Supporting collaborative activities using Wikis

Yesterday, I delivered a seminar titled Supporting collaborative activities using Wikis, which formed the part of the Enhancing Teaching Through Technology Summer Seminar Series at the University of Bath. The session, was attended by both colleagues from around the University campus, including some from the e-Learning team.

We’re currently evaluating our approach to training sessions, workshops and the like, so I’ve also taken the opportunity to also examine my own style of presenting, starting with my PowerPoint slides. I must say a huge thank you to Alison Wildish, Head of Web Services, who gave me some useful tips on how to make my slides more visual. The slides, which are available available as well as on SlideShare, took about a month to come together and went through numerous drafts [including some last minute tweaking whilst watching The Apprentice the night before!].

© 2008 Andy Ramsden

© 2008 Andy Ramsden

The session was recorded using Camtasia, which whilst being an excellent piece of software, was let down by a rather poor audio recording. Therefore, I’m unable to make the recording available at this stage. I’m working on it!

During question time towards the end of the session, some issues came to the fore, which I thought might be useful mentioning here.

• Is it possible to say that Moodle and Confluence are “rivals/competitors”? Um, I’d say no. Moodle is a Virtual Learning Environment which offers a multitude of activities to support collaborative activities online, such as discussion forums, facilities for online discussion, a quiz activity for e-assessment as well as a very basic, but functional, wiki. Confluence is a “best of breed” wiki application which offers both basic and advanced wiki functionality. Both services can be used side by side, and do complement each other. Do remember that it is possible to link to a Confluence wiki from within a Moodle course.
• Can colleagues external to the University of Bath get access to protected Confluence wikis? Yes that can, though a University of Bath staff member will need to apply for a BUCS Lite-type account on their behalf.
• Is it possible to import SAMIS groups into Confluence? Not currently, however this work is plans for sometime in the next few months.
• Which team in the University is responsible for Confluence? The Web Service teams currently look after Confluence. For more information, send an email to support-wiki@bath.ac.uk

Overall, I was pleased with how the session went. I was apprehensive about delivering it, though I really shouldn’t have been. The e-Learning team, as well as the wider Learning and Teaching Enhancement Office, is an exceptionally supportive environment, which made for a less fraught experience. I was also apprehensive about how my stammer would be on the day, but all in all, it/I was fine. Some further reflections follow:

• When explaining the concept of restricting access to a wiki space in Confluence, I should have made mentioned that the permissions in the applications are restrictive enough to limit viewing and editing rights at page level tool.
• I would have liked to have a couple more discussion points in the session, with the intention of both engaging with the audience a bit more, as well as giving myself a break from talking. I expect this area to develop as I become more confidence with the content and style of delivery.
• The previous point, of course, needs to be balanced with the amount of content. There was a lot to say and get out there, and I think I did ok.
• The model titled Developing the use of Wikis only really came together a couple of days before the session itself. I would have liked to have had more time to develop my thoughts on this before the session. [see next steps]

Something that I am attempting to introduce into my blog writing is the concept of “next steps”. As such, some appear below:

• Re-evaluate content of the sessions and think about whether or not anything needs to be added or removed. For example, I could introduce some about barriers to engagement. If I was being critical about the presentation, I would say that it was a little too much on the evangelical side.
• Test the technology before going live with it. I was really disappointed that the audio didn’t come out as expected. We’ve got a good quality USB microphone that my colleague Roger Gardner might trial during his session on Exploring Social Bookmarking next Tuesday lunchtime.
• Finally, drive my research towards discovering what the intervention points actually are in the model mentioned above. This would form part of a wider literature review.

Exploratree from Futurelab

I’ve just been sent an email about a new resource from Futurelab called Exploratree. It is free website where users can download, use and make your their interactive thinking guides.

Thinking guides are great for supporting student led enquiry projects and research by helping to shape and focus ideas. They also provide frameworks for working through issues, topics or questions. Whilst I assume that this software might be targeted at schools [as much of Futurelab's work is], it might also have some utility in Higher Education.

This website has a variety of freely usable and customisable resources which can be printed or used online. Best of all it is quite easy to use! All you need to do is register on the site to be able to use all aspects of the resource.

New(er) tools such as Exploratree could usefully form the basis of briefing papers produced by the e-Learning team at the University of Bath. The aim would be to answer questions such as: “What is X?” “Where can I find out more about it?” “How can I use this to support Learning and Teaching? And why?”

TMS on Twitter

I can’t quite believe it. The institution that is the BBC’s Test Match Special, now has a Twitter stream in addition to their Flickr output. Who’d have thought it! They’ve even put together some useful information on what Twitter is and how it works. Might be one way to sell the application to colleagues

Supporting e-Learning applications and tools

During a meeting yesterday, it struck me how many internal and external e-Learning related or Web 2.0 applications I seem to get asked about. As a result of this, I thought it might be good idea to get down a list of tools that I could refer to in future meetings. I’m pretty sure that all of the following have free signups.

e-Learning Tools at the University of Bath

• Moodle – Our institutional Virtual Learning Environment. We’re currently running version 1.9+.
• Confluence – A tool that allows for the fast, easy creation of wiki pages which can be used for collaborative activities.
• Learning Material Filestore (LMF) – An online file storage and sharing facility available to all students and staff at the University of Bath. Whilst strictly speaking this is the responsibility of the Web Services team, we often point colleagues towards this, and might offer some help and advice.

Web 2.0

• Social networking websites, mostly Facebook and LinkedIn in relation to how it might be used to support learning and teaching related activities.
• Social bookmarking websites. I usually point colleagues towards my personal favourite del.icio.us, though Diigo seems to be increasing in popularity.
• Blogging tools such as WordPress. In addition, newer “micro-blogging” websites such as Twitter.
• A place to find images to use in lecturers or presentations. Flickr and Google Images are two examples, though I often stress the copyright implications of using such resources.
• Applications for subscribing to RSS feeds are usually of interest. I use Google Reader, though I’m aware of a variety of others. I point colleagues to the BBC website for a good definition of what RSS feeds are and how to get started.
• For subscribing to podcasts, which could well be hosted in the LMF, I’d recommend iTunes. An alternative is Juice.
• For podcast creation, as well as other general audio-editing, Audacity comes recommended.
• For videos, YouTube seems like the obvious choice. The less popular Google Video is alternative for hosting content.
• There’s also Google Docs, which is a free, Web-based word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation application offered by Google. It allows users to create and edit documents online while collaborating in real-time with other users.
• In addition, we offer recommend SlideShare, which in the spirit of YouTube [see above], allows users to upload their PowerPoint presentations for viewing and sharing. Presentations can be tagged and permissions set so that downloading of presentations can be allowed/disallowed.

Other

• The University of Bath has a site licence to Bristol Online Surveys, which is a service that allows staff to develop, deploy and analyse surveys via the web. For a non-University hosted solution (which students can also use to create surveys), SurveyMonkey is often a good alternative.
• We have implemented phpMyFAQ to power the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) database for our Moodle installation.

Phew! I think that’s all. If there’s anything else I’ve missed, please do let me know.

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19 June 2008 – The e-Learning team have recently acquired in 25 audience response systems from TurningPoint. The specific model that we own is ResponseCard RF. Please do get in touch if you’d like to find out more.

Using Podcasting in Learning and Teaching

I attended the first presentation of our Summer Seminar Series 2008 earlier on today, entitled Using Podcasting in Learning and Teaching. The session gave a useful introduction to podcasting, giving demonstrating how easy it is to both create and disseminate podcasts using RSS feeds. Whilst I’ve used iTunes in the past to subscribe to audio-related RSS feeds, an alternative was put forward in the form of Juice, which is billed as a “cross-platform podcast reciever”.

Most interesting during the presentation was Andy Ramsden’s Framework to assess educational podcasts – Instructor actively involved. In this particular approach, student created podcasts are perceived to have the greatest effectiveness when it comes to the primary delivery mechanism for learning materials. In particular, this also extends to a greater level of motivation to listen and engage with the content of the audio, in turn leading to deeper learning. Whilst I would tend to agree with this conclusion, I wonder if students have as yet been equipped with the skills, technical know-how” and intuition to create such content. This despite the existence of software such as Audacity. Student-led courses such as “Creating your own Podcast” could potentially be delivered through the SORTED scheme.

I’ve got my own session, Supporting collaborative activites using Wikis next Thursday… so if you’re a member of staff at the University of Bath, and haven’t signed up to attend yet, please do!