June 25, 2008

Searchme Stack demo...

One of the things I was really pleased to get into the current presentation of T184, our online short course on robotics, were a handful of embedded video clips from Youtube. The presentation of the assets isn't that pretty, but...

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Posted by ajh59 at 08:37 PM | Comments (1)

June 17, 2008

Trackback Graphs and Blog Categories

Okay, another take on the Digital Worlds uncourse blog trackback graph... To what extent do the emergent structures "respect" my use of blog categories (which have RSS feeds associated with them, and so are automatically published as discrete linear lists...

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Posted by ajh59 at 10:52 AM | Comments (0)

June 16, 2008

Uncovering a Little More Digital Worlds Structure

Tweaking the Wordpress blog structure parser to get a GraphViz output was trivial, so here are a couple of snapshots for the reverses pingback graph (that is, if post B pingbacked post A, then I plot A as emergent linking...

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Posted by ajh59 at 04:51 PM | Comments (3)

Emergent Structure in the Digital Worlds Uncourse Blog Experiment

In an earlier post on Disaggregating the Notion of PLEs #1 - PCVs: Personal (Portable?) Content Views, I showed how by using blog post tags and categories in the Digital Worlds uncourse blog experiment the original steady stream of posts...

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Posted by ajh59 at 04:06 PM | Comments (0)

May 29, 2008

Categorising RSS Feeds & RSS Feed Use Cases in Education

Following the blatant self-plagiarism of Social Bookmarking and Infoskills Development, here's more, this time retrieved from a comment to another of Alan's posts, "Introducing students to RSS". This time, the list enumerates several different sorts of RSS feed might be...

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Posted by ajh59 at 12:20 AM | Comments (0)

May 28, 2008

Social Bookmarking and Infoskills Development (with a 'hmmm' about transient resources...)

Over the last couple of days, I've come to realise that a lot of my thinking is based around "lists" - as with the Education 2.0 Business Models list of web 2.0 business models as vaguely applied to elearning... (Thinking...

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Posted by ajh59 at 07:13 PM | Comments (2)

May 20, 2008

Digital Worlds Weeks 9-11, Round-Up

A couple of slow weeks in the Digital Worlds uncourse blog experiment, so this isn't so much of a reflective post, it's more of a catch-up catch-up on the posts I have managed to do... Perplex City Exposed Our World...

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Posted by ajh59 at 01:38 PM | Comments (0)

April 27, 2008

Digital Worlds Week 8, Round-Up

Another slow week on the Digital Worlds front, and again I didn't find the time for the half-a-day or so of tinkering that the the Game Maker posts require:-( And next week is already looking less than promising in terms...

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Posted by ajh59 at 04:31 PM | Comments (1)

April 20, 2008

Digital Worlds Week 7, Round-Up

I was away for most of last week, so I scheduled several posts (all on a theme - can you tell?!) to the Digital Worlds uncourse blog experiment. Producing Game Audio Creating a Game Soundtrack: Interactive and Adaptive Audio Representing...

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Posted by ajh59 at 02:22 PM | Comments (0)

April 13, 2008

Digital Worlds Week 6, Round-Up

Here's this week's round-up from the Digital Worlds uncourse blog experiment. Other things got in the way somewhat, so the posting frequency was a few posts down on what I really need to producing, and it's looking as if the...

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Posted by ajh59 at 10:28 PM | Comments (0)

April 07, 2008

Digital Worlds Week 5, Round-Up

Here's a (late) roundup of postings in week 5 of the Digital Worlds uncourse blog experiment. Do Game Players Tell, or Create, Stories? Keeping Up With Digital Worlds An Unfortunate Sequence of Events... Quick - Find Out About Some Platform...

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Posted by ajh59 at 03:57 PM | Comments (1)

April 02, 2008

OU Courses and Quals Graphs

The OU Courses and quals site has just had a redesign - I'll post about it when I've had a chance to have a proper look around at the changes, but this is sort of related - a marker post...

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Posted by ajh59 at 11:32 PM | Comments (0)

March 31, 2008

Digital Worlds Week 4, Round-Up

Last week, I lightened the load on the number of posts (partly because of a trip full of meetings in Milton Keynes, i.e. no work done...), which means I'm not as far on in uncourse as I wanted to be...

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Posted by ajh59 at 12:12 PM | Comments (4)

March 24, 2008

Digital Worlds Week 3, Round-Up

End of week 3 of the Digital Worlds uncourse blog experiment, and looking back it was a busy week occasional/informal learning readers - in fact, too busy maybe? Though probably not too far off what would be expected of students...

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Posted by ajh59 at 08:39 PM | Comments (0)

March 21, 2008

Disaggregating the Notion of PLEs #1 - PCVs: Personal (Portable?) Content Views

There's been a flurry of posts lately about PLEs - Brian today, Martin a few days ago, AJ over the last couple of weeks (also check out his What the heck is a PLE? tutorial). So I've taken a step...

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Posted by ajh59 at 01:11 PM | Comments (2)

March 15, 2008

Digital Worlds Week 2, Round-Up

Here's a round up of posts to the Digital Worlds uncourse blog experiment over the last week: Whose Rules? Points Make Prizes - or Penalties! Getting Philosophical About Games Who's Best? Keeping Track of High Scores Upping the Stakes -...

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Posted by ajh59 at 11:16 PM | Comments (1)

March 13, 2008

"Playing" at Soliciting Learner Generated Content

More than a few people I know around the OU are quite taken by the idea of OUr students generating some of our course content. Some courses already do this to a greater of lesser extent (over and above the...

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Posted by ajh59 at 03:12 PM | Comments (0)

March 09, 2008

Digital Worlds Week 1, Round-Up

Earlier this week, I started an experiment: blogging a course, (sort of!) (Why *shouldn't* I have the nerve to do this online...? Err...). Here's a catch-up list of the first week's posts: This is where it all begins... In the...

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Posted by ajh59 at 11:14 AM | Comments (3)

February 14, 2008

RESTful Image Generation - When Text Just Won't Do

One of the take homes for me from the recent OU VLE 2.0 show-and-tell was a talk by LTS developer Jonathan "Google Charts, MathTran and editable PNG files" Fine about displaying mathematical equations in online course materials. This would be...
Posted by ajh59 at 09:43 PM | Comments (1)

February 13, 2008

Best Practice Instructional Material?

One of the 'issues' we meet again and again when writing OU course materials is the extent to which we have to hand-hold our students when explaining how to use particular software applications. Unlike traditional HEIs, where computer lab sessions...
Posted by ajh59 at 01:15 PM | Comments (1)

January 07, 2008

Still Not Getting Rights....

Another year, and I'm still not clear about what's acceptable when it comes to reusing third party materials. Consider the following -  a movie about robots from New Scientist magazine. The movie appears in a free, publicly available blog post...

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Posted by ajh59 at 03:42 PM | Comments (5)

December 20, 2007

Thinking Aloud - a-learning ;-)

A quick count of devices in our family that are: a) portable, and b) capable of playing audio files suddenly brought home to me just how accessible recorded audio is becoming from a technology point of view I've thought for...

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Posted by ajh59 at 11:39 AM | Comments (0)

December 18, 2007

A Fragmentary Thought on Content Reuse

I've been thinking a bit lately about open courseware reusability, so here's a breadcrumb to mark the possibly false trail I'm on... this is all thinking out loud, so may not make any sense at all... For the purpose of...

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Posted by ajh59 at 07:02 PM | Comments (6)

November 04, 2007

School Calculator Woes...

Sunday, Sunday - last week tech support, this week, school calculators... "We're just off to town to get a school calculator... do you want anything?" "What..? I thought you'd already got a calaculator? No - I KNOW you've got one..."...

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Posted by ajh59 at 02:00 PM | Comments (3)

September 21, 2007

Pair Writing with Google Docs

One of the key strengths (so it is said) of the OU course production process is the course team approach (Google turns this up as a good hit for that topic: Designing Multi-Media Courses for Individualized Study: The Open University...
Posted by ajh59 at 03:31 PM | Comments (0)

September 19, 2007

Click On Series 2

The first programme in the second series of Radio 4's IT magazine programme Click On aired at 4.30 pm on Monday (listen again here), and will be filling that slot for the next few weeks. As with all OU/BBC co-productions,...
Posted by ajh59 at 11:21 AM | Comments (0)

August 14, 2007

OpenMark Computer-Assisted Assessment Tool

For some time now, the OU has been running a "computer-assisted assessment system" on some of our courses using an in-house system known as OpenMark. The project is actually made available as an open source project, which you can find...
Posted by ajh59 at 06:39 PM | Comments (1)

July 25, 2007

Thinking About Course Gameplay

OUseful blog post 501: Martin's been wondering Is education intrinsically a bit dull?, Marc's been deliver[ing] a stinging condemnation of elearning at his keynote address to the IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies on Friday in Niigata, Japan and...
Posted by ajh59 at 07:43 PM | Comments (0)

June 13, 2007

So Just What is a Podcast (or a Blog)...?

JISC are running an online conference at the moment - Innovating e-Learning 2007: Institutional Transformation and Supporting Lifelong Learning (where there are some interesting discussions going on - check it out if you can...) Today's keynote is delivered via "a...
Posted by ajh59 at 10:20 AM | Comments (2)

June 06, 2007

T151 Day One...

A few weeks ago, I took on what should be a new production course if it gets through the opportunity review - T151 for those of you who speak OU course code, working title along the lines of Digital Worlds:...
Posted by ajh59 at 02:16 AM | Comments (0)

May 12, 2007

Powerpoint Presentations That Support Glanceability

"Glanceable Powerpoint" - what's that all about then? Lorcan Dempsey posted a couple of days ago about glanceability after seeing the phrase mentioned in Learnin' from Virgin, my review of James Cridland's talk here a week or two ago. Lorcan...
Posted by ajh59 at 11:43 AM | Comments (2)

May 26, 2006

O'Reilly SafariU

On Wednesday, we had a presentation from CJ Rayhill, CIO at O'Reilly's SafariU 'self-service, text book on demand' website. Here are some lightly edited notes from the session... How could O'Reilly help out in academic publishing? Been around for 25...
Posted by ajh59 at 12:58 PM | Comments (0)

May 17, 2006

Google/Yahoo/Amazon Certified Professionals...

A couple of days ago (or was it just yesterday?) I posted on the topic of Google Certified Professionals as consultants who could go into SMEs and deliver training on getting a Google (or Windows Live etc.) web appliction office...
Posted by ajh59 at 11:26 AM | Comments (0)

May 16, 2006

Google Certified Professional

WIth the increasing numbers of (free) web based office productivity tools, as well as Microsoft and Google's moves towards hosting academic email accounts, I wonder when we'll start seeing Google Certified Professionals (in addition to their Google Advertising Pofessionals) lending...
Posted by ajh59 at 12:31 PM | Comments (0)

May 15, 2006

An Aside on SOAP vs. REST

An aside, becusue this post is little more than a quote from Justin Leavesley: but it captures very well my own take on webservices and the SOAP vs. REST debate: Clayton [in The Innovator's Dilemma] also describes what he terms...
Posted by ajh59 at 10:22 AM | Comments (0)

May 07, 2006

Blogging Academic Lectures

It's late, I'm tired, but I've just read John Dale on Laptops in Lectures and it reminded that I meant to post about my experience of blogging the OU Learning and Teaching Conference a couple of weeks ago. So, for...
Posted by ajh59 at 11:32 PM | Comments (0)

April 27, 2006

L & T Conf - Final Question Time

Chair: Linda Price Panel: Lewis Elton, Steve Swithenby, Niall Sclater, Paul Clark, Josie Taylor, Pete Cannell Are we on the move and in which direction? JT - society on the move and going all over the place. To everyone over...
Posted by ajh59 at 05:06 PM | Comments (0)

L & T Conf - Anne Hewling - Personal Repositories

Personal Repositories Online Wiki Environment - PROWE JISC project, with Leicester(?) CPD for ALs using wikis and blogs (was known in he past as the 'bliki project'). What kinds of sharing do we need to support for ALs (and are...
Posted by ajh59 at 04:03 PM | Comments (0)

L & T Conf - Andy Lane - Open Content Initiative

Why Open Content? Wide range of content forms (documents, audio, multimedia etc.) OU/BBC relationship means we have a long history of broadcasting 'open content' (free to view/consume/access, open2.net, OU materials in libraries etc.) Open Content licensing is broader than just...
Posted by ajh59 at 12:34 PM | Comments (0)

L & T Conf - Niall Sclater - Blogging & Podcasting in the OU VLE

First 20 mins of talk given as a podcast... I'm not going to blog this becuase you can listen to it here... (Interesting - I see Niall has: 1) switched comments and trackboacks on his blog off; and 2) taken...
Posted by ajh59 at 11:33 AM | Comments (0)

L & T Conf - Paul Clark

[I missed the first 5-10 mins] (Half recalled from while the laptop booted... Elearning will allow us to move to a more activity based learning. Competittion Univ of Leicester University of Liverpool A.N.Other New, new technologies e.g. Skype) Changing Customer-Information...
Posted by ajh59 at 10:44 AM | Comments (0)

L & T Conf - Josie Taylor - Supported Mobile Open Learning

Futurist views of computers from decades ago were wildly out (e.g. Watson - need for no more than 5 computers). Academic worries - what are benefits, how do I keep up, etc. What's the relationship between societal and technological change...
Posted by ajh59 at 10:36 AM | Comments (0)

April 26, 2006

Social Bookmarking Workshop Slides

As part of a two day (today and tomorrow) OU internal Learning and Teaching Conference(which I've been live blogging throughout the day - see previous few posts) I gave an hour long workshop today on social bookmarking. The workshop was...
Posted by ajh59 at 07:54 PM | Comments (0)

L & T Conference - Afternoon Question Time

Panel: Dennis O'Brien, Mike Sharples, Ormond Simpson, Kathleen Gilmartin, Linda Jones, Paul Clark. Chair: Linda Price Are we on the move? OS - lots of recent failed e-universities MS - Nottingham having an outpost in China(?); people have more mobile/access...
Posted by ajh59 at 05:05 PM | Comments (1)

L & T Conf - Kelvin Street - Recent Library Apps for Business School Students

Business school has a multimedia tutorial [a screencast, essentially] on using online library apps (e.g. for B830). Link from course page to multimedia resources on How to do a literature search (essentially slides with audio and with mixed in screencasts...
Posted by ajh59 at 12:17 PM | Comments (0)

L & T Conf - Steve Armstrong - Enhancing the Brand Through Podcasts

Background Move away from mass broadcast. Origins of podcasting in blogging (audio blogging). Syndication via feeds, subscription model etc. etc. Enhancing the brand Podcasts good for: - language learning - facilitate self-paced learning - support students with disabilities - record...
Posted by ajh59 at 11:35 AM | Comments (0)

L & T conf Keynote - Mike Sharples - Beyond Mobile Learning

[Live blog]Beyond Mobile Learning - Mike SharplesInformal online networking - e.g. social networking sites (MySpace, Bebo)Many useful skills implicit in social networking - communicaiton skills, networking, teamworking, online research etc.Conflict with formal education - disruptive devices (e.g. PSP in lecture...
Posted by ajh59 at 10:42 AM | Comments (1)

April 23, 2006

Outsourcing Email in Higher Education

Some time ago I blogged in passing about how Google were starting to host email accounts for educational establishments and more recently about how they appear to be seeking to attract students to use Google tools in their everday College...
Posted by ajh59 at 04:53 PM | Comments (0)

April 21, 2006

Time for a Course on a Stick?

Although our Technology (Relevant Knowledge) short courses are delivered largely online, they still have a surface mailing associated with them. In the case of the course I work on (T184 Robotics and the Meaning of Life: a practical guide to...
Posted by ajh59 at 08:18 PM | Comments (0)

April 05, 2006

Plex Personal Learning Environment

I've just spent 20 mins or so over lunch having a look at the Plex personal learning environment desktop client (written in Java, versions available for Windows, Linux and Mac), and whilst I'm still not sure about half of what...
Posted by ajh59 at 01:37 PM | Comments (0)

April 04, 2006

My Podcast Radio

Cheapskate that I am, I tend to download podcasts onto my PC at work, not just to save bandwidth but also becasue the pipe is a lot faster at work. This suits me well, most of the time. I tend...
Posted by ajh59 at 04:46 PM | Comments (0)

March 24, 2006

An Alternative Take on Online Apps - Browser-based Desktop Apps

Just a quick follow up to the previous post on online application bundles - Ajaxlaunch have announced that over the coming weeks they are going to release a series of what are essentially browser based rich interface applications with the...
Posted by ajh59 at 04:10 PM | Comments (0)

Making the Most of Online Apps

I've written before about the application bundle the OU gives out on CD to our students and how we might consider alternative approaches to this in the form of delivering portable apps on a USB memory stick, or downloadable bundles...

There is a third way, of course, that is increasingly possible and that is to provide an online application wrapper that allows students to easily set up an online office environment for themselves.

For example, with Google's purchase of Writely presumably putting Writely on a secure footing, we could now point students to that as a possible application for them to use for writing documents.

I don't know if anyone is scouting the Numsum online spreadsheet, but that's another online application we could possibly be referring students to.

Ideally of course we'd be able to offer one click registration to these services (or the ones they select) for students who aren't already registered with them.

A section of the student's personal profile page on the OU system could also be used to allow them to enter their web apps login details so they could access these third party services from within the OU (or OCI learning environment.

Ideally we'd be able to offer common authenitication to allow students who have an current OU authentication ticket to access Writely, or Numsum etc. although I suspect the OU powers that be would be wary of exploring any such relationship with a web startup, or a web monster!

Web services would provide an alternative integration route, of course, even if it's only at the level of syndicating feeds (e.g. the Writely personal RSS feed can be accessed via a secure https route.)

That's still pretty neat, though. For example, I just added Writely to my Netvibes profile (read how here), and was immediatley able to click through from Netvibes to any of my public Writely documents (and then edit them with another single click). The feed keeps users updated as to changes that may have been made by other authors collaborating on a document, which could be very handy in an OU context, with several students working at a distance on a common document as a part of a group exercise, for example. One for MyOpenLibrary, perhaps?

Netvibes has several other neat feed consuming ideas - for example GMail, and iCal calendar feeds. (Hmmm - calandars... perhaps we could add an online calendar to the mix, like 30 Boxes perhaps? I know calendaring is one of the VLE mini-projects - I really hope they make whatever solution they go for syndication friendly (both in and out)!)

And finally - you may have noticed that this is (sort of) an apps corollary to the ad hoc community doodle I posted with last week. That's purely intentional...

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Posted by ajh59 at 03:14 PM | Comments (0)

March 19, 2006

Word 2003 Research Pane

I've just got Word 2003 installed on my desktop machine at work, which means that just as soon as I get a couple of hours spare I'll be having a go at timnkering with the research pane. If you haven't...
Posted by ajh59 at 01:54 PM | Comments (0)

Integrating Ad Hoc and Formal Communities

By chance, I had a brief chat on Friday to Marc Eisenstadt and Simon Buckinghum Shum, both of KMi about the potential they see for using Web2.0 approaches in the infrastructure that is going to be built around the OU's...
Posted by ajh59 at 01:07 PM | Comments (0)

March 13, 2006

Chatting About Web Pages: Just Another Form of Annotation?

I've been wondering over he last few days the extent to which chat might be a useful mechanism for annotating web pages compared to more 'traditional techniques (such as these). So when I read this post from Russell Beattie this...
Posted by ajh59 at 09:53 PM | Comments (0)

March 04, 2006

Embedded Searchable Further Reading Lists

One of the things I've written about several times before are 'livelinks' - lists of links fed live from a social bookmarking system and embedded in a piece of teaching material, for example, as might be the case for a...
Posted by ajh59 at 10:55 PM | Comments (0)

February 27, 2006

Making Something OUseful Out of RSS2Email

Squeet - Free Email RSS Reader is probably just another RSS2Email service, but it got me thinking about what role this sort of service could play in an elearning (bleurggghhhh;-( environment.... 1) Squeet is (probably another) RSS2email service (though it...
Posted by ajh59 at 01:18 AM | Comments (0)

February 22, 2006

What Is a PLE?

I just stumbled across this piece on a Personal Learning Environment Model (via Downes), which comments: I'm not even sure that it [i.e. a PLE] can be created or designed by someone for someone else. Just as each person's desires,...
Posted by ajh59 at 01:49 PM | Comments (0)

February 12, 2006

OU VLE Programme Blog

Several months on from the OU's stated intention to adopt Moodle for the OU VLE, VLE programme director Niall Sclater has been doing the rounds of the OU in the last week or two giving staff an overview of what...
Posted by ajh59 at 10:34 PM | Comments (0)

February 03, 2006

IE Starts to Look Interesting...

Old news to most perhaps, but if I had a day to play, I'd probably commit it to IE this week for a couple of reasons. First up, there's a new Google toolbar (v. 4) for IE, though not for...
Posted by ajh59 at 12:26 PM | Comments (0)

January 23, 2006

OU Blogger Listings

After putting a call out to anyone who blogged on the OU intranet, I've had a few more returns from people who blog for all sorts of reasons (more on that in a later post, perhaps). There are quite a...
Posted by ajh59 at 09:19 PM | Comments (0)

January 20, 2006

More on Possible Outlets for OU Blogging...

Dutiful employee that I am, the homepages of my various browsers tend to be either the Open2.net site (when, oh, when are they going to make an RSS feed of future programming available...?!) or the Intranet default/home page: The one...
Posted by ajh59 at 05:08 PM | Comments (0)

January 19, 2006

My Curriculum Conference Presentation

As promised, here's a link to the presentation I gave at the recent OU Curriculum conference: OU Curriculum Conference: Curriculum innovation across boundaries Jan 17-18, 2006. Course in progress: involving students in real-time course production Tony Hirst, Ches Lincoln &...
Posted by ajh59 at 09:35 AM | Comments (0)

January 18, 2006

Blogging in the OU...

I think that over the last couple of days, institutional blogging has been encouraged by our VC.... The setting was a two day internal conference at the OU on Curriculum Innovation Across Boundaries (I couldn't find a public link so...
Posted by ajh59 at 07:47 PM | Comments (2)

January 15, 2006

Is Plagiarism Necessarily a Bad Thing?

...by which I mean: if we set assessment questions/tasks that can be answered using a search engine, and a student locates/discovers a relevant resource that satisifies the assessment, so what? (This begs the question of course - what exactly is...
Posted by ajh59 at 03:01 PM | Comments (2)

January 13, 2006

Time for an OU Updater (OUpdater?!)?

I just spotted this post - Google Pack's real innovation is Updater - which notes how the Google Pack updater provides Google with an installation path for future products straight to the desktop... (The Google/Sun collaboration now seems to make...
Posted by ajh59 at 05:25 PM | Comments (0)

USB Study Stick

Should the OU be offering students OUseful study and course related software on a USB memory stick? This is a question I have asked myself - and others - several times over the last few years, but it was brought...

The OU already provides a similar service - and has done for many years - as a download or via a CD-ROM mailed to every student at the start of every course in the form of our OLA (On Line Applications) CD.

The OLA software includes Software for OU courses (Adobe Reader, FirstClass Client, Kaspersky Anti-Hacker, Kaspersky Anti-Virus, Lyceum, StarOffice) as well as additional 3rd party software utilities and drivers (DirectX, Info-ZIP WiZ, Java (JRE), Java Access Bridge, Java Media Framework (JMF), Macromedia Flash, Macromedia Shockwave, Mozilla Firefox).

One problem that has been encountered by OU students repeatedly in a computing context is where they can do their computing related activities.

Many OU students work, many do not have sole access to a home PC and so on. For working students, who may make use of their work's computing facilities (over lunch, of course...), there is often a restriction on the software they can install on a centrally administered work machine. For students making use of public computers, for example in learning centres or public libraries, there are similar constraints on software availability/installation, as well as the threat of virus infection.

However, with the increasing availability of cheap USB memory sticks, and the rise of portable applications, I can't help but wonder why we aren't encouraging students to adopt portable working solutions and providing them with (customised) portable application variants?

There is also a marketing/branding or even sales (at cost, of course, or for small profit) opportunity in the form of customised, preloaded USB memory sticks.

So, what would be useful on a USB Study Stick?

Why this focus on portability ('portable learning'), rather than a web based VLE or PLE, or online office suite that offers the required functionality? Because that protoypical extreme environment OU student - the submariner - can't guarantee web access for weeks on end and will need to work locally. (The same is true of students with dial-up access and teenage children who hog the phone...;-)

I wonder, too, whether there is scope for a portable personal learning enviroment (PPLE)?

PS I got a Creative Muvo which doubles up MP3 playing capabilities with a Flash drive; so I can have my portable context on the device, and use it to play any MP3 (or WMA) files I happen to have on it...nice! :-)

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Posted by ajh59 at 04:54 PM | Comments (2)

Firefox Smart Keywords

I've known about Firefox keyword/quick searches for a long time (basically - associate a keyword with a bookmark, and then visit the bookmarked site by enetering the keyword in the browser location bar), and I use them quite a bit,...
Posted by ajh59 at 04:23 PM | Comments (0)

January 10, 2006

Peer Review 2.0

Seeing this post just now - O'Reilly Radar > Digging The Madness of Crowds - about how an unchecked, largely untrue story rose to prominence on Digg, resonated with one aspect of something I've been mulling around for a few...
Posted by ajh59 at 01:16 PM | Comments (1)

January 04, 2006

Embedded Livelinks

This is a quick test (in the context of this blog) for embedding del.icio.us fed links within a popup tooltip. The core library is one I have used before - Walter Zorn's (?) DHTML JavaScript Tooltips and demoed briefly here....
Posted by ajh59 at 06:55 PM | Comments (0)

December 15, 2005

Innovative Curriculum Development?

Note to self: could we use the following as feeds into thinking on curriulum development in the STEM subject areas? OST Horizon Scanning - their first report comes out n February, 2006.Prediction markets - I have no idea how this...
Posted by ajh59 at 03:00 PM | Comments (0)

Community Building for Course Cohorts

The web's moving just too fast for me at the moment - Yahoo!'s purchase of del.icio.us, the announcement of the Alexa web Search Platform and this new Blogger Web Comments for Firefox extension are just three things to mention that...
Posted by ajh59 at 02:22 PM | Comments (0)

November 20, 2005

Blogging to an Institutional Repository

To what extent should informal web publications - such as blog posts, Wiki contributions, and even social bookmarks - be classed as 'proper' publications, and to what extent are they just part of an everday informal channel of academic discourse...
Posted by ajh59 at 10:57 PM | Comments (0)

November 07, 2005

Seven Ways of Using Social Bookmarking

A couple of weeks ago, I offered to run a workshop on social bookmarking in April next year at what used to be known in the OU as TTAA (Tracking Technology for Academic advantage). The event has since been renamed...
Posted by ajh59 at 02:47 PM | Comments (2)

November 05, 2005

Unintended Learning

To what extent should we require learners to learn what we want them to learn, rather than what they think they want to learn? For example, the following quote comes from the article Teachers are wary about using IT in...
Posted by ajh59 at 10:00 AM | Comments (0)

November 04, 2005

Towards a Managed Social Bookmarking Environment in Higher Education

As followers of this blog will know, one of the topics I keep doodling about is social bookmarking in an academic context. In this post, I want to start considering how we might use such tools at scale in a...
Posted by ajh59 at 06:15 PM | Comments (0)

October 30, 2005

Annotation Tools, Everywhere

A propos nothing, I've noticed over the last few weeks and months an increasing number of tools that support the micro-annoation of a wide range of electronic resources. Whilst I'm not going to blog - just yet - about how...
Posted by ajh59 at 09:19 PM | Comments (1)

October 15, 2005

Keeping Course Homepages Current With 'Related News' Feeds

A quick note on a minor breakthrough a couple of weeks ago: the T184 course homepage now consumes a feed from one of mt del.iocio.us tags, which allows me to get robotics related news items onto the course homepage without...
Posted by ajh59 at 06:49 PM | Comments (0)

September 16, 2005

Encouraging Online Engagement with Wikis

In Encouraging Online Engagement with Social Software I discussed the motivation for the use of social software in encoraging online, student engagment in distance education. In this post, I shall consider how we might use wikis. Background Wikis are straightforward...
Posted by ajh59 at 09:20 PM | Comments (0)

Encouraging Online Engagement with Social Bookmarks

In Encouraging Online Engagement with Social Software I discussed the motivation for the use of social software in encoraging online, student engagment in distance education. In this post, I shall consider how we might use social bookmarking. Background Social bookmarking...
Posted by ajh59 at 08:53 PM | Comments (0)

Encouraging Online Engagement with Social Software

In a previous post (OUseful Info: Online Student Engagement) I blogged a conversation about some of the issues related to getting students to engage with online activities. What follows in this post, and the two blog posts that will come...
Posted by ajh59 at 08:32 PM | Comments (0)

August 05, 2005

SMS for Student Support

[A cheeky post , this one - republishing a fragment of my Micro-Information Services web page, which is a couple of years old now, almost verbatim...] An EMERG [now disbanded...] briefing to the Learning and Teaching Committee (LTIC) identified several...
Posted by ajh59 at 10:51 AM | Comments (0)

Easy-to-use Course RSS Feeds?

It had to happen - there is a saying I've seen floating around the blogosphere that if you want to know what will be in the next version of Internet Explorer, look to the popular features of Firefox. So the...
Posted by ajh59 at 10:17 AM | Comments (0)

August 02, 2005

Live Links and Metadata

One of the major benefits that I can see in using Live Links in course materials is the degree of separation that is provided between the link (or link hook?) as it appears in online course materials, and the actual...

NB the previous link is not explicitly encoded in this page, it is pulled in by an RSS2HTML service from http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu.

So, Live Links are easy enough to incorporate in the page, but how are we to find which links to pull in where? It may be useful to think of the tags as metadata that describe not only the content, but also the potential ways in which the links may be used, and perhaps even unique identifiers that can be used to retrieve particular links.

In order to establish what sortof metadata we need to capture about links, we need to clarify the various contexts in which links are used in course materials. For example, the author may want to either:

a) ensure that a particular page is referenced - for example, if the page is the focus of a particular reading activity; or,

b) just provide links that are generallly useful - for example, in an informal Further Reading list.

In the latter case, it may be possible to go so far as pulling in content that is searched for at the time the material is viewed. For example, the following is a list of news stories from the BBC, acquired via the Google webservice, that mention Babbage:

There are pitfalls associated with this approach of cousre, such that search results may not be consistent over time if the database that is being searched is dynamically maintained during the presentation of the course.

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Posted by ajh59 at 03:23 PM | Comments (0)

July 29, 2005

Online Student Engagement

A couple of weeks ago, I was part of an interesting email exchange with a couple of colleagues (Chris Bird and John Martin) about engaging students with online activities. I didn't blog it at the time - though I should...
Posted by ajh59 at 04:35 PM | Comments (5)

June 20, 2005

Are Desktop-Based Browsers the Best Way Forward for e-Learning?

I'm still not sure that I have a clear understanding of what we all mean by e-learning, but I'm increasingly unhappy with the common assumption it has something that it is just to do with stuff delivered through a networked...
Posted by ajh59 at 11:28 AM | Comments (0)

June 16, 2005

OU on a USB Drive?

Quite by chance, I just got to see a copy of a (presumably monthly?) newsletter from LTS Interactive Media, and there's some interesting stuff in there, such as this news item: U3 is about to launch technology that turns a...
Posted by ajh59 at 11:50 AM | Comments (0)

June 07, 2005

Relevant News and Social ROUTES?

To what extent should our longlasting courses be augmented with contemporary, perhaps short-lived, content and/or external references? Some time ago I made a short post about bookmark management in the context of links provided from within course materials, as well...
Posted by ajh59 at 11:38 AM | Comments (0)

May 04, 2005

Online Courses - ePhemeral or Persistent?

With the OU presenting more and more courses online, the question of whether - or how - to allow students continued access to the course materials after the course has finished is increasingly likely to become "an issue". At the...
Posted by ajh59 at 07:56 AM | Comments (0)

May 02, 2005

Managing Bookmarks

With an increasing number of OU courses referring to websites outside the OU, and increasingly information literate students who are bookmarking websites related to a course but discovered by themselves, bookmark management is potentially one area of value added service...
Posted by ajh59 at 01:25 PM | Comments (0)

April 30, 2005

A Prior Art to Screencasts? E-Software Guides

Before blogging SSOL - Screencast Supported Open Learning?, I emailed a cut down version of the post to a few colleagues. The resulting replies led to a couple of follow up thoughts and prompted a few memories of related things...
Posted by ajh59 at 10:20 PM | Comments (0)

April 29, 2005

Web Based Activities

Not so long ago, I noticed a simple but effective way of setting up web-based activities on the Science course, S381 (although the same model may well be used on other OU courses too...), of which more below. At the...
Posted by ajh59 at 10:24 AM | Comments (0)

April 28, 2005

SSOL - Screencast Supported Open Learning?

I just stumbled across an interesting piece on on the merits of screencasting, written by uber blogger Jon Udell. Jon is one of screencasting's major proponents and the person who asked the community what movies about software should be called...
Posted by ajh59 at 05:12 PM | Comments (0)