The Centrality of Outcomes

On Monday, I attended a workshop given by Prof. Harry Hubble (more details here) on Curriculum Development. Harry is well respected in the International Teaching and Learning community, and had a great deal of value to give, substantially more than could be delivered in a two hour workshop. The workshop was captured, and will be available on the NAIRTL website on video in due course.

What I picked up from the workshop was the centrality of having clearly and well defined learning outcomes before setting out to design your curriculum. If you don't have clear definition and agreement on what your course/programme/institution is trying to achieve, good luck with getting any coherent output.

One of the in-class exercises Harry set was to come up with learning outcomes at an Institutional level. What are the Universal Learning Outcomes one of our graduates (regardless of discipline) should achieve?

People came up with lots of good ones, to my mind, they all fitted into a framework of three pillars:

The Craft of Learning

They must have learned how to learn. They are capable of self directed learning. They are committed to lifelong learning and continious development. This is vital in a world where the half life of technical knowledge is increasingly short.

The Application of Reason

They must be able to do high order critical thinking, to Reason, to see past the headline. They must have the information literacy to assess the quality of evidence, the capacity to develop a reasoned course of action based on that, and an understanding of the scientific method (in the broad sense) so they can adapt their strategies in light of what works.

The Skills of the Discipline

They must an acceptible competance in the skills of their discipline. Calculate a dosage, conduct an interview, design a doorway - they actually have to be able to do what the degree says they can do.

I had it all wrapped up in this neat framework until somebody mentioned Ethics, which didn't even occur to me. I'm a child of the 80's. We don't do Ethics.

Nevertheless, the framework was useful to me in understanding what a University should do, and how important the first two pillars are. Universities claim to operate above the level of Technical Colleges and vocationally focused tertiary education. If we don't deliver on those first two pillars, we are kidding ourselves.

Note:

This is slightly off-topic for the blog, but framing good outcomes at course level is going to be central, and should drive the how, which and whether of your usage of Technology Assisted Learning.

I will add the link to the Video on the NAIRTL website once it becomes available.

Audio Recording Tips

Over at The Rapid E-Learning Blog there is an excellent post with some tips on how to get good quality audio. It's really well worth a read. Many of the points, like recording 10 seconds of ambient noise, are really useful - I'm sorry to say I learned them the hard way.

Just about the only things I would add to that post are:

1: Script, but don't get too hung up on it. Reading a word for word script sounds wooden, unless you are a good actor. Working from bullit points, as you would in a lecture, is fine.

2: Always always always start the recording by stating the date, and what the recording is. We're used to text documents where we can easily open and skim the document to see what it is about. You can't really skim an audio file, and there are few more annoying things than having a large audio file, say, of a lecture, and not really remembering which one it is. This is particularly a problem when working with other people's audio, when you may not be familiar with the material.

Fast Podcasting

In the last post, I linked to Bud Hunts Podcast "Why Technology". It's worth revisiting, not only because of what he says, but of how he says it, and where.

"..coming to you from the off ramp, near my home.." says Bud. He has recorded it while driving home, on a mobile, non specialised recorder (probably an iPhone or similar). There is road noise. There are pauses. It is technically imperfect, overlong, sure. We can pick holes in it, if we like. Let's not.

What it really has going for it though, is that it exists, which beats the socks off most of the great podcast ideas in my head, and yours.

He isn't hung on on quality. There is no jingle at the start, he hasn't done a noise removal. There is no fancy recorder or expensive microphone. The segment is thought through, but not scripted. Things could be done to improve it, but the key thing is that it's good enough to communicate the message effectively.

He hasn't gotten stuck into technicalities of podcasting distribution. The link on the web is just a regular link to a html file, no different from how you would link to a word document or a powerpoint file. Forget about RSS, iTunes, streaming servers, and all the paraphanalia of formal podcasts. He just put the audio file up there, where you can get it, play it, download it, hear it.

Quality, in the end, is not an absolute thing. Quality is fitness for purpose. Don't let technical factors be an excuse for you in creating material. Just get the minimum you need and do it. That's a computer, a microphone, and someplace on the web or Blackboard to put the files. Don't let time be an excuse - Bud recorded his file on the drive home. Buy a cheap clip on mike and it's hand free. There is no legitimate excuse here.

We are, in the end, what we create and produce. The greatness in our minds (such as it is) is of no use to anyone unless we can get it out there. Tools like this quick podcast are a fast means of doing that, and capturing valuable content for your students. You have all summer long to capture some for next term. Get to it!

Twitter: Yes, but, how can you teach with that?

Twitter is the top teaching tool of 2009, according to Jane Hart's "Top 100 eLearning tools of 2009" list, available in draft on her website. Powerpoint languishes at number 9. The list is drawn from a poll of learning technologists, and is classic example of what Bud Hunt, and others, call Bright Shiny Object Syndrome - a passion for the newest, shiniest tool as a panacea for all ills.

[If, like many people, you have only just heard of Twitter and don't have a sense of what it does, I'll again direct you to Commoncraft - Twitter in Plain English]

In terms of technology adoption, I'm unrepentantly in the early majority. I like to see others prove the technology and find a usage model that works, before leaping in to try it or advocate it myself. Twitter, for teaching, isn't at that stage yet. I haven't seen a usage model for Twitter as a teaching tool that is compelling and makes use of what Twitter can do, over an above the effect that any new trick or tool might have to perk up a classes interest for a while.

There are compelling uses for Twitter beyond the purely social. I use it as a straight information dissemination channel (@ionadbairre) for events at work and others, for example @GrahamAttwell use it well as tool to spread their ideas, a personal marketing tool in effect (and nothing wrong with that). There is an interesting application for it as a sort of topic themed chat facility. For example, people tweeting from the recent EdTech conference tagged their tweets with a #EdTech09 keyword, so by searching on that you could get a sense of the buzz of activity about the conference. There is real value there. Some people use this dynamically in a presentation as a discussion or conference backchannel.

In teaching a compelling usage mode has not yet emerged, and I have my doubts if it will. There are some good efforts out there on the web. David Parry, of University of Texas, has a nice video of his usage of Twitter to connect to his students in the Chronicle of Higher Education. He makes the case for using it as a tool to keep engaged with his students, rather than a teaching tool in a strict sense. French Today, a language learning website, makes use of it as forum for discussion of vocabulary. This presentation by Tom Barrett "Twenty Five interesting ways to use Twitter in the classroom" summarises some other approaches, as does Steve Wheeler of the University of Plymouth on his blog. Steve has some great links to other resources on teaching with Twitter. Some of them have potential, such as the 'Lingua Tweeta' approach for languages.

Another place Twitter might come into play in in contexts where phones are abundant but computers and broadband are scarce. I suspect the compelling usage models of Twitter in teaching won't come from a JISC funded study, but from a school in Nairobi, or Lagos, where mobile phone penetration is going to be orders of higher than networks PCs for some time. Through it's SMS linkages, Twitter could allow them to do things we might do with a heavier tool like our Virtual Learning Environment or eMail systems.

One other barrier to consider for adoption of Twitter in a core teaching activity is you need to get everyone in class using it. David Parry notes that only half his students use it. Shifting everyone on to Twitter to carry out any kind of core teaching exercise is going to be difficult. You would need a really compelling reason to try. My advice on Twitter is, sure, check it out if you have the time by all means, but I don't think it is ready for your classroom yet.

Prove me wrong!