Random discussion board thoughts

It would be nice to breathe fresh life into social construction tools like the Discussion Board. Currently managing posts, reviewing and directing students to use a discussion board is time consuming and not very popular. The discussion board could be so much more effective if it could allow you to:

• set up a discussion board activity where each user has to make a post and there is a tracking sheet that clearly shows if a student has made a post in thread. 
• A task is set whereby a student is automatically allocated another students' post to reply to. Again, the tracking sheet allows easy review of task completion. (This would also reduce the usual issue of certain posts receiving more responses and others languishing without peer interaction.)
• A further column in the tracking sheet that shows how many posts a student made overall to the discussion board task activity that was set up.

I also like the 3CQ approach (see Inside Higher Ed article) that could be promoted to encourage further development of skills in forum discussions.

Food analogies and the 4Ps

Just finished running another action-packed Future Teacher webinar with Ron and Alistair on designing technology-enhanced programmes. I think the food analogy was used to great effect on this theme. If someone said they wanted you to prepare meals, you would instantly ask certain questions (apart from the why!!): When, how often, for how many, buffet or sit down 3-course meal, what cuisine, how many options or choices people should have and so on.

And yet, when we are asked to create an online programme, we rarely ask all the questions we need to ask in order to create the right learning experience for the learners. That's why using frameworks and models can be so helpful as they remind you of things you maybe hadn't thought of. I came up with the 4Ps (well, 3 and Alistair added one) to help make sense of the range of advice out there:

• Philosophy - what is your learning intention or teaching philosophy? Do you want students to self-access some materials or to work collaboratively with others?
• Psychology - how are you going to motivate and engage your learners? How are you going to make it more brain-friendly?
• Process - what models (recipes and cooking methods) and development processes will help you to ensure you have the best chance of success? How will you know if x number of quizzes is too much or too little? How will you get feedback?
• Production - what tools or platforms will you use to generate the content, resources and activities?

On closing, Alistair came up with another great use of the food analogy. If cooking for friends, you might ask if anyone has any food intolerances before you decide what to cook. That's just like taking into account accessibility needs when designing our programmes. In fact, there may be so many requirements to cater for that you should plan enough 'alternatives' so everyone can have a balanced meal even if they are vegan, have nut-allergies, are gluten-intolerant and so on.

I'll be testing out the use of the food analogy together with the ABC Curriculum Design method mentioned in the webinar next week with a group of tutors. I'll update again after that.

Continuing professional development habit - Blogging as portfolio

It's really hard to form the habit of continual development without a formal qualification to drive you. I've been thinking this through in the context of the Erasmus Future Teacher 3.0 project that I'm currently working on as part of Learning Apps (see About FT 3.0 tab)

The plan is to create a Digital Thermometer to help people measure where they are on their digital teaching journey. Then there's a Digital Compass to direct them to a set of Digital Journeys they can take. 

How do we keep people going through a cycle of journeys after the project ends?

After completing my CMALT, I should have continued to use the core areas of competency to reflect on my on-going journey, but I didn't. I'd reached an 'end' to the journey. Refreshing the portfolio in 3 years' time felt like I had lots of time to relax and to do other things. I didn't develop the habit of continuing to blog as a result of CMALT because it wasn't part of the qualification requirement.

I then embarked on the MSc TEL a few years later to continue my professional development journey (gaining my Prince2 and Agile project management qualifications in between).

What I'm now curious about is whether I can get into the habit of continually developing my portfolio. I recently had to curate my recent works as evidence of my ability to meet a person specification. I had a fun time going through my back catalogue of presentations, materials, and reflections, but it was also time consuming. Much better if I could keep on top of things and feel like I could reflect my professional capacity more easily at any time, and not just at one point in time.

I also miss the habit of blogging (triggered by my very active life as an e-learning consultant) and the fun we had in creating podcasts with the likes of David Sugden, James Clay, Ron Mitchell etc). Ron, Alistair and I are currently recording our audio discussions as they lend themselves to being a podcast. It's great to be able to hear people's thought processes when they are designing a lesson for you! (View the Future Teacher link above to listen to the discussions which have been added to the learning objects.)

I looked into ways of triggering the habit of adding to a portfolio and in the end, it boils down to this. It has to:

• be easy to add to
• allow me to categorise entries so I can curate when I need to
• be easy to share with others when I need to

And so, I've come back to my slightly neglected blog! Email into blog is one of the easiest ways to add things to a visible site. If I want to, I can keep things in draft until I'm ready to share it. It allows me to tag stuff, so I can find it again easily. I could go through items and tag it with a new tag if I need to group it for a new audience. Curation sorted!

Very pleased with this idea. What I need to do now is to determine a set of tags for each area of competence that I would like to keep adding to, set reminders on my calendar or aim to add to it every day, and then have regular reviews to ensure I'm not focusing too much on one area of competence over another. I'm also keen to cycle through different models of e-learning for reflection purposes to deepen my understanding of their principles (or work out what works best when). TPACK might be a useful starting point, but for learning technologists, would we be using Learning Technology as our subject specialism for our Content Knowledge? It may not work so well for us.

In terms of accountability, I'm thinking of asking other learning technologist friends to start the journey with me. Maybe we can make part of the journey "read someone else's journey and provide them with feedback". This could be a really hippy but fun experiment for my Masters project.

It certainly ticks the box in terms of being based on intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivation.If we can build this into our Erasmus project with the ultimate aim that people continue on their journey after we have 'finished with them' (you know what I mean!), then I might feel like my day's work is done!

Rethinking pedagogies, reusing pedagogies

When it comes to delivering training, my preference to use a social constructivist approach is based on my belief that everyone has something to contribute and that I am not necessarily the expert, or the only expert about a topic. I like to harness the ‘resources’ of other people’s expertise in my teaching. I feel that people generally gain more satisfaction and active learning from participation than absorption. This feeling is supported by years spent delivering training and getting feedback; being involved in their own learning has been very gratifying for many teachers. (There are also many comments from these teachers that their students don’t care to be active learners. They just want to be fed the answers. That idea is for another blog post.)

I came across an interesting piece of research via a New Yorker article called “Why facts don’t change our minds”. Two professors, Sloman and Fernbach, found that “when it comes to new technologies, incomplete understanding is empowering.” Our incomplete knowledge about stuff actually helps to protect us as a group. We use a “division of cognitive labour” to help us make progress; if we all spent time working out how to programme the web before we used it, we wouldn’t have gotten very far. The ability to accept someone else’s thinking or outputs and to use it stops us from being in the dark ages. This is where people are willing to accept being trained or mentored by others they trust (The idea of social capital to be discussed in yet another blog post :-)). They essentially piggyback on others to get a step up. There is no point reinventing the wheel; just use the knowledge others can provide. Luckily for us as trainers, this behaviour means we have many attendees in our upcoming webinar on ‘Online learning: What works?’. This is part of the Future Teacher 3.0 series of webinars that you are welcome to join.

This trait can also work against us as people can have strong feelings about things they don’t understand, and talking to others with similar feelings can reinforce misconceptions. Many of my fellow trainers have encountered naysayers in our groups, or people who are so resistant to new ideas they are practically ‘dismantling the wheel’. This can also be dangerous in a community of knowledge where misconceptions can be spread like wildfire due to ‘confirmation bias’. Sloman and Fernback suggest that to counter such aggressive ignorance, people should be challenged to explain their thinking based on facts and research. I remember a teacher who proclaimed that using technology didn’t work since there was no improvement in his classes. This teacher had simply brought laptops into the class, but did nothing more. He didn’t redesign his learning activities to take advantage of the affordances of the technology. This is why we are approaching the topic of online learning ‘from the ground up’ by looking at strategies for designing active learning, rather than describing how to use online tools. We’ll be looking at ‘visible learning’ and ‘effect sizes’, a concept researched by John Hattie and I hope to have time to introduce Puentedura’s SAMR model. The latter has been criticised for not being based on empirical research, but some tools are useful despite not knowing their pedigree ;-). If it helps a teacher to evaluate their approach to learning activity design and to make a difference to the learner, a blunt instrument is better than no instrument at all.

This brings us full circle to the idea of using a social constructivist approach to the upcoming webinar. Much as I would like to have lots of discussion and chat over a ‘presentation-style’ webinar, the numbers attending mean that this is going to start off more like an interactive lecture, than a small-group discussion. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; there are possibly some threshold concepts we need to communicate before people can have a reasonable discussion. Rather than continuing on my preferred ‘teaching style’, I am going to practice what we preach and consider the best alignment of practice with the optimum learning gains we can achieve. My co-presenter, Alistair McNaught, and I look forward to seeing you online on March 31. Future sessions will also feature my esteemed colleague, Ron Mitchell.

Is this a load of bollards?

I'm getting into my reading on Learning Organisations and I come across different models, theories, factors, principles etc etc. The short, sharp punchy '5 principles' approach or '3 criterion' explanations appeal to me - then I get to a '10 principles for explaining' such and such and my mind throws a cynical - really?
I can almost go with broad brush strokes to categorise behaviours but when you get to 10, why not go the whole hog and aim for 20? What is it about 3 or 5 or some smaller number that appeals but bigger numbers like 10 just seem ridiculous? Does a long list of 'factors' or 'principles' get in the way of understanding?
We're all familiar with trendy articles that try to entice us to read them with headlines like '3 ways to (lose belly fat) (gain confidence) (insert other title here)'. It works - for me anyway. I think I can handle that small amount of information whereas '100 ways to declutter' might just take too much time to read and leave me with decision-paralysis.
So, I'm trying not to dismiss the '10 principles' that I'm reading about and with my mindset, it's hard not to be cynical! However, I've decided to be positive about it and will try to look at a specific client's learning approach using '5 factors' and '10 principles' and see if the extra dissection helped me in my thinking at all.

A little learning could go a long way...

Reading Carol Levitt's 2011 paper on organisational learning and finding that it is triggering a whole new way of thinking about how one of my clients is approaching 'training'. I suggested to the client that we should write a strategy to guide our approach in the next 2-5 years; without a learning strategy, we are simply going by the 'topics' that need to be delivered. Having a strategy and considering organisational learning models may actually help us to have a more holistic approach. It will stimulate ways to design the training programme that we might not have otherwise considered. Looking forward to the difference this term's #msctel assignment will make to this global organisation.

Is Viv the next big thing to revolutionise how we use the Internet?

"In A World Dominated By Apple and Google, This Company Wants to Forge A Third Way" by @johnbattelle on @LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/world-dominated-apple-google-company-wants-forge-third-john-battelle
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I like to think of new technologies as a 'spectrum of stuff' and just when you think things have gotten granular enough, someone manages to make another slice between two (in this case, 5) things. On the one hand, we have this amazing ever-expanding functionality that we didn't know we needed until someone created it. On the other hand, we have corporations who want to protect their knowledge assets using closed systems. There are an increasing number of services that would make a big impact on learning and development in corporations. Just as we can 'buy' Google search services to run within a closed system, it's exciting to think we can hopefully tap into new technologies through something like Viv (see the article above) that may force increased handshaking between services. I'm still waiting for our LMS to develop some functionality that has been out there for years now! Development companies need to go more agile and buy in 'add-ons'. If someone else is doing it quicker and can keep that part of their spectrum updated, buy it in. I can see how Viv could revolutionise things. And even if it isn't THE game changer it hopes to be, something else is waiting backstage. Exciting stuff. What an amazing world we live in!

Going to the Polls 2016

Going to the Polls 2016 (#gttp16) was organised by Paul Foxall, one of Birmingham University’s Digital and Technology Skills Advisors and aimed to showcase "how the use of interactive technology can enhance the student’s learning experience in the classroom". The event was held at the University of Birmingham on April 20th, 2016 and sponsored by TurningPoint, which the University used, as well as ResponseWare.

The day kicked off with Turning Technologies Distinguished Educator, Dr. Fabio Aricó (@fabioarico), the Senior Lecturer in Macroeconomics at the University of East Anglia, as the keynote speaker. His talk was about the use of Peer-Instruction to develop self-assessment skills and to generate learning gains in a flipped classroom environment. His extremely thorough research was backed up by quantitative data to prove the learning gains achieved. 

Peer-Instruction (PI) as a teaching method was made popular by Eric Mazur (@eric_mazur) and there are many studies on its use alongside the Flipped Classroom approach in STEM subjects. However, there are fewer studies on its use with social science subjects and Dr Fabio Aricó's work clearly adds value to demonstrate the application of PI in the subject of Macroeconomics.

His key messages were:

• Engage in teaching-led research for personal development (Let your teaching lead the research, not the other way around).
• It's not about the technology, it's about the pedagogy and more importantly, it's about the students.
• Be concerned about ethics but do not be discouraged or scared as the students are not according to JISC.
• Choose your demonstrators carefully - the average user of technology may be more convincing than an expert.
• When you move from 'novelty' to 'norm', then everyone can just get on with the learning

Fabio was also to be praised for his overt attempt to raise his learners' epistemologically awareness. The learners were able to see for themselves through the polling data how much better they understood concepts after discussion with their peers and this gave them buy-in to the method of teaching.

Prof. Prem Kumar (University of Birmingham) was up next and presented on the highs and lows of adopting a flipped approach. His humorous but insightful talk was full of encouragement for lecturers to 'try, try and then try again' when it came to implementing the flipped classroom. He labelled the four stages of learning as Clueless, Naïvely Confident, Discouragingly Realistic, and Mastery Achieved, paying homage to the Conscious Competence learning model. In fact, his labels on these four stages are much more sympathetic than the original - no one wants to be labelled 'consciously incompetent'! His struggles with implementing the flipped classroom approach led him to add a stage before Mastery Achieved: Semi-Conscious Competence or Nagging Self-doubt. This is a stage where "you know there's even more about what you don't know, than what you do know." Prem's talk was very much about the challenges he faced and provided the yin to the yang in terms of approaching self-development - rigourous and data-driven like Fabio's approach, or deeply reflective and anecdotal, like Prem's approach. He raised the point that changing practice was no longer an option - improving the student experience and increasing learning gains in a lecture was part of a practitioner's commitment to teaching quality, now driven by the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF).

Prem spent a little time talking about the discomfort of the change in practice in the lecture theatre - having to stand and wait while learners discussed things, or thought about things in silence. Having the presence to 'control' the class while using such disruptive techniques was clearly something that needed to be mastered. 

David Matthew is a learning technologist from the University of Bedfordshire and he talked about 'Textwall for the shy'. His definition of 'shy' was anyone who was previously unengaged in the classroom or felt unable to contribute in some way. Working in the Health and Social Care department at the university, a key conflict of using Textwall with the students was the modelling of practice. The students were likely to have to turn off their mobiles in a Practice situation. However, this also became a good incentive to aid learning, almost as a reward for participating and contributing in class. Like Fabio, the experience was that after the novelty factor had died off, both staff and students could just focus on the learning and the affordances of the tool could be taken for granted. 

Other presentations on the use of clickers were of less interest to me, I must admit, although it does form a necessary part of learning about any technology. 

One presentation that did make me sit up and take notice was Annette Margolis' use of Socrative as an alternative to clickers. Annette works in the Language department (apologiesbif I have got this wrong, but I will follow up and find out!). She engaged us in her Socrative exercise and used it as a way to illustrate how she triggered active learning in the students by making them choose an answer when there was possibly no one right answer. She encouraged us in peer discussion before the results or consensus of the room was revealed and this led to further insights into the way our minds were working. 

Annette inspired me to go away and create an example for Textwall users (Fig 1) to demonstrate how using voting could result in an activity that was higher-order thinking on Bloom's taxonomy. 

Fig 1 - Possible example for ethics discussion, demonstrating how the 'no right answer' technique can be used to trigger active discussion or learning

Designing questions can be a difficult task and questions used to trigger discussions in the lecture are of a different nature to questions used to test knowledge and understanding. When the delegates were polled about whether they thought they needed training on this, the answer was a resounding (and surprising) no. Either the audience was very clued up and pedagogically expert, or they were (in Prem's words) Naïvely Confident.  This topic will probably become another blog post at some point.

There was an overwhelming consensus that the event had been successful and that we should form some sort of online community to support each other in our progress.

I must compliment Paul Foxall and his colleague, Debbie Carter, on their choices of presenters and the range of topics covered, ensuring that all aspects of using student response systems (SRS) were covered as well as could be in a day. I made some valuable contacts, learned much and look forward to participating again in future in the 'polling' community. 

Reflection on blogging

I've tinkered with blogs since 2000 and lost a few along the way. Posterous was a firm favourite for a few years until it disappeared. It was the most intuitive to use. Blogger and WordPress are rather difficult to navigate if you're a novice but I persisted with WordPress for a bit on various projects: https://cwaipads.wordpress.com
https://blhairtraining.wordpress.com
https://techdisambassadors.wordpress.com

Why I blog:
I quite enjoy blogging and looking back at my posts going back to 2007, it's a relief to be able to find reflections that I made years ago still available for me to refer to. Blogging has served as my memory bank. I think there's even benefit in looking back at the posts from years gone by and reflecting on those. Things can look different after time has passed and new knowledge and skills can further enhance my practice. I can look at my practice through new lenses as I learn about different theories. Things that I took for granted as praxis, I can now attempt to put into words.

In addition, I have a back catalogue of Tweets, Google Presentations, Google Sites, podcasts etc that all serve to record my experiences and interactions with others. I'm glad I have been keeping a digital recording of my professional life. It all went quiet for me when I went into the private sector in 2013 and I feel that I lost some valuable reflections on my developments at the time. I can only try to capture them now that the blogging habit has been reinstated.



Why I tag:
By tagging (or labelling) each post, I can recall a related set of blog posts by selecting a tag, regardless of chronological order. The discipline is in tagging posts, and sometimes reviewing previous posts to update tags as necessary, otherwise the system won't work for you. You get out what you put in. :-)

Why I add images (or not):
I do like to add images to blog posts where possible but do not make it a 'must-have', especially if I'm just 'dashing off' a quick idea. However, I can always come back and update the blog post with a relevant visual at a later date. It can help to identify the post more easily when you are scrolling down the web page.

Why I read other people's blogs:
Usually, this is a way for me to keep up with my colleagues who are working on similar things. In recent years, my work has changed focus and I felt less drawn to keeping up with this blog, and reading those from my blogroll. However, the MSc has given me fresh impetus and reminded me of the value of blogging.

Downsides to participating with blogs:
Learning to control the flow of information into my sphere of awareness is a 'digital literacy' that I have had to master as part of my profession. In some 'communities of practice', where I wish to be seen as expert, I feel the pressure to be the first to reply to a post or comment, and it takes some discipline to take a step back. In a 'contributing student' approach, it can also be a set back when there is insufficient participation from other members to provide a critical mass of viewpoints or discussion resources with which to work with.

Mini-projects

My favourite mini-projects can be found here:

Flipped Classroom with Textwall

The future of VLEs

Being succinct, being focused

This is a short Christmas post to record the fact that I have probably created my project and written my MSc TEL design project rationale 10 times over simply because I cannot decide on the angle I'm taking. How do other people do it? Choose one focus area and zoom in on it? Especially if you only have 1000 words! I'm as bad at this as I am at shopping - I can never decide if I have too much choice and I tend to walk away empty-handed. Unfortunately, walking away empty-handed is not an option when the deadline is looming! So many possible perspectives and so little time. My compromise is to store up all the ideas that don't fit into this one 'episode' for the future, and to focus on getting this one small bit polished and ready.
Things I've learned about essay-writing so far:
1. Start with a question or a stance when reading a book eg "This is not going to work for me because", or "This is going to work for me because..." Record key ideas relative to your stance.
2. Mind map the various ideas and for a small essay, focus in on one idea only. You can make reference to the others to show you thought about them
3. From the moment you pick up a book or go to a website, record the reference, otherwise it's a pain to go back and collect them!
4. After writing your essay, look back at the brief from the point of view of a tutor and see if you can 'mark' it - does it meet the objectives?

Does anyone have any other tips that helps them?

'Podcast' about using textwall in a flipped classroom context

Here's a recording of a conversation a fellow Masters student, Ono, and I had this week about using textwall in a flipped classroom context. I've never put the two things together before, so thank you, Ono, for a fabulous idea!
Select this link to listen to the recording (20 min)

Disposable email addresses

I've always liked the fact that Yahoo mail provides me with a way to set up disposable email addresses and now I've learned a way to do this in Gmail!

What is a disposable email address? 
Have you ever been in a position where you have to enter an email address (for a competition or some other promotion) but you dread the unwanted marketing that is going to flood your email inbox? Disposable email addresses allow you to receive the email in your inbox, but if you decide you no longer wish to receive the emails, you can simply set up a rule in your inbox to delete all emails coming into that email address.

Why not just unsubscribe from the marketing campaign?
The company who had your email address may sell it on to other similar companies who will then send you emails too! You don't want to spend your time unsubscribing from emails you didn't ask for! Setting up the rule to 'dispose' of any emails that come into your disposable address makes it simple to manage.

How do I create disposable email addresses in Gmail?
You simply add +something after your gmail username. Yes, it's that simple. Here's an example.
If my gmail address is somebody@gmail.com, you simply give out a disposable email address like somebody+anything@gmail.com, or somebody+goaway@gmail.com or somebody+001@gmail.com

Try it on your gmail account and you'll see what I mean.

Now you can sign up for stuff and after the initial novelty has gone from receiving voucher codes, great tips or trivial news, you can simply dispose of it once and for all from your mail box. Simples. :-)

PS I learned the Gmail tip from an LMS supplier whose system requires unique email addresses for each learner. It's much more efficient than setting up disposable emails in Yahoo mail.

(pix from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gmail_logo.png)

Design of multimedia learning v pedagogic approaches to elearning

In my current work, I create e-learning modules for learners who access these through a Learning Management System (LMS). I'm keen to develop some guiding principles for my team based on theory and research by Richard E Mayers, Ruth Clark and John Sweller. In addition, I'm influenced by industry leaders in this field like Cathy Moore and Anna Sabramowicz.
However, I'm also looking forward to collating the theoretical principles that will guide and underpin the development of our e-learning. While reading Mayes and Freitas (2004), I've come across some useful 'language' that I believe will help me to sell my ideas to the company. Up to recent times, the company has been putting out e-learning based on an industry-wide 'understanding' that colourful pages with narration and interaction will sell e-learning. I was pleased to read that "there is no real theoretical base, but rather a strong folk tradition that compelling explanations will lead to better learning" (Mayes and Freitas, 2004). I've wanted to have a good reason for moving away from the digital chalk and talk to a more scenario-based, constructivist approach and I think I'm building up some good arguments to move us in that direction. (We've already started by shoe-horning in some scenarios but we've not yet re-designed our whole approach).
Using Biggs' model of constructive alignment, we should be looking at our curriculum or learning outcomes (LOs), our teaching and learning activities (TLAs), the learning environment and the assessment methods. Because we work in a compliance industry, we have no say in the LOs. Our learners have to use our LMS to access the learning, so the learning environment is fixed. We have the most control over the TLAs and the writing of our assessments and I intend to use theory to produce our e-learning guidelines 2.0 and start to move us away from the 'presentation of facts' mode to a more learner-centred approach.

MSc TEL Day 1

Started on the MSc TEL, looking forward to engaging with theory and getting some underpinning support for things I know work! Pop over to the MSc TEL tab for my assignment related work as they develop.
Coursemates:

It's been a while since I've posted actively on the blog. I've not been under a rock; I've had to sell myself to the private sector. ;-) Over the last two years, I've developed further skills in VLEs (known as Learning Management Systems or LMS in the private sector) and the development of multimedia materials. I've been developing a community of practitioners globally through a video channel and trying to engage them through forums. The next step is to implement badges and to see what happens. Perfect for an action research project, perhaps? I'm looking forward to putting some of my current work under theoretical interrogation and also to developing more theoretical frameworks for the effective use of textwall.

Sadness at losing JISC TechDis

(I've had a busy 2 years as an e-learning manager but I'm looking forward to picking up the thread again. )

First off, sadness at losing JISC TechDis as a distinct service for Further and Higher Education. At the moment, JISC feels a little faceless to me, and the JISC TechDis team were a distinct team of people who were boldly making a definite positive impact on people's lives. I will miss the collective and will feel a little lost without you!

To leave the team a fond message to celebrate their 12 years of achievements, visit the blog here: Celebrating 12 years of Inclusion Technology Advice

Curation tools - Pinterest

There are many curation tools to choose from as can be seen from the list tweeted by @web20classroom http://bit.ly/SyViES. I have adopted and dropped a few over the years. I started with Delicious, moved to Diigo, tried Scoop.it for a bit and have most recently adopted Pinterest.

Why swap and change so much? Well, each new tool promised new functionality - but it has also been an interesting learning curve. I struggled with scoop.it initially. I just couldn't work out how to get to my own page or how to start a new scoop for ages. The same thing happened to me when I joined Pinterest. It took a bit of getting used to, but now it has become my favourite curation tool.

I've been busy curating a board of textwall case studies, images and so on.
http://pinterest.co.uk/xlearn/textwall
For the first time, I have managed to pull together a rich resource about textwall from the community. It's visual, attractive and helps to convey what textwall is about more instantly than a list of links could do.

So now I have a dilemma: Do I repeat my links in delicous, diigo, and scoopit? Or should I just reference my pinterest page on the other sites?

Epic's images tip sheet

In Epic's January 2013 newsletter, I came across their tip sheet on images and their usefulness in e-learning: http://epiclearninggroup.com/uk/files/2013/01/Images_in_learning.pdf

It ties in with my previous post on Daniel Willingham's question about the usefulness of the concept of learning styles. Epic's tips include the idea that an illustration can really help to convey some information more effectively than text or audio (picture speaks a thousand words etc). There's also the fact that decorative images (those that do not help to convey the meaning) are actually a hindrance.

It's great that Epic have highlighted this: I've seen a lot of page-turning e-learning content that 'forces' layouts that require picture on the left or right, so the designer has to upload 'something'.

I might consider putting an image of key words instead of pictures when I am forced by certain tools to do this.

One thing to add though, is that even though images may be more effective at conveying some learning, you should consider learners who are visually impaired. ALT text is a simple way of ensuring that learners who are using screen readers will have a brief description of the picture read back to them. Where a picture is complex (eg an infographic), it's even more important to accompany it with text that can be read back to the learner.

This may seem time-consuming, but there's a quick and easy way to turn your image into something more useable - with something like Screenr, Camtasia or some other screen capture software. You can talk about what you're seeing on the screen and record it. Creating this video means visually impaired learners can listen to what they have to learn, and other learners may find it more meaningful too.

I personally find infographics can be too complex for me to make sense of - I 'zoom' in on one part at a time to cope. By pressing Ctrl + on the keyboard, you can zoom into a pdf or website so that when you are using screen capture software, you present a bit of information at a time.

Why not turn things on its head and ask learners to explain an infographic with Screenr?

And it's worth giving Xerte Online Toolkits (XOT) a plug at this point. This interactive e-learning content creation tool has a plethora of page templates to choose from, and is highly accessible. Find out more about XOT from the Nottingham University web site, and if you'd like a hosted account for a modest fee, contact info@learningapps.co.uk.

Making meaning - learning styles don't exist

I've just been introduced to the work of Daniel Willingham, by my friend Keith Tellum, who suggests that there is no such thing as learning styles. I've seen this debate around but I've never spent time looking into it until now - this Youtube video by Daniel sums up his reasons why we have been so convinced about the learning styles theory.

So, he ends by saying that good teaching is just good teaching, and that a lot of the time, we are learning 'meaning' and that is not necessarily based around a particular modality like hearing, seeing or doing. (So I guess he's talking about constructivism.)
So what's my takeaway from this?
- go and try to find more examples of 'good teaching' and more research into why 'good teaching' is 'good teaching'.
What are the factors that make it so?
1. For me, part of 'good teaching' is related to the teacher's personality: A teacher who is good with analogies and story-telling (helping people to make meaning) will have an advantage over someone who just relays facts.
2. Teachers who are good learners make better teachers.
But there must be something I can do, as a teacher-trainer, to help teachers to become better teachers (using technology or not). I must admit there are certain personality types that are just HARD WORK, but the majority of teachers and support staff I have come across have just enough curiosity, wonder and interest to learn new things. Phew! So I need to come up with more techniques to unleash the great teacher in these people. Time to go research. If you know of any "practical theories" (oxymoron intended) I should be exploring, please let me know in the comments.
I am a little way through Daniel Kahneman's book: Thinking, Fast and Slow, and I'm hoping that I will find some answers in there eventually.

Checking and assessing learning with rubrics

When you create assessment or learning rubrics, you make it clear in your mind what acceptable work or excellent work looks like. This information is also helpful to your learners as they can see what they need to do to make the push for excellence. It can also be used for self-assessment or peer assessment.
A good starting point for creating your own rubrics is The University of Wisconsin's rubrics page. This site has example rubrics for the technology-led classroom: how to assess podcasts, mindmaps, eportfolios, blogs etc.
I have encouraged various organisations to use rubrics as part of their quality process to improve the learner's awareness of their own learning and to ensure the tutor is clear on his/her objectives. Ian Cooling of Sparsholt College (@iancooling) was inspired by this idea to create the following handout to use in class.

What's clever about his approach is that he clearly shows to the learner that what they think they know, and what they do know, are two different things. The handout is used while Ian plays a YouTube video in sections. Learners are shown some of the video and then tick to indicate their level of confidence in the topic. They then try to answer the question to prove what they know. This is where the learner is made aware of their misperception, if any, of their grasp of the knowledge or concepts.This awareness of learning is a powerful tool - one that we perhaps do not invoke often enough in our learners.


It's not the technology that is sophisticated in this example - it's the level of learning invoked by a simple handout, used with a video that could be accessed by learners in their own time. Almost all our technology-inspired teaching and learning could be improved further if we only make the learners aware of the process of learning. And that can be done simply with paper and pen :-)
Sammy of BLHairdressing Training is going to ask learners to add captions to YouTube videos - this is again an example of a learner 'proving' that they understand something. How Sammy can help these learners to feel confident that they are putting in quality captions or annotations to the videos, is to provide them with a rubric that clearly shows them how to reach excellence. When a learner has provided captions for the video, what does an excellent version look like?