I won't lecture you then.

On youtube now is an outstanding Keynote by Donald Clark at the recent Alt-C conference. It's well worth the watch. In it, Clark skewers many of the myths about the lecture, and does a fairly comprehensive debunking of it as a means of teaching.
If you are in the business of delivering long lectures, take note. Some points that struck me to take away for actual practice:
1) Keep talking to short blocks - 5-10 minutes, never beyond 15. No one is that good, not even Donald Clark.
2) Record it and make it available for review.
3) Give out all notes and materials ahead of time. Good students will review them.
4) If you must use slides/powerpoint, learn to use them properly. Simple visual, minimal text.
5) Use in class time between talking 'blocks' for group work, discussion, practical problems etc.
6) Use feedback tools like clickers of short quizzes to assess comprehension as you go along. If comprehension is good, move on. If it is poor, slow right down.
7) If there is good material on your topic in the public domain already, iTunesU, youtube.edu or wherever, use it, or refer your students to it. Optimise your teaching time and don't bother developing or delivering material that someone else can do better.

Useful Things: The Rapid eLearning Blog

For people short on time and trying to get some online learning material together, the Rapid eLearning Blog is worth looking at. It's fairly straightforward, and pitched very much at people trying to put Powerpoint based classroom material online.

Some good posts to give you a feel for the blog include this one on instructional design and how to approach turning Powerpoints / Slideware from a classroom session into an online course, and this one about learning and memory. As you can see, the blog covers both technical how-to stuff, and more pedagogical material about how best to design and lay out material.

Seasoned online learning folks will probably roll their eyes. Where is the web 2.0 connectivist peer to peer learning and so on? This blog isn't for them. It's for people trying to get some fairly straightforward stuff done, using tools they are already familiar with. It's not going to bamboozle you with gee whizz. It's the kind of blog I'd like to produce, but don't have time, and since they've done an excellent job of it, I don't have to.

The Rapid eLearning blog is corporate, produced by Articulate, who make a bunch of eLearning tools. That said, the blog doesn't require or hard sell those tools, which is nice.

Waking up

Good Morning.
I'll be blogging again here, from time to time, again focusing on quick tips and links of value to people who don't have time to sit up at the cutting edge of online learning. When I started this blog, I was aiming that mainly at University staff, specifically in University College Cork, where I was on contact at the time.
Twins came, and full time employment had to go. Now they are 18 months old, and my eldest has started school, so I have a little time to consult again. I'll be focusing mainly on the online learning space, probably more aimed at the private sector, training companies and so on, rather than Universities, simply because that's where the economics are just now.
Even though the audience might be the slightly different, many of the issues are the same. How can you get stuff up online in a big hurry, when you don't have the time or budget to do a big job on it? That's the kind of stuff I'll continue to cover online here.
If you already read the big blogs on online learning (Like OLDaily, for example) this little blog probably isn't for you, you'll know it already. I'll be keeping a really practical focus here, filtering out whatever I run across or create that I think is worthwhile.

Gone to sleep

This blog, as you might gather, is currently inactive. It was created as part of my thinking around a role I held in UCC, but I'm now a full time stay at home Dad, so I don't expect to be posting here again for some time. I am, however, Blogging fairly actively on the future of Tertiary Education over at http://tertiary21.blogspot.com/
Do pop over and check it out.

10,000 hours doing what?

Malcolm Gladwell makes a good case for the 10,000 hour rule in his recent book, Outliers. The idea is that people who are truly great at something always spend at least 10,000 hours practice on it. While Gladwell is widely criticised by his supposed intellectual betters, largely for selling more books than them, the 10,000 hour rule idea certainlt seems sound.

So what did I spend 10,000 hours doing?

Primary and Secondary School. 15,000 hours. I learned to keep my head down, avoid bullying, and get acceptible grades in predictable tests on boring topics with a minimum of effort.

University 5,000 hours. Unlearning the above.

Workplace: 12,000 hours. Office politics. Processing information into useful knowledge and communicating it to people who seemed interested at the time.

So what have you broken the 10,000 hour barrier on?

The University of the Future

"My daughter is 3 years old. In October 2023, she will probably go to University. What will that university look like? Where will it be? Will it be anywhere?"

I've started another blog, looking at issues around the future of Tertiary education. It's an issue I keep running into, and thinking about, but it is firmly out of scope for this blog, and I like to keep my promises in terms of blog content and scope. Due to my correct work focus, you can expect it to be much more active than this blog for the next while, as Ihave time to flesh out some of my thought on the topic, while I'm not currently directly involved in staff support work. If you have an interest in how Universities and Tertiary sector might look as we go through the next century, do take a look, it's at: http://tertiary21.blogspot.com/

Dr. Steve Wheeler at UCC.

Last week we had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Steve Wheeler from University of Plymouth at UCC for a lunchtime seminar. Steve presented "It's Personal: Learning Spaces,Learning Webs" which he was later to present online to the Personal Learning Environments and Personal Learning Networks Online Symposium http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/blogs/ples/

It was a happy accident that we were able to host Steve, via his Blog we noted he was in Cork on other business, and with a couple of quick eMails everything was arranged - the efficiencies of the online world made manifest.

You can access an audio of the session here:http://www.ucc.ie/academic/ionadbairre/SteveWheeler.mp3 (15mb, 1hr)

And view the slides on Slideshare via Steve's blog here:http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/2009/10/its-personal-learning-spaces-learning.html

Find the pain point

If you want to use technology in teaching, great, but first understand why you want to use it. Find a pain point, a teaching problem the technology will help you solve, and you are much more likely to see the process through. If you are using technology just to 'be modern' in your teaching, forget it.

A couple of years ago I did some research about usage of the Blackboard VLE in UCC. Academics I spoke to had differing views of their level of usage:

"I hardly use it at all, I only put up my powerpoints and handouts"

to

"I use it very extensively, I put up all my powerpoints and all my handouts."

For all practical purposes, regardless of their perceptions, they were all in the same boat. They put their materials on the VLE, because they had large classes. Copying and carrying 500 handouts for a lecture was torture. The VLE took it away. They used it for that, and stopped right there. They had solved their pain point, and nothing else bothered them enough to get worked up about finding a tool to solve it. But it was that issue, not quality, or access issues, that motivated most staff to use the VLE.

To successfully adapt a new technology tool, it has to solve a problem with an amount of effort that seems proportionate. Find your problem first, and then try to find the tool to solve it. The latest web 2.0 buzz topic might not be it.

So what's your problem? What takes you the most time and effort for the least learning benefit to your students? That's your pain point, and a good place to start.

The Overlooked Educators

Ionad Bairre recently ran a Teaching and Learning session for Technical Officers here in UCC. Technical officers are the folks who make the labs not blow up, demonstrate equipment, design and set up practicals and generally flit around making sure the lecturers grand vision for the course actually runs in the practical labs.

Professional Development strategies in teaching and learning often focus on the Lecturers and course leaders, and forget about everyone else. Often, it is the 'everyone else' Technical officers, postgraduate teaching assistants and so on, who front the bulk of the most effective teaching time in practically focused courses. If you are finding the lecturers a hard sell for technology assisted learning, try these people. Not surprisingly, they are very technically minded, capable, and pragmatic - all a great help for using Technology Assisted Learning tools.

The other overlooked group are the administrators. Often lecturers use their VLE's in name only. They toss an eMail or a memory stick in the direction of a departmental administrator or assistant with a general direction to 'put that up on blackboard'. Again, if you want to improve how your VLE is used, there is another overlooked community to try and reach.

Powerpoint in the Army: Dumb Dumb Bullets

There's an interesting essay in the Armed Forces Journal (which, no doubt, you all read. I only spotted it via Boing Boing) about the negative influence of Powerpoint in decision making. The premise is that the shift away from briefing papers to Powerpoint presentations changes how decision are made for the worse. Much of the points the author argues are as relevant for teaching as decision making. I'd get a coffee and read it, if I was you.

One of the points made was how instead of a short paper being circulated before a meeting where a decision was to be made, much time was spent in the meeting going through the powerpoint slides. Thus people did not review the material in advance, or in the level of depth, or have time to reflect on it before the meeting where the decision was made. Instead of having, say, 20 minutes to discuss an issue and make a decision, there was a 15 minute powerpoint, then 5 minutes to discuss and decide.

And in lectures, we spend 55 minutes in Powerpoint, and zero time in discussion and reflection...
Are the lessons applicable? Could we expect students to review a couple of pages of material before a 'lecture'? Can we expect them then to participate in a discussion of the material, instead of simply listening and writing it all down? Probably not, but should we expect more of them? If we, as teachers, up our game, will they, as students, do the same?

Blended Learning: The H1N1 incentive.

An interesting juxtaposition of events today. I ran the first of what promises to be a long series of workshops on the theme of "Yes, but how do I teach with that?" this one looking at teaching with Audio. As I left, my wife (A GP) rang me and asked me to get some Tamiflu on the way home. Sudden onset flu, outside of normal flu season, with very (very) small kids in the house? We're taking no chances.
My brother points out that, even if the pandemic amounts to no more than a bad flu season, anyone in the next 12 months who has so much as a sniffle will be staying off campus until it clears up. Given the level of coughs and sniffles in a typical Irish winter, we'll be facing massive absenteeism in lectures, and shedloads of medical certificates come exam time. One way around this is to make heavy use of online learning to help those who stay off campus to fill in the gaps. Whether it's just coursecasting of lecture recordings, or full up blended learning, there is a strong incentive here to move our VLE usage past uploading the Powerpoints if we want to get through this academic year without more chaos than usual. Otherwise, we'll have a very busy autumn repeat season in 2010.

Power corrupts, and Powerpoint corrupts absolutely

Edward Tufte, originated the quote in the title in his 2003 Wired article , is one of many critics of Powerpoint. His famous essay 'The cognitive style of Powerpoint: pitching out corrupts in" elaborates the criticism better than I could. In the essay, he shows that Powerpoint may truly be a 'killer app', as he describes how a cryptic Powerpoint slide hid the severity of the problem which would lead to the loss of the Space Shuttle Colombia, and seven lives.

And yet, here we are. Powerpoint is probably the most widely used teaching software on earth, (despite ranking only 10th in Jane Hartes top 100 list). Who will rid us of this terrible tool!

Powerpoint's great virtue was that it gave poor speakers a frame to prepare. It established an expectation that there would be slides. Thus, folks would would previously have muttered through a 20 minute presentation in an hour or so have to actually prepare and think through their material in advance. The linear prison of Powerpoint forces a linear narrative upon them. For some lecturers I know, this was nothing short of revolutionary. But the virtue of revolution depends on your point of view. This very structure sucks the greatness from the heart of many great, or even above average speakers, as the Gettysburg Address Powerpoint slides (a must see, if you haven't) demonstrate with wit.

If you do use Powerpoint for teaching, please try and use it better, or less. Presentation Zen is the best resource for in this area I have come across so far-there is a book also, alas not in our Universities otherwise excellent library. Neither is Slide:ology, another good text in a simlar vein.

Another useful resource on presentation style is the TED talks. Note the near total non use of Powerpoint. It's worth watching some of their top 10 talks, for style alone, if not content. Widely circulated on the web are their speaker tips, The TED Commandments.

Finding reusable images on Google

Google have added to their image search, allowing you to now search images filtered by licence.

So what?

Just the other day, I was looking for an image of Bloom's taxonomy for a slide. Google image search found me hundreds, but no clue as to whether I was allowed to reuse the images. Today, I can just go to the advanced search filter the results for 'labelled for reuse' and I'm done, now I have an image I know I can freely use. It's a small thing, but it isn't much trouble and means I'm not faced with a choice of stealing someone's graphic, or putting in the hard yards to redraw it.

Incidentally, those of you in UCC can find our own image catalog, of nice stock footage of the campus here:http://upic.ucc.ie/

The Art of Public Speaking

Scott Berkun posted an interesting review of the literature on public speaking, part of his research for his upcoming book. I note public speaking a central aspect of lecturing technique, rather than being technology, so I'm slightly off piste here, but his blog posting on the topic is worth a look.

Two books seem to come out of top in his view:

"What's the use of Lectures" by Donald Bligh. (for UCC readers, we have it, 378.1 Blig, up on Q+2)

"Public Speaking for Success" by Dale Carnegie - the original of the species. Not in our library, it seems, but you can download it for free as an eBook from Project Gutenberg.

Worthwhile poolside reading.

Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning

If you follow any Education blogs other than this one, you'll have heard of the report recently released by the US Department of Education, on the evidence around online learning (I assume, in this blog, that you don't spend spend all day reading eLearning blogs and thus may have missed it).

It is a thorough report, and well worth a review if you are interested in the field. The take home points, to me, from the executive summary are:

"On average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction."

"Blended conditions often included additional learning time and instructional elements not received by students in control conditions. This finding suggests that the positive effects associated with blended learning should not be attributed to the media, per se."

So, blended learning is better, but it might be because better lecturers who tend to do it, and making good blended learning requires more effort and thought to go into the course development than simply turning up in Boole 4 and talking for an hour a week.

Regardless of whether blended learning is better because of the medium, or the message, that finding is good enough for me. Blended learning will lift your game. Terms starts in three months, you have enough time. Give me a call if you need a hand.

You can view the full text of the report here:

http://www.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/finalreport.pdf

Formative Assessment: Why should students care?

Formative assessment is, in a nutshell, assessment that helps to guide your learning in the future, rather than measuring what you learned in the past. It guides students on where they might need to focus their study and teachers on where they might need to review or cover topics in more details. Online, machine gradable assessment tools have big practical advantages in this area. The instant grade means instant feedback to students - not two weeks later when the module is nearing it's end. An online, machine gradable approach means formative assessment can be 'small and often', without crushing the lecturer under a paper mountain.

One of the two great challenges of online formative assessment is how to actually get the students to do it if it does not contribute directly to a final grade. Assessment drives behaviour. Students will do almost anything (bar study!) to get grades. The rational utilitarian human, beloved of economists, fills our campus, if not our lecture halls. A cunningly devised 1000 question MCQ bank might be a great tool for them to assess their level of knowledge, but if there is no grade attached to it, and they know the final exam is two essay questions, it'll never see a click. They may agree with their lecturers that the formative assessment will help them learn, and be of great benefit, but they won't do it.

Medical Students, of course, are seldom far from their MCQ practice books, always testing their knowledge against practice questions - self directed formative assessment. This is because so much of their assessment appears to rest on questions of this type (if not here in UCC, beyond it). The practice questions are a valid simulation of the real assessment event - they have authenticity to the students. That doesn't mean you need to turn your final exam into an MCQ fest. Questiosn about the content of an audio file might be great prep for an oral exam in languages. Questions about an image could be useful prep for a practical exam in mineralogy or pathology.

Another approach is to get them to do the formative tests in class. This is tricky for an online assessment, as they may not have easy web access in class. If you revert to paper, you are back to marking again (unless you take the time in class to do a peer marking exercise).

Feedback is also important. If the students know that you will take note of the results to guide your teaching - revising topics where students scored poorly, they are more likely to pay attention to the assessments as worthwhile expenditure of their precious time.

Bear in mind is that machine gradable questions are not all MCQs - 'Who want's to be a millionairre' style fact recall tests. Blackboard alone supports 14 different question types. With creativity and thought, they can be genuine tests of high level reasoning an critical thinking. I'm currently collating an example set of such 'smart questions' for a workshop on the topic (contributions welcome!).

There is also no reason you can't mix in non-machine gradable questions in your online assessment. Most systems will support questions with free text responses, and even two or three in the mix could lift the test to a higher level. For example, in the humanities, you might ask some MCQ style questions about whether a given historical text (or audio of a speech) is incomplete, biased or unbalanced in one direction or other to test a readers critical reading skills. Then have a short free text question where they elaborate on why they imagine the bias exists. It will slow down the assessment, but not as much as running full pen and ink test.

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!