Looking for a world clock for distance learning

I need a world clock for international delivery of distance learning. Staff and students need to realise the time difference, I’ve been looking for a solution, but not found anything that works in all browsers. All accept The solution was to use http://www.thetimenow.com/ for a nice embed that works in firefox and explorer. There are links that take you to the site for each time zone for lowfi and mobile users Then offer link to http://www.clocklink.com/clocks/world001-blue.swf?TimeZone=BST which displays a nice flash based interactive map. This seems to work in all browsers but the lowfi links are there for extra support. (see image for final effect)

Curriculum mapping tools, where are they?

We have been looking for a tool to help provide an overview to students of their curriculum. This hasn't been a major project, just a curiosity sparked by a growing desire from staff to show how the whole programme thing fits together.

The modular system means the students miss some of the interconnections between subject and assessments. Seeing the macro level of the curriculum and linking the connections and can allow students to plan further ahead for the assessments and see how feedback connects with the next assessments. It also provides a talking point in class. By pulling up the map at the beginning of the session allows everyone to see 'here we are' and 'this is what's to come'.The most famous example of this type of map is the Bauhaus's (see image)

 What I was hoping for would be a time line mapping tool, that would give the names of the modules, the general aims, the assessments and a rough idea of when they occur. 

The tools needs to be embedded into web pages and PowerPoint slides. It needs to allow you to move in and out of detail.

There are a number of good time line tools out there that come close. The most notable is dipity.com They mostly fail because 

- they want to be precise about dates, which means the assessment dates have to be exact

- timeline tools lack the flexibility and connectivity of mind mapping tools

- mind mapping tools aren't good at expressing sequences of activities and events

- they  are very expensive for entry level people that just wants to pilot an idea

In the end we are going with prezi and building a template. Which will at least proves the idea. However, the interface of prezi is still fiddly for the novice users, and the embed in explorer opens a new window rather than display the content on the page.

Any suggestions?

Iste13 from a distance

The iste conference had me glued to twitter late Sunday night. The experience of waiting for the key speaker, and then receiving their presentation through the media of a few hundred tweets was a real entertaining and gloriously odd. First came tweets from the queue as people shuffled into the main hall, over looked by a different group gripping at the length of it and the herd mentality. Next came endless excited comments about the 'house band', the thrill of being there and occasional mention of the who the key speaker was. 

As the presentation started the tweets summarised the key points over and over again as each tweeter delivered their individual perspective. For every 20 tweets of diligent relation of the key points would come the occasional voice of decent "not sure a really agree with that". At the virtual back of the room a few 'bloggers' revelled in the fact that a few people were leaving the conference and preferred not to comment of the presentation, "nobody watching the presentation in the blog zone". 

I prodded with tweets of my own, trying to get a deeper response from those present. 

I don't pretend to understand the phenomena any better but the experience did have a tangible unique quality which I can imagine being highly addictive.  

Keynote at iste 2013 - digital games, I can't believe we are still thinking like this

Educational games and games for learning have been researched, produced and tested for over 10 years. Some fine examples exist, and interesting results published. But one major problem stands in the way of this new technological nirvana. Designing a successful digital game takes incredible skill. The successful games that kids and adults play are the very cream products that an industry is turning out. Where there is one success, there are 1000s of failures, that fail on such a wide variety of reasons, You can get a game design wrong on some many levels. If we take the equivalent in the literary world it's like saying, "wow life of pi is such as great book, and so many people are reading and enjoying it, if only my lesson on . . . . was like that, I know let's write a book that's as good as that but stick some learning in it". The audience is too savvy, the skill required to create this takes years to develop, unless you push the resulting book down the students throats the market is too saturated for people to discover it and, most important of all, the  material is already rich with meaning.  

I could expand more, but the message is simple . . . 

Don't design educational games, but if you must think about games in the classroom, look at current commercial games and discuss them, they are already rich in meaning.

But . . .  Simulations, that's where it's worth exploring.

Is that really me? Turning on student pictures in blackboard

This post is about this uses surrounding the process of making personal images available via blackboard VLE.

Background
It is now possible for personal images that represent you in online spaces (avatars) to accompany any postings made in blackboard. This has great benefits but also carries concerns, and highlights the wider issue of representation on line or virtual presence.

The process could work in 2 ways, the start-from-blank way, users (staff and students) could be allowed to upload their own image, starting with a blank, or here-i-am way, users could have their university image uploaded for them, and could then change it.

Benefits
Here-I-am, solves a major problem that has been discussed by lecturers many times.
It takes them a long time to remember and identify students names with faces. Seeing recognisable faces online will all help this process. And in a similar way students will benefit from seeing each other. So far, so good for overall student community.

Concerns
Would the Here-I-am stiffly the emergence of online identity? Would this impact of student engagement in online activities.

Online presence embodied in avatars
No avatar image in neutral, they all say something personal about you. Other participants are hungry for information about you to help them analyse your text. Even having no image can be interpreted in a particular way. Having an egg as an avatar in twitter can say, I'm new, I'm shy, I'm not committed or I can't find how to upload an image. This is part of the process of becoming a tweeter, you commit a little bit more of yourself when you finally upload that image. This all connects with you immersing online identity. So would having an image of yourself already there make a difference to that process?

For students . . .Possibly yes and no.
Having an image already there, I would say, helps with making a positive break in the creation on an online identity. It says, here I am, both to the audience and to the student. Who will I be at university, becomes a more explicit process. However, when making that first posting in the VLE with not only text but also an image, may increase procrastination, as they battle with how to commit to expressing this identity. Now, anyone can possibly put a name and a face to those tenter time first postings.

What does research say
Strano (2008) sees the avatar image as a central mechanism to expression of identity in Facebook. In the study, younger uses change the image more regularly that older. This may be because younger users are less certain of their self image or identity. What's interesting is younger remains change their image more than any other group, and are more including to include others in their image, eg boyfriend. While older uses are much more included to be alone in their image. Zhou et al (2008) sees users upload more of a true representation of themselves in closed networks, which blackboard would be categorised as.

So Not much convincing evidence from research yet to say students may be more or less inclined to engage. However, the important point here is that students maybe more inclined to but an image up that will be of themselves. Being an internal network, where the pressure to preform in a more open social space such as Facebook maybe reduced. This change in demands to present yourself in a particular way may lead to the creation of new academic identities as the space offered is free of this pressure. Although, it may carry new pressures as yet unsurfaced by the literature. This might be interesting to research next year.

Staff and images
The reseach might indicate that the images will be less problematic. profile images are changed the lesast by older age groups. This also carries a very different dynamic. On the surface, getting staff to involve themselves in creation of profiles seems positive. However, I can image staff will be troubled by the pressure to perform in a particular way. We will have to wait and see on this one.




References

Strano, M. M. (2008). User Descriptions and Interpretations of Self-Presentation through Facebook Profile Images. Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace, 2(2), article 5.
http://cyberpsychology.eu/view.php?cisloclanku=2008110402&article=5
Shanyang Zhao, Sherri Grasmuck, Jason Martin, Identity construction on Facebook: Digital empowerment in anchored relationships, Computers in Human Behavior, Volume 24, Issue 5, September 2008, Pages 1816-1836, ISSN 0747-5632, 10.1016/j.chb.2008.02.012. (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563208000204) Keywords: Anonymity; Facebook; Identity; Internet; Self-presentation; Social networking sites

Wiki, Blogs and Discussion boards

I'm putting information together to a session on these tools. I had some old nots that took me to Warwick University blog site. You might remember, but when blogs first became popular Warwick were very quick to make blog spaces available to all students. The site is still going, but as you can see from the stats, it tells a story of the rise in interest in this technology and the decline caused mostly by Facebook dominating university campus communications.

three character feedback - could this be the answer

We have been testing the latest version of blackboard today. The new editor interface is a lot better. I noticed in the feedback section you can add emotioncons. Perhaps this is the answer to quick feedback (only kidding ;)