Web 2.0 | doug woods

Archive for the ‘web 2.0’ Category

Blogging as Learning and Revision Tool

Wednesday, July 13th, 2011

Image via Wikipedia

One of the ways in which we learn, as students, is through taking notes; one of the ways in which we revise is to read through those notes. I think we’d all agree with that.

Traditionally, those notes have been made on paper in exercise books; there’s nothing wrong in that but what I want to suggest is that using a blog is a better tool.

Why is a blog a better tool?

Your note books and loose sheets of note paper can easily get lost, torn or spoiled over time. What use are they if your studies last one, two or three years at the end of which, you turn to your notes for revision only to find … well, that you cannot find them or, if you can find them, that you cannot read them or only bits are available. The advantage of putting notes onto a blog is that they are available in perpetuity. You can access them at any time from any computer, or smartphone or tablet, which has internet access. You can add to them or amend them at any time and you can read and reread them whenever you want or need.

Not only can they be read by you but you can also share them and let fellow students read them. Not just read them, of course, but also to add comments. Let’s just suppose you write a blog post on what you’ve learned in one lesson and a fellow student comes along later, reads your post and thinks ‘that’s not quite right’, they add a comment to that effect and suggests what they think. Some teachers may call that cheating; modern teachers prefer to call it co-operation.

How about this, then? Let’s say you don’t know the answer to a question. So you put a post on your blog, explaining your situation and asking others for their answer. Along comes a friendly soul who provides you with the answer you’re looking for or tells you where to go for more information.Is this wrong? Of course not, again this is just co-operation. The only caveat is that you will need to check the ‘answer’ given but, hey, that’s all part of learning!

That’s a couple of times now that I’ve mentioned co-operation. Co-operation is a thing that works two ways, so you too can read other students blog posts and maybe you can find occassions where you can add a comment to help a fellow student. Or just maybe you can find a student somewhere in the world who is doing the same studies as you, so you can perhaps agree to study together, share your studies and share your findings; maybe even share the workload.

I can see some people starting to see a bit of a problem here in that a blog will contain posts that relate to each student’s study in a a range of subjects and it is likely that these posts will get mixed up. One day there will be a post of mathematics, the next there may be one on biology, then the next day the student will post two posts on Physics and Psychology. Carried on over a two or three year period, these notes are going to get very jumbled, especially if the student wants to post items about social life as well. This is where tags and categories come in; each post can be tagged by subject or topic of study and each subject can be assigned a category. Then when the student wants to read their notes they can do a search by tag or category and only those selected posts will appear.

Aha, I can hear some of you saying smugly but even if we use tags and categories correctly, there will still be a lot of material to read through and they’ll be in reverse order (with the oldest last and the newest first) and it isn’t always easy to read through post by post on a screen in order to revise. Well, I agree, which is why I advocate the use of a plugin like Anthologize, which will turn all your selected posts into an ebook or pdf so that you can either read on screen or print off.

So there, you are, I have tried to present just some of the reasons why I feel students should be allowed and encouraged to use blogging as a learning and revision tool.

QOTW: How do I revise for my Exams? (travisthetrout.wordpress.com)
How People Learn (and What Technology Might Have to Do With It) (education.com)
Learning Journey (teachingofscience.wordpress.com)
Revision Today (fwmblog.wordpress.com)

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Tags: Blog, Education, WordPress
Posted in education, web 2.0 | No Comments »

21st Century This, 21st Century That

Friday, June 10th, 2011

Are you getting a bit fed up with all this talk of 21st Century Learning, 21st Century Teaching, 21st Century Skills ….? I know I am! Quite often it just seems like people drop the term 21st Century into their articles, conversations, marketing materials just to make themselves look trendy but, quite often, I’m not sure they know what they are talking about!

What are these 21st Century skills, anyway? Often people cite skills such as creativity, collaboration, cooperation, communication, creativity, critical thinking, problem solving. Well, hang on a minute, all those skills were around in the last century, they are hardly new skills. So are we to assume that 21st Century skills are simply old skills repackaged or brought to the fore in the 21st Century?

Then what about 21st Century learning or C21st teaching, how do C21st skills impact upon them? Well, cooperation and collaboration were being used in schools in the last century only we called it something like groupwork or project work. Perhaps a difference was, though, that we were not necessarily learning together but working together for our own learning. Teachers were also teaching creativity in the last century, though with hindsight it could be argued that the coming of the National Curriculum killed off a great deal of creativity in schools. Teachers were also teaching problem solving and critical thinking back in the day.

There is, perhaps, a certain amount of arrogance in anyone assuming that the skills being taught, or needing to be taught, nowadays, will suit the whole 21st century. The world in 2050 will be different from the world today, that includes the world of education and work, we may well find other skills we need to teach in 2050 or, say, 2093 yet they are still in the 21st century.

We do live in a society and a world that is increasingly, though not exclusively, digital and technological. I have no qualms anout anyone saying that we need to learn how to live and work in such a world but let us not dress it up in pretentious jargon.

The world of education and learning is changing and needs to change more, I wholeheartedly support that but lets be open about this and not hide behind cliches and catchphrases, which might only serve to alienate others.

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Posted in Classroom Technology, web 2.0 | 1 Comment »

Shiny things of little substance

Tuesday, April 12th, 2011

photo credit: SoloXis

I’m not a great fan of infographics. Sure, they can look good, they can display data in ways that may be more meaningful to many learners but, without giving access to the data behind them, they may be more trouble than they’re worth. The simple fact that something looks good does not mean it is good.
I’m not a great fan of twitter newspapers, such as paper.li or flipboard for similar reasons. Sure, they look good but are they little more than eye-candy? They may have uses as aggregators of tweets or topics in my twitterstream but is presenting this in fancy ways any more effective than just presenting me with a list? Plus, I’m always a bit suspicious of the tweets these ‘papers’ miss out; why do they do that, who gives them rights to edit my twitterstream, why does Flipboard emphasise tweets with images, why does paper.li emphasise those tweets with links? Is it because such tweets make their end product look good?
The same, I have come to feel, may be true of eLearning. Just because a tool or a service looks good or has this tool and that tool, doesn’t necessarily constitute good elearning. I sometimes feel it is ironic that most elearning platforms, Elluminate for example, provide more tools for teachers than for the learners. Just because a teacher is able to show fancy images, animations or video on a screen, it doesn’t mean that session is going to be a good one. A good elearning session appears to be one in which there is interaction with the student (by which, I do not just mean answering multiple choice quizzes).
I am not yet a dinosaur, some may beg to differ, and I am certainly not against progress but simply tarting things up is not really the way forward. Making something look good is not the same as making it more useful. On the other hand, if something looks good and is more useful, then I’m all for it

The perils of shiny shiny educational technology. (dougbelshaw.com)

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Posted in Classroom Technology, elearning, Uncategorized, web 2.0 | No Comments »

A Second Look at Second Life

Sunday, April 10th, 2011

image by Learn4Life

A few years ago I first tried out Second Life and, to be honest, I didn’t like it at the time. Nevertheless I decided to give it a second look recently to see if things have changed.

Let me try to explain what it was that I didn’t like the first time. At that time I had a Pentium processor in my machine, a good deal of memory and, for the time, a top range graphics card. Even so, I found Second Life to be quite unusable. The graphics were very crude (rough not rude!) and took a long time to display on the screen. Moving your avatar appeared tricky and cumbersome, in fact doing anything with your avatar appeared tricky and cumbersome, even getting him to look right. As for the flying option, well that just cheesed me off … I wanted to walk properly before I learned to fly!

What I really didn’t like was that you were very restricted in the way you could name your avatar. Although you could give yourself any first name you wanted, your surname was either chosen for you or you could pick from a limited choice. Consequently, I ended up with a name I could never remember and that was not particularly useful when you had to type this in to login each time! Besides, I really wanted the option to use my real name!

When I did get Second Life working (slowly) I found that there wasn’t much you could do with it. Okay, you could meet people but I really just wanted to explore and find out things, after all I don’t talk to people I bump into on the street in real life, except perhaps to say ‘sorry’.

Finally, what really hacked me off was the need to buy virtual currency. You had to pay real money to buy virtual money that you used to buy virtual goods; I’m sorry but that just seemed like a scam to me!

Anyway, that was then and recently I’ve decided to take a second look at Second Life. So what has prompted me to do so? Firstly, I had hoped there would be more to see or do now, I had, in particular, heard about the Learn4Life island which seemed more relevant to my work. I also now have a much more powerful computer and graphics card. I hoped also that many of my other niggles may have been resolved by now.

There certainly have been improvements. I found that Second Life remembered my original Avatar name, which was good because I had long forgotten it, even so, I decided to create a new one from scratch. You still cannot use your real name or even one you completely make up yourself. This is a shame but I did find the choice of surnames a bit more usable than previously, so I was able to come up with a name that sounded a bit sensible!

I still found a problem with the graphics in that they didn’t always render quickly, despite the much faster graphics card. Perhaps my slow urban broadband connection is the problem here (but don’t get me started on that issue). I was also surprised that some of the graphics seemed very poor, almost 1990s style, particularly in the landscape, textures and objects such as trees, but maybe that is a legacy issue.

I still found creating a reasonable Avatar to be tricky, the limited options really didn’t quite match what I wanted to produce. However, it did seem quicker this time around. Moving the avatar was also much easier than before, flying also seemed easier, though I found less need for that.

Second Life has recently introduced a new ‘viewer’ interface tool, which makes it quite easy to use and navigate around the virtual world.

There did seem, however, to be far fewer people in the virtual world than I experienced in the past. I don’t know if Second Life is losing popularity or if more people were now spread over a much larger world.

I did venture a few times over to the Learn4life island and there are certainly a lot of interesting things going on there, except that I didn’t find anyone else on the island. I guess it is the place people visit only when they know something is planned. Even so, I’m quite intrigued by the possibilities on offer there.

The virtual currency still exists and even has a variable exchange rate! My membership to Second Life is still the free level and, I hope, you can do a lot with that. There is a premium level which gives you a few (it seems) more features such as a virtual house, virtual money each week, online help and access to virtual adult facilities (no thank you!). Of course you have to pay real money to get these virtual features which you can only use in the virtual world, which still seems like a scam to me but then, on the other hand, if you can earn virtual money and convert that to real money, it may be more useful. Of course the services offered by Second Life and its developers do cost them money and nobody should begrudge them earning a living; perhaps I just wish there was something more tangible on offer for your real money.

Overall, my second experience of Second Life has been much more positive, the recent changes to the viewer are a great improvement over what went before. I do feel there is a steep learning curve to be gone through before you can fully use Second Life but that is part of the fun of it. There are still a few niggles with the choice of names and avatar design but they do seem more flexible than in my previous experience. Second Life still appears very ‘resource hungry’ and you may find you need a high end machine to make best use of it,m you also appear to need a good broadband connection and I guess some of my problems may lie in my poor urban broadband connection (I told you not to get me started on that…)

If you’ve been put off by earlier experiences of Second Life or not looked at it for a while, I would suggest having another look at it.

If you are on Second Life and see a sullen overweight avatar walking around in a denim shirt and shoulder bag, please say ‘hi’ but don’t be offended if I don ‘t reply; I’m either shy or haven’t yet mastered the speak options!

If you are interested in the Learn4Life island on Second Life, there is a short video introduction here http://blip.tv/file/3404585/

After Frustrations in Second Life, Colleges Look to New Virtual Worlds (tc.eserver.org)
Virtual Living for Uncapped Internet Users (davidonline.co.za)
Second Life’s economy grows 65% to $567M (venturebeat.com)
It’s Easy to Throw Real Stones at Virtual Glass Houses (downes.ca)

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Tags: Learn4Life, Second Life
Posted in Online Resources, Training INSET and CPD, web 2.0 | 1 Comment »

Four Twitter Services You May Not have Seen

Sunday, December 26th, 2010

: Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Just recently I have been playing around with a few twitter services which some of you may not have seen. Most of them are quite new services and I thought it was time to give you my first impressions of them.

TwitterTim.es and Paper.li

Two of the services are quite similar. They take the tweets of you and your followers and present them as a ‘twitter’ type newspaper. I have been using Paper.li for a while and have tweeted it a few times in my twitter stream. Twittertim.es is one I have only recently begun using and have not yet tweeted it. The reason I have not yet tweeted Twittertim.es is that they do not let me know when a new story is published, whereas Paper.li sends me an email.

Of the two services, Paper.li looks the more innovative and more appealing on screen. I like its inclusion of photos, videos and text pieces. It is published only once a day and, as I mentioned before, they send me an email when each new edition is published. Generally the service has been very good and I have been pleasantly surprised at the relevancy of most of the items they publish. There have been a few slip ups, they did publish an article about the film Avatar, in which I have absolutely no interest whatsoever and I wouldn’t like anyone reading my paper to think I had. Okay, this is a trivial thing and one that I can put down to early trial glitches.

Twittertim.es appears a bit more traditional in its on-screen appearance. There does, though, appear to be more stories in it and, again, they are usually very relevant to my interests. The newspaper seems to be updated more frequently than paper.li but they don’t let me know when a new item appears, though they do have an rss feed. So I have to past that into a reader if I want to know when a new item is published.

While both these services are interesting, I’m not really sure who they are aimed at. Are they aimed at me, so that I can read in depth more about the stories or news items that I and my followers have visited or are they aimed at my followers? In some way, at the present, they seem to be a solution in search of a problem.

Newzfor.me

At first I thought newzfor.me was going to be a similar service but which worked in a slightly different way. On its website it presents a number of categories and in each category it has a number of news stories which it will publish into your twitter stream at regular intervals (you can choose what interval). What you do is to simply choose which category you want to publish and the service does the rest, it even automatically shortens the url using your bit.ly service. It seemed like a good idea and I signed up to give it a try.

That was my first mistake. I chose the technology category as that seemed to be the closest to the educational technology that I usually tweet about, that was my second mistake. I set the tweet interval to be once every two hours which, I thought, seemed reasonable; third mistake. Finally, I linked the service to my bit.ly account,.. you guessed it!

For a few days, every couple of hours, my twitter stream was punctuated with tweets about some breaking technology story. All seemed okay at first but soon the items seemed to have less relevance to education technology and it seemed more like I was spamming my own stream. I also found that an interval of every two hours was far too frequent and again made it look more like spam. I could have changed the category of the items but no other category (and there weren’t many) seemed at all relevant.

So I decided to end the service but on returning to their homepage I found there was no way to login to my account to delete or cancel it. So I took the step of denying the service access to my twitter stream, that at least stopped the tweets appearing. However, the posts were still appearing in my bit.ly account, with a new one every two hours! I had to send an email to the newfor.me team to try to find out how to stop the account. It turned out that I couldn’t, they could only do it, for now, at their end. That meant letting them know my twitter ID, which I was a bit reluctant to do. Eventually, they did remove my account and the posts no longer appear in my twitter stream or my bit.ly account.

So the newzfor.me experience turned out to be a bit of a disaster but it needn’t have been. If there had been a user-panel on the home page which gave me full control of the service, I could have made any changes including cancelling at any time. Yet, I think the service would have been made better had they opted, instead of automatically tweeting articles on my behalf, to send me a link to an article and then let me decide whether to tweet it or not.

Reportage

The fourth service is one I have been using for a while now. It is not a web service but an iphone app but I really wish there was a web service as well! The app is called reportage and it is a twitter client that works in a slightly different way. It automatically groups tweets by twitter ID. So when I select the app, it first shows me the avatar of every person I follow (and that takes quite a while to load now). By selecting an avatar, I can then read every tweet made by that person over a recent timespan, say 1 day. This is great, especially if I have been away or busy during the day; it means that I can easily catch up with what people have been saying/doing. Another feature is that certain people I follow I can mark out as special and these people will be displayed on a separate screen, which makes it a bit easier to catch up with tweets from people I feel are important or influential.

How Many Times Should You Tweet Your Blog Post? (bothsidesofthetable.com)
Who’s Tweeting in Your Backyard? (twitterrati.com)
Two tools you should be using (lostremote.com)
Paper.li Lets You Read Your Twitter Stream like News (appscout.com)
TwitBlend – blending conversations on Twitter (twi5.com)
5 genuinely useful Twitter tools. (dougbelshaw.com)

Four Twitter Services You May Not have Seen

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Tags: Twitter, web 2.0
Posted in web 2.0 | 2 Comments »

Comfortable Technology -Learning Transformation pt4

Sunday, September 5th, 2010

Comfortable Technology Learning Transformation pt4 One early evening I found myself recently giving a presentation about ICT and improving learning to a group of school teachers as part of their INSET training.

The presentation was going well; at least nobody had fallen asleep. I had just finished the introduction and a demonstration of the first program I wanted the staff to try out and all this time I had seen one teacher making notes.

The trouble was, she was making notes with a pencil. Ye Gods! there I was talking about and demonstrating high technology and electronic wizardry and there she was using a pencil; possibly the most lowdown piece of technology around!

It made me think, though, why would a person make notes with a pencil?

It occurred to me that this was a piece of technology she was familiar with. She knew how to use it, she knew what it could do and what it could not do, she did not have to learn anything new and she had acquired the necessary skills to use it. I then thought that I too could do the same; I could use a pencil. The pencil was a piece of technology that she and I were both comfortable with. This led me to the notion of ‘comfortable technology’.

At first you might think that being comfortable with technology might be a good thing. In some ways it is but it all depends what type of technology you are comfortable with and how much you are prepared to change or ‘come out of your comfort zone’.

For myself, I am comfortable using a pencil and also comfortable using a laptop. I am quite comfortable using a digital camera though if you give me a new one then I feel a slight discomfort while I get used to its controls. I am comfortable using a video camera but less comfortable performing in front of one!

It seems that being comfortable with a piece of technology can be a good thing but you can become too comfortable and become resistant to change or innovation.

So here is a question for all of us, including those of us who regard ourselves as being quite tech savvy, what technologies are you comfortable with? What new technologies or new uses of technology do you feel less comfortable with?

I think this could be an important question to ask ourselves because if we who are tech savvy feel uncomfortable with any new tech, how can we expect or encourage others to adopt such technologies?

Progressing the right way (digital-teacher.co.uk)
ICT Targets for 2010 (digital-teacher.co.uk)
Learning Platforms, Insets and lessons (digital-teacher.co.uk)
Using Mobile Learning to Teach Reading to Ninth-Grade Students (downes.ca)
Advice for New Primary ICT Subject Leaders (redbridgeprimaryit.blogspot.com)
TeachMeet Inspiration (l4l.co.uk)
Learners Y Factor (redbridgeprimaryit.blogspot.com)
Consolarium (Games Based Learning Podcast) Podcast (olliebray.typepad.com)

Comfortable Technology Learning Transformation pt4

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Tags: comfortable technology, Technology/Internet
Posted in BSF, Classroom Technology, Transforming Learning, web 2.0 | No Comments »

Blogging in School

Saturday, July 10th, 2010

It appears that the subject of blogging in education is continuing to be a topic of discussion on Becta’s Research Network. A number of people are coming up with good ideas and there are some people who believe that it still has no place in education. Equally, there a re people who appear to express a ‘voice of reason’ by asking why should we adopt new technologies or new practices just because they are there, rather than because they have proven educational value.

I have always said that the power of blogging lies not in the blog but in the comments.

Hackers and spammers have long realised this, why do you think comment spam is so pervasive?

The educational potential of blogging in schools lies, it seems to me, not so much in the facility of the pupil to write their blog but in the facility it gives for other pupils and/or staff to add comments to that blog.

By blogging, the pupil is making digital notes of their learning and these, like written notes, can be of great value in aiding learning and recall, especially at examination or test times.

It is the facility to share the blog and to allow others to add comments that better befits the learning process. To illustrate what I mean, let us say that a pupil has written in their blog that they are doing an economic study of a particular country. Another pupil can then read this blog entry and add the comment that they, too, are doing a study of that same country and asks whether they can share their findings and co-operate together. Another pupil reads the blog entry and adds the comment that they have found a website which may be of relevant to the first pupil’s study and he adds a hyperlink. A third person reads the blog and adds the comment that he actually lives and works in the country concerned and asks whether his experiences might be of interest to the pupils.

So you can see that the comment facility in the blog has given the pupil a study buddy, a link to relevant information from another website and a possible first hand account.

Let us take the case further and let us now suppose that each of the three participants now add further parts to the blog, either by adding original items or by adding further comments. The blog then starts to take more shape and can be used to view how findings or answers were obtained. Let us suppose that one of the findings reported in the blog is inaccurate. A teacher can read through the blog and spot the inaccuracy, they can then add a comment and ask the pupil to recheck their finding.

It may also be the case that a pupil may be following a rather narrow line of enquiry in their study, the teacher has the facility to add comment(s) to try to steer the pupil into broadening their study into different aspects.

In order for all of this to take place, I am making a number of assumptions. Firstly, I am assuming that the facility to add comments is enabled, secondly, I am assuming that the ability to add comments is open to all and, thirdly, I am assuming that only the pupil has the ability to add original posts to the blog. This is actually the most common setup for a blog.

It is usually possible to disable commenting, though this does rather defeat any idea of co-operation. However, some form of restriction may be necessary to prevent abuse such as comment spam. It is possible for the pupil or staff member to have moderation rights, which means that they can decide which comments are published or not. Even without moderation rights, it is often possible to avoid comment spam by adding the requirement for the commenter to reply to challenge questions such as typing in a randomly chosen sequence of letters. This avoids much comment spam as that is often generated by automated bots.

It is always possible to allow the blog to be read and commented upon by anyone who comes across it on the blogosphere. This obviously allows for the widest amount of interaction and participation. However, it may be necessary to restruct access to only certain pupils or members of a particular school.

While it is usual for only the blog owner to have the facility to post original posts to their blog, it is often possible for the owner to allow posting rights to other people if they wish. It could be very beneficial if the teacher or tutor also has the right to post to pupil(s) blogs. With the teacher also having the right to post to blogs, then they can post new questions or new assignments, homework etc. for the pupil(s).

Well, for now, that is my view about blogging in schools. I do believe it has a value if it can be implemented succesfully. My enthusiasm for blogging is based upon its potential educational benefits rather than its technological availability or its current vogue.

If anyone would care to comment upon their views or experiences with blogging in schools, then please leave a comment ….. not comment spam please! LOL.

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Posted in blogging | No Comments »

Archive for the ‘web 2.0’ Category

Blogging as Learning and Revision Tool

21st Century This, 21st Century That

Shiny things of little substance

A Second Look at Second Life

Four Twitter Services You May Not have Seen

Comfortable Technology -Learning Transformation pt4

Blogging in School

Contact me

Follow us on Twitter

Doug Woods

Archive for the ‘web 2.0’ Category

Blogging as Learning and Revision Tool

Related articles

21st Century This, 21st Century That

Shiny things of little substance

Related articles

A Second Look at Second Life

Related articles by Zemanta

Four Twitter Services You May Not have Seen

Related articles by Zemanta

Comfortable Technology -Learning Transformation pt4

Related articles by Zemanta

Blogging in School

Contact me

Follow us on Twitter

Doug Woods