Category: Reflection

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Reflection

Is this a PLEasing activity?

This will be a very brief post…with follow-up to come. I’m looking at definitions of Personal Learning Environment (PLE) and wondering what kind of PLE I’m creating as I work through the MET program. The Learning Technology Centre wiki at UManitoba (http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/wiki/Ple) notes eight elements of a PLE:

  • Production Tools
  • Collaboration and Sharing Tools
  • Communication
  • Storage Tools
  • Aggregating Content
  • Aggregating People
  • Aggregating Software

and

  • Identity Management

In one or two subsequent posts, I will examing whether and how I may have created a PLE and to what extent I have covered all eight elements. I’ll also give a brief overview of some of the PLE software that’s availiable or currently in development.

The following embedded content is the LTC wiki from uManitoba (cited above).

Categories
Reflection

Synchronous Discussions?

In the group work for our assignment on choosing an online delivery platform, we decided to “meet” online. The idea was to set up a live video chat session so we could get to know each other a bit better and to plan out our strategy for completing the assignment – very noble ideas! However, our experience followed a trajectory that shows up quite frequently with this sort of enterprise: Novelty – Disappointment – Resort to the Lowest Common Denominator…

Novelty: I’d heard some positive reports about Adobe’s free online meeting app (Connect) and suggested that we give it a try. Setting up the meeting was easy and three of us were online, chatting and sharing video within minutes. We spent a good ten minutes or so discussing the app and trying out different features – and wondering where our fourth member was… It turns out Connect (at least the free version) can only handle up to three participants in a meeting. This is too bad, since having simultaneous video from more than two participants is an improvement on Skype’s service.

Frustration: Since Connect was out of the question, we considered Skype, and briefly had three of us chatting with live audio (no video, of course). Unfortunately, this kept our fourth member on the sidelines without a Skype install. We tried using our WebCT Vista Chat room, but it managed to freeze and crash all of our computers (several different systems, browsers)- not a useful result at all.

Lowest Common Denominator: Since we were editing our document collaboratively using Google Docs, we decided to use Gmail Chat – a similar tool to MSN Messenger or Yahoo Messenger. Gmail Chat does have video and audio possibility, but we decided not to risk wasting even more time and stuck with the text chat, which worked quite beautifully. An added bonus was that Gmail archived our conversation automatically.

The upshot is that we spent about 90 minutes in what had been scheduled as a 60 minute discussion, spending more than half the time trying to iron out the technical glitches. I imagine that users (students, teachers) who are less technologically-inclined than the average MET student are likely to get completely turned off by such technical frustrations. If we want to make good use of synchronous tools to bridge our physical distances, we need tools that are reliable and work for all users when needed. Out of 60 minutes for an online meeting, I would like to expect to spend no more than 2 minutes dealing with technical issues. Our time is too precious to waste.

Have you encountered similar issues?

What apps would you suggest, and why?

What kind of dis/advantage might there be by using a commercial provider?

Categories
Reflection

fiddling in moodle

Well, I’ve just finished following the introductory moodle activity as outlined in the moodle toolkit wiki page. I’m accustomed to setting up pages and discussion forums in WebCT CE, which is fairly quick and simple. Setting up the discussion forum in moodle did take more work than I’m used to, but I think that’s partly because of what I’m used to and also because of the number of setting options available in moodle. (Flipping back and forth between the moodle course and the wiki to ensure I followed the instructions to the letter was also time consuming and likely more labour intensive than it would be to create a forum on my own.)

The one feature that was new to me, so far, was the grading option in the forum. This option does open up some possibilities for assessment, but I would want to really think about how and why I would grade individual posts, and whether all, some or even any posts ought to be graded in this way. Why isn’t there a checkbox option for students and faculty to indicate that they have read a posting? This could be a useful measuring tool too.

I also have some trepidation about the layout of the discussion forum, but I won’t really be able to judge its effectiveness until there are more postings to read. Things seem to be okay for two postings, but will moodle afford a good organization of several thousand messages?

I find it interesting too, that moodle automatically set up my course shell for a 10-week organization. Such defaults might restrict less adventurous (digitally) faculty who are trying to create online courses.

Cheers,
David

Categories
Reflection

Past the First Post

This is my first time blogging for a course. I’m curious to see how this all turns out, especially since I’m encouraging my own online students to use blogs for reflection on how they listen to music.

In following other blogs, I’ve learned that good blogging is done purposefully, and not to fill space. Except for the posting of course assignments, I’ll try to blog in response to the readings we do (writing to read better) and to reflect on the learning process.

Another principle of good blogging is brevity – shorter blogs get read more often (Downes, 2009). [I’ll try to find a link to this point tomorrow. Okay – couldn’t find this reference…]

On that note,
Thanks for reading and please come back soon.

David

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