#ocTEL Week 2 – Digital Literacy Questionnaires

Looking at the examples given e.g.
Penn State

University of Houstonthere seems to be some confusion as to the purpose of these questionnaires.

If the purpose is for an individual tutor to assess likely barriers to learning at the start of a course, then a better method might be through a forum where the group can see each others responses and the survey can stimulate discussion and promote peer support

If the purpose is to set student expectations of an online course, then less questions and more guidance and support might help – is it any use knowing I’m rubbish at time management without suggestions on how to improve it?

As far as I can see, the main use of a survey with these type of closed questions would be for institutional information  and  benchmarking around the digital literacy of our students e.g. what devices do they own? what do they use them for? and how is this changing year on year

 

 

 

 

My Big Question – for #ocTEL

My big question seems to reassuringly the same as that of many other people…

How do we persuade ‘reluctant’ members of staff to enage with TEL – especially those with limited skills/confidence/time?

To me the increasing issue in my role in carge of eLearning support is becoming that of ‘standarisation’ and to a certain extent fairness?

Students are increasingly starting their courses with expectations of things that will make their life easier and more interesting – course materials on a VLe, the ability to submit work online, the use of more visual an interactive learning materials…

Should we ensure all students get a ‘minimum level’ of this, whatever the skills/interests of their tutors?

Has the time come for less ‘carrot’ and more ‘stick’?

Introdution for #ocTEL

Hi, I am Emily Armstrong, Libraries & eLearning Manager at Hull College

I have many years experience of working with technology to provide acess to information to staff and students to support their learning & teaching – through library catalogues, web pages, online databases, VLes

For the last couple of years I also have formal responsibility for eLearning college-wide (maintaining Moodle and related systems, staff training, student support)

I am also one term in to an MSc in Elearning which is taught using a mix of TEL and more traditional methods

I am always keen to mess about with a new bit of techonology but want to improve my knowledge of learning processes and how to evaluate the impact rather than the novelty of TEL

Task 8 Harvard Referencing and models

Since my design project will involve text, images and video, I think I will look at Mayer’s research on multimedia. He claims that “students can learn more deeply from well-designed multimedia messages consisting of words and pictures than from more traditional modes of communication involving words alone” (Mayer, 2003. p. 125) . His research identified 4 different effects :

 

• a multimedia effect — learning is more effective when words and images are used rather than just words (both in print and online)
• a coherence effect —learning is more effective when fosused on the key material that needs to be learned
•  a spatial contiguity effect—learning is more effective when the words are placed close to the picture they relate to
• a personalization effect—learning is more effective  when the text is ‘conversational’ i.e. informal rather than formal

Mayer, Richard E. (2003) ‘The promise of multimedia learning: using the same instructional design methods across different media.’ Learning and Instruction. 13 (2), pp. 125-139

Ideas for my Design Project – part 2

Right – I have decided!  I am going to try and develop a learning object that gives a very short introduction to e-Safety and can hopefully both be used by lecturers during the induction period and used to direct part-time students to to look at outside class as there is not  enough contact time for them to do it at college

The hard thing will  be that it will need to be approriate for both classroom delivery and independent study and also ideally appropriate to all courses from GCSE to Masters!

I am thinking of using Xerte (if it is not too difficult to learn) as it is very accesible and I think allows multimedia and quizzes to be easily built in – but I also need to build it in to Moodle so we have a record of who has completed  – not sure if this can be done!

Ideas for my design project

I am feeling a little indecisive about my design project – I have 3 possible ideas:

1. Looking at a way to offer the 1 to 1 study skills support we provide online. I have heard about another college that was doing this and it seemed a good idea but I haven’t really thought through the practicalities yet – maybe using Google Docs? Jing?
2. In the summer we did a pilot using WizIQ to deliver staff training sessions simultaneously in Hull and Harrogate – this might be an interesting thing to look at although it hasn’t been entirely successful ..
3. We also started using Socrative to get quick feedback from staff training session – again this could be interesting to look at.

Am still not sure but having typed them up, I am tempted by the first one – it might be most work but might have most benefits at the end of it – but then looking at the other two could lead to improvements as well…

 

What do I make of blogging?

So far, I have mixed views on the usefulness of blogging…

Personally, I have found it difficult to remember to blog and so instead of any ongoing considered reflection it feels more like a series of short, sharp posts when I feel I am getting behind everyone else. I worry a bit too about my style of writing – I am torn about the style of writing I should use – because blogs feel so personal, I feel it should be my normal informal, slightly irreverent style of communication I would use verbally but then when I look at other peoples I wonder if people are actually expecting a more formal, academic style of writing. I find the use of images and multimedia tends to be an afterthought as I am not a very visual sort of person…

However, I think other people’s blogs are a wonderful source of information – especially when they have the credentials for you to trust them as ‘experts’ in their field – where tagging is done well, it allows relevent posts to be easily and blogs can provide great summaries of the key arguments and contrasting viewpoints on a topic.

Generally speaking, I feel blogs are most useful as a quick and easy form of publishing – for ‘experts’ within communities to put across their views and generate discussion. I have great appreciation for the poeple who have the time and commitment to do this … but I suspect I may not be one myself!  For me, in terms of community building I feel other social media (particularly Twitter) are a better (and more realistic in terms of time) way to keep in touch with my fellow professionals.

Also, I really hate reflecting – I prefer doing things – which does make me wonder why I thought this course was a good idea…

Harvard Referencing Quizes

We have 3 quizes (written in HotPotatos many years ago) you can use to test your referencing skills!

 

My Skills

©Newsquest (Herald & Times). Licensor http://www.scran.ac.uk.

Wasn’t sure I had any so thought I would ask my boyfriend – he points out I can knit and that I’m often better at commenting on F1 than the TV commentators – from this I conclude I am not a very useful person to live with!

Workwise, I have some Moodle admin skills (though if it gets to technical I have to ask my lovely eLearning team), I can write a bit of HTML in notepad, I can usually fix Heritage (our library management system), I’m quite good with numbers (although I don’t know the difference between less and fewer) and I have an NVQ2 in Customer Service.

I am almost certainly not the greatest teacher at the college but I am quite probably the fastest! My line management skills are either pretty good or I’m so scary my team pretend they are and I am good at making decisions but sadly not all the decisions I make are good!

Posting video clips

This is me learning how to post a video clip (encouraged by Chris Skerrow)
Here is an example of the least exciting video ever made (apologies to my colleague Lauri who made it)

There must be  a better way of using this medium!