the introductory remarks for the tools.

The scenarios provided by Michele Martin did not fit my target audience too well and thus I thought up some which I want to share here. Due to time constraints, we shortened the game and only used two scenarios. Although I think that I was more excited about the game than my students, they did a good job at discussing the various options and coming up with a good tool set.

I post the scenarios in English and German as I had written them in German originally and did not want to discard them.