Tag Archives: visualization

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.

Visions with Lego

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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

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

Vision for the future of our research lab

It’s the end of week 1 as I see it

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The first week of the MOOC CCK08 (these abbreviations are already ingrained in my brain) is almost over. I still have a lot of work to do, but have to interrupt it after this post to prepare some stuff for work. Unfortunately, I cannot devote my entire waking hours to the course which I think would be extremely helpful at times to really follow up on interesting discussions and trying to contribute to them instead of just opening them in my tabs in Firefox. I don’t feel comfortable to jump into a very theoretical discourse if I still need to straighten out the basics in my head. Hopefully with time it will get better, my inner optimist encourages me. Of course, I don’t and can’t follow all discussions, but at least the ones that I am interested in should be possible. :-)

The “Mookies” (Stephen Downes coined that name for people who participate in a MOOC) have been producing a lot of writing, video, concept maps and other visualizations in this past week. The visualizations certainly help me to get a better idea of the connections among us all and to sort out the many participants.

Tom Whyte and Trevor Meister try to come up with visual representations of our networks. Tom has started on the Twitter connections and Trevor put forward his ambitious and awesome ideas in his blog entry “Visual Network Interactions in CCK08“. As of now, Tom had already nine Twitter networks connected and there will hopefully be added many more. There are common connections already within these nine networks, and the network map starts to become complex. Pretty soon, we will need to invest in screens as big as walls and have them multi-touch enabled to navigate through this visualization. :-)

I order to see where I have been active and to reflect on my sparse activity during the week, I collected all Moodle and blog posts as well as tweets connected to the the course and put them in the infamous Wordle. Of course, I already knew where my emphasis was in the discussions, but maybe I had missed something which could have come up in the visualization.

Wordle of my participation in Week 1 in CCK08

Wordle of my participation in Week 1 in CCK08

Common English words as well as numbers have been removed by the program which leaves the most often used words in the visualization. As you can see, “course”, “can” (isn’t that also a common English word?), “use”, and “moodle” dominate the word cloud. I never imagined being drawn into a discussion on Moodle as much as a I was, but that is what happened and where I posted mainly. In hindsight, this forum, albeit I am not an expert on Moodle and there are participants in the course who are much more familiar with the software, was a safe place for me because I knew the topic, had read about advantages and disadvantages of virtual learning environment, had tried a few myself, have worked with them for several years now and was confident that I could contribute something. Although it was a safe spot, that does not mean that it was not challenging, just not challenging in the same way as if I had tried to wrap my mind around a less familiar topic.

My resolution for the coming weeks is to spread out more thematically to the discussions closer to connectivism trying to geet a better understanding of the theory. I am not sure yet, if the coming epistomological week will actually be the perfect week to start with ;-) , but I will try my best and stick with the discussions even though I may be a more silent observer.

For this week’s Wordle, I have tried several versions as the words are redrawn every time you select a different font. Finally, I chose the one above as it gives me hope for my New Year’s course resolution. “Connections” sticks out a bit from the rest of the words and I take that as a sign for the next weeks: Look out for new connections and foster the ones that have started growing and that I want to keep. Connect week 1 with the coming ones.

The gathering of the data I used to feed to Wordle showed me that I will need a different strategy if I want to continue doing that for the next weeks. It’s been only one week and I had to remember where I had posted. It was rather easy for Moodle because you can access all forum posts of one person in the profile. However, for the blog entries it would have been more difficult had I posted more. In the first instance I even forgot Twitter. So I went back there, got my tweets out with Tweetake, the service Tom uses for his experiment, and fed it to Wordle as well. Next time, I guess, I should also include Facebook. The only thing I can think of right now is to paste anything immediately after posting into a document to keep track of. That’s the disadvantage of the distributed discussions, but I would not change that for the sake of ease to gather data. That would be like adapting your teaching to the technology that is available and being unhappy about it.

To end this post on an optimistic note, I am looking forward to the continued discussions, (visual) experiments, live online sessions (I hope I can make the Elluminate session on Wednesday) besides starting the new semester and everything that comes with that.