Two purposes in one post… first to highlight this interesting post by Niall Sclater who’s reporting on events at an OU conference where liveblogging has been frowned upon by some. Secondly I’m experimenting posting to my blog direct from Diigo, a social bookmarking service I’m trying out:
Update: had to come here & tidy up a messy bullet point but otherwise worked well.
I read about Open Yale Courses in yesterday’s Guardian. Yale are now offering free online access to seven introductory courses, although really they should call it access to course material for seven courses as you’re getting access to video lectures and the odd resource rather anything interactive such as a discussion or formative assessment. However not to be sniffed at! For example see Intro to Political Philosophy, Lecture 1. As you’ll see the quality of the video is excellent.
This is not a one-off, some would go as far as calling it a trend – I read that recently somewhere but exactly where escapes me. In contrast I still get a feeling from many lecturers that they want to keep a tight hold of their content. It’ll be interesting to see how this develops. Others sharing include:
I’m sure there are more and there are other related activities taking place too.
Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eyeballstew/6040319/
Thanks to Blogging IT & EDucation for a reminder about EDUCAUSE’s “Seven Things You Should Know About…” series. I’d used a couple before – covering blogs and wikis – as supplementary handouts in workshops. However I’d no idea how many there were, it’s a monthly thing. As well as the obvious candidates: Podcasting, YouTube, RSS, there are plenty of less well-known topics such as Lulu, Ning & Haptics, so something for all the family!
Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/maxbisschop/324291309/
Thanks to Mike via Jane for this presentation & paper I missed. I really must keep a closer eye on what’s taking place on campus.
Faceworking: Exploring Students’ Educational Use of Facebook was a presentation by Neil Selwyn last month based on his associated research paper.
Neil’s research was carried out in the School of Social Science of a large ‘Russell Group’ university and is based on the wall postings of 600+ students over a 4-month period. 4% of the wall postings were found to be related to the students’ studies or aspects of their university experience. These 2000+ postings we classified as follows:
The discussion (indeed the whole paper!) are well worth a read but here are some of the findings. Facebook is being used by these students for education-related interactions but on a small scale and mainly to maintain links within an existing network. The Facebook wall postings appeared to be one part of multi-modal conversations involving IM, email, SMS and of course face-to-face. The interactions are seen as important but also nothing new, just a continuation of existing offline practice.
My favourite quote from the wall postings has to be “I am so done with this vygotsky shizzle, it’s driving me insane!!!!!!!”
Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/avlxyz/2077892948/
I’ve been looking at “eportfolios” recently – specifically Mahara & MyStuff, though previously I’ve experimented with elgg too. I say “eportfolios” because I’m not 100% certain what an eportfolio is and just to confuse me further elgg seems to have repositioned itself and dropped that moniker completely:
electronic portfolio, weblog, resume builder and social networking system [Mahara]
OU’s ePortfolio tool [MyStuff]
social networking platform. It offers blogging, networking, community, collecting of news using feeds aggregation and file sharing [elgg]
And one more I haven’t looked at yet (because it costs!)
much more than an eportfolio. It is a Personal Learning System [Pebble Pad]
Blimey! My exploration has been partly initiated by some interest from within the LSE but also by the need to keep an eye on what’s out there… and there’s certainly plenty of talk about eportfolios. I’m still uncertain as to how such a system might be used here, so some initial thoughts: Continue reading “Eportfolios”
