My Write to Learn

This is not the first time I’ve created a course in an LMS. As part of my job, I do all this nitty-gritty for our new online courses in WebCT. Whilst taking this course, I completed one on the “Greek and Latin Roots of English” and am starting on a course on “Women as Visual Artists”. Thankfully, the content is the responsibility of experts in the respective fields. Several MET courses ago, I also collaborated on the creation of a course module in WebCT Vista.

So, while this wasn’t as much of a “how-to” learning experience for me, it gave me the opportunity to compare the platforms. In most ways, Moodle is more advanced and user friendly than WebCT (Vista and earlier). However, I found the lack of control over organizational pages, the hierarchical “breadcrumb” trail (why, oh why does it not track where you’ve been? back-clicking from a forum to a list of all fora is counter intuitive and less than useful), discussion forum layout, and vague explanations of tools and terminology to be frustrating.

My personal preference would be not to choose Moodle as an LMS platform if the resources were available for another, more polished and logical LMS. Nonetheless, I do know now that I’m just as capable of creating a course in Moodle as in any other LMS. I’d like to spend some decent sandbox time in D2L, Blackboard 9 and others now.

Incidentally, today I came across (via Twitter) a course delivered entirely using Wetpaint. Have a look at Alec Couros’ EDST 499K web site at http://edst499k.wetpaint.com/. I’m impressed.

David

In Module 5 of ETEC 565 (Spring 2009), the terms media and multimedia are used almost interchangeably, adding an element of ambiguity to what we choose to include in our “Multimedia Inventory”. Richard Mayer (2001) defines multimedia as “the presentation of material using both words and pictures” (p. 1). Pictures may be still or moving, and words may be print or audio. Kingsley & Boone (2008) define multimedia as “any system that combines two or multimedia-media-inventorymore media into a single product or presentation, such as a software program or a Web page.” Clearly, multimedia artefacts are those that combine multiple media objects into a single entity. As can be seen in my inventory (attached in Word 2007 and PDF formats), some multimedia entities can even combine other multimedia entities. I have chosen to separate those items that are simply media from those that are truly multimedia.

With a couple of days left to polish the mock Moodle course I’m creating for Lay Readers, I may still add some more media and multimedia files. The inventory is up-to-date as of today. I have to admit that I was surprised at just how many files I have included in the course, despite having completed only a small portion of the overall course.

At first blush, I have found that the main benefit of this inventory exercise has been to force myself to be meticulous about recording my (multi)media object sources. I have already begun to apply this exercise to my professional practice.

Multi/Media Inventory (PDF)

Multi/Media Inventory (Word 2007)

References

Kingsley, K., & Boone, R. (2008, December 1). Effects of Multimedia Software on Achievement of Middle School Students in an American History Class. Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 41(2), 203-221. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. EJ826093) Retrieved July 26, 2009, from ERIC database.

Mayer, R (2001) Multimedia Learning, 9th ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Well, I finally got my “digital story” finished and posted online, using Scrapblog, an online, digital scrapbooking tool. I know more than a few people who are avid (or near avid) scrapbookers. I’ve never really understood the attraction – there’s always been something missing. Scrapblog might actually fill that hole by making it easier to share your work. It does lack the satisfaction of working with the pictures, paper, stickers and sundry other paraphenalia, but it sure is cheaper and easier to change your mind about where to place elements.

This activity was a learning experience for me – I had to learn to record audio using Audacity in order to create a mash-up in Picasa of photos and audio to upload to YouTube. Otherwise, there was no way for me to get an audio narration on my pages. I learned a bit more about Creative Commons licences from selecting photos on Flickr to use. One thing I would do differently next time, and may still do, is spend a bit more time cleaning up the audio. Even though all three audio clips were recorded in identical settings, with identical equipment, the sound quality varies quite a bit between the three.

What I learned from reviewing my classmates’ digital stories was that social media enables us to move from a starchy presentation of facts to a potentially compelling human story. When the story becomes meaningful to the author/creator, the information it conveys carries more weight with the audience. The ability of some platforms to incorporate audience response into the presentation itself raises the interactivity beyond “traditional” powerpoint presentations. [As a side-note, the death of powerpoint has been declared multiple times, at least as early as 2005, and most recently with the launching of Prezi, a much more dynamic tool. Yet, it’s still here with us. Why? Because it ships with MS Office…] Scrapblog operates as a weblog, in that viewers are welcome to leave comments on the presentation page, in the same way you (my reader) might see fit to leave a comment at the bottom of this page. Presentations that use original artwork or photos can also be much more compelling than those that use stock or pirated images.

That’s enough reflection for now…here’s the scrapblog I created, with much thanks to Karrie Emms who gave me permission to use her copyrighted story.

David

I’ve been doing a bit of light research into competencies of “digital natives” and stumbled across a neat little slideshow (see below) on the PEW Internet and American Life website. It’s closely relevant to the discussion we’re having in class right now about the use of publicly accessible blogs in school and the safety/risk implications thereof. For an intelligent and objective look at the hype about digital natives/millenials/net generation, see Mark Bullen‘s blog Net Gen Skeptic.

Here’s a blog post I wrote in November 2008,  in response to Downes’ article:

http://cellodav-blogtolearn.blogspot.com/2008/11/reading-to-blog-to-learn.html

In this unit on assessment tools, we were asked to create a “complete quiz or exam” in the LMS we have chosen for our project. Having finished this, I’m really not convinced that it is a tool I would use extensively in an online course for Anglican Lay Readers. Such an online course would be better served through the creation of artefacts such as written, audio- and video-recorded sermons (much the way ETEC 565 has been designed).

The assessment activity I’ve chosen to highlight here is an assignment upload activity in which students are asked to apply the knowledge they have learned from the preceding portion of their content module and the related discussion forum, compile this application of knowledge into a report and upload it for assessment.

Assignment Upload Area in Moodle

Students are also expected to post their assignment in the following discussion forum for sharing and discussion as members of a community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991). This assignment will be the first of a series of assignments on preaching, each one building on the previous: first, students describe how they would go about researching and preparing for a sermon. In the next assignment, they’ll be asked to review readings for a specific Sunday and prepare a short (5 minute) written sermon. After revision based on instructor and peer feedback, students will be asked to make an audio recording of themselves presenting the sermon, followed by a video recording of the sermon being presented in church, preferably to a real congregation.

Such an ongoing series of assignments meets all of the conditions set out by Gibbs and Simpson (2004). By distributing assessed assignments, study time does not become concentrated in the period right before a test, exam or major assignment (Conditions 1, 2). These assignments prepare students for their duties through authentic activities (Condition 3). Lay Readers’ duties are carried out in a community of peers, so frequent written and conversational feedback from both the instructor and classmates is extremely relevant to the activity (Conditions 4, 5, 6, 7, 8). By situating feedback in a discussion forum, students can’t help but receive it and act on it in preparation of the following assignment (Conditions 9, 10).

Is it the assignment tool in Moodle that meets the conditions outlined by Gibbs and Simpson (2004)? No. The tool is simply that – a tool. It is the assignment/assessment design that meets these condition. To be quite frank, an LMS isn’t even truly necessary to accomplish effective assessment. A flexible blog platform or wiki could facilitate this just as easily. What the LMS does provide is a way of recording, tracking and reporting student grades. But what represents learning? A grade or the series of artefacts? In my opinion, it is the series of artefacts showing growth in understanding and ability that is evidence of learning. A grade is no more than a temporally-dependent judgement of a student’s performance level that says nothing about his or her learning.

References

Gibbs, G. & Simpson, C. (2004) Conditions Under Which Assessment Supports Students’ Learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 1, 3-31.

Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991) Situated Learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press.

My colleague, John Koetsier, recently described setting up a quiz in Moodle as “trained monkey work”…very apt, except that the trained monkeys would probably want to pawn it off to a bunch of macaques.

Setting up my quiz in Moodle has been the most tedious task I’ve undertaken for ETEC 565 thus far, and one I don’t relish doing again (although I’ve got one to set up in WebCT CE 4.1 at work next week). It was probably a mistake on my part to start off with the embedded question (Cloze) style assessment. My first thought was that a fill-in-the blanks kind of question would be useful, but the fact that such questions require special coding in Moodle and that the related Moodle Help documentation is rather skimpy made this question very frustrating to set up.

One of our requirements was to embed an image in at least one question. My inclination was to do this in a matching-type question – provide an image and match terminology or a description. This would add variety to the quiz and take into account different learning styles, although accessibility to visually-impaired students becomes an issue. Well, first of all, I couldn’t embed the images into the question fields – I had to put them into the question description area. Alignment wasn’t working, so I set up a table and labelled things to coordinate with the question fields. Then, in preview mode, the table showed up, but without the images. As it turned out, I had to fiddle with the html created by Moodle, linking in the resources stored by Moodle. I shouldn’t have to do this. Many instructors won’t know how to fix the html and will end up complaining to the trained monkeys about outsourcing to the macaques.

Probably the biggest part of the learning curve for me was having to detail everything, anticipating how I would respond to student answers, how students might answer correctly and how they might answer incorrectly. When I’m grading a paper-based test, I’ve got all those correct/incorrect algorithms stored in my subconscious, ready to interpret and assess a student’s answer. On occasion, I’ll get a correct answer that I hadn’t anticipated – an online, automated quiz isn’t necessarily prepared for this. Fortunately, there is the opportunity in Moodle (not in WebCT CE 4.1) to review and override automated grades. In my view, though, reviewing and overriding marks is probably more work than manual grading (on paper OR online).

David

uManitoba’s LTC wiki on Personal Learning Environments lists several examples of “Production Tools”: wikis, blogs, podcasts and video/YouTube.

So, how do these contribute to a PLE for me?

Well, this is a blog I’m using for reflective practice in one of my MET courses. If it weren’t for the assignments and expectations of this course, I probably wouldn’t post as much as I am, let alone as much as some of my more reflectively-abled classmates. Also, this blog is intended to be an ePortfolio for ETEC565, which gives it added functionality within my PLE. I did start blogging earlier this year (http://cellodav-blogtolearn.blogspot.com/), but I haven’t been very good at posting regularly.

I’ve used a couple of different UBC wikis as collaborative tools during the MET program, and set about creating a Teaching and Learning wiki at Laurentian with a colleague last year. Growth has been fairly slow, but the grassroots formation of an informal “Pedagogy Research Group” on campus may provide a community that has the interest to use and expand on this resource.

I haven’t created any podcasts yet, nor have I posted any videos on YouTube. These are tools I expect to explore in ETEC565.

Thoughts…

These different tools may contribute to my PLE, but they are somewhat scattered. There are LMSs out there that incorporate blogs and wikis, but they persist only for the duration of a course or program. For a Learning Environment to be Personal, it must persist as long as I want or need it to. What I need to keep my PLE organized is some sort of flexible, customizable interface into which I can plug in or embed all the services I use so that they’re “fingertip” accessible.

Next…

I’ll look at my use of Collaboration and sharing tools.

Cheers,
David

I’m not entirely certain what to say here – I’ve used a variety of communication tools in personal, educational and professional contexts for a number of years now, both in and external to LMSs. Setting up a discussion forum in Moodle really wasn’t very hard, once I’d figured out a purpose for it. I suppose I could have set up a Moodle chat, using the built-in tool, but I decided that my course content really demanded voice and video capabilities. I’ve used Skype, MSN Messenger, Adobe Connect, Wimba Classroom, Elluminate Live!, and probably others I really don’t remember any more…

Skype is a tool that I use regularly to teach cello to an adult student who lives more than a few hours from me. Except for one recent lesson that was interrupted by a power outage in my student’s community, Skype has worked fairly well. It’s drawbacks are the slight delay that makes it impossible to play duets online, and that only two users can broadcast video simultaneously. As soon as you have more than two participants, Skype goes to voice and text only.

For multiple participants, I’ve found Elluminate Live! to be a very robust and reliable meeting platform, with good management features. However, since I’m cheap and didn’t want to shell out for more than a free service, I briefly considered using Elluminate’s V-Room service, which is fairly limited in its capabilities and number of uses. It’s really more of a teaser to get you to subscribe to a paid service. Instead, I decided to try out Dimdim, which had been recommended on a couple of different occasions by various Ed Tech colleagues. Dimdim is an Indo-European opensource project, with a scaled-down free service with unlimited usage. Yes, it’s also a teaser, but more functional than V-Room. Despite the paid-subscription plans, the software is free to download and host on your own.

I did test Dimdim out with several family members. Setting up the meeting, logging in and managing participants was a breeze. I did have some technical difficulties, but they were specifically related to the setup of my computer and not to Dimdim itself. This is definitely a service I’d use again…

David

I hope this works…I’m attempting to embed a presentation on PLEs given by Stephen Downes on 25 September 2008.

David