Tsunami

While I was browsing I came across a demonstration island for weather studies,


This was developed by the earth system research lab of the NOAA.  They have took the simulations of second life to the next level, demonstrating such things has how hurricanes occur, what happens in a tsunami etc.  This is a really good useful way of demonstrating the effects and what it would look like to be in one, though maybe second life graphics itself could be improved, the concept behind it is really good.


I suggest you take a look...http://slurl.com/secondlife/Meteora/177/161/27/

One Big Community

Think about it, we badger on about social networking for all types of things, for business to get together, for students to do collaborative learning and for us all to socialise together.

Now do we practice this ourselves, wouldnt it be great if the University itself had a social network, allowing each other to share best practice/ideas/reasearch etc. Lets say Academic A has been trying some really cool stuff that lecturer B would never probably get the chance to see or hear about. You could make postings that way and allow people to subscribe to feeds on e-learning or whatever subject you wanted to.

Now we things like intranets etc which is sort of like this, but does not provide the personality of a social network, then we could have sub groups for the sub committees, if someone has interest or a speciality that they would like to share then they could join that group as such and provide feedback that way. It could make interpersonal working more friendly etc, I have found social networking does not really work for small teams you need a pretty hefty user group to work best, providing a lot of posts. The other benefit of a large cohort is that you are just a number, this makes it a lot more easier to voice opinions etc without judgement.

That is not without problems:

Implementation

Engagement

Privacy etc

But is that not you have with social networks anyway??

e-learning Overload

Much as the same as us techie's becoming overloaded with 2.0 tools, the same thing seems to be happening with academics and e-learning tools.  We throw so many tools at academics that a lot of them dont really know where to begin or how to fit it in with their modules.

There is always going to be the next big thing, but in the sense that average joe lecturer who designs their module, they dont need constantly inundated with e-learning progaganda, recently a few collegues have came up to me and said that they simply dont have the time to look at anything.  This is due to staffing reductions and more responsibility being put on them.  There seems to be a fine balance of filtering these tools out to everyone, we should give academics a chance to breath..

The worse is when you have multiple tools that basically do the same job, yet we advertise them separetly, all this casue confusion to the user.

Anyway like a tide that will never cease the e-learning onslaught continues..

Project Management in the e-Department

I thought I would do a couple of posts to describe the processes behind some of the work we do here at the e-Department. So I will start with the Project Management software we use.

Agilefant  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Agilefant is an open source kit of software (which means its free!) developed by the Helsinki University of Technology in Finland.  The software itself is constantly updated with pathes and features which makes it one to watch. 
 
We use Agilefant to help project manage some of the projects we have running from, computer based assessments to large scale social networking pilots.  There are a number of heirachys we use in Agilefant starting with PRODUCT > PROJECT > ITERATION> BACKLOG>TODO.  We have found using Agilefant a blessing as we can keep track of where projects are and what is still to do.  Iterations are usually about a week to two weeks in length and we try to ensure that we have deliverables by the end of that iteration, this helps us define what is in scope and out of scope for the project or iteration.
 
The software allows us to get a rough overview of the work that people have on, though that could be improved. 
 
All in All a good program and defintaly recommended if your bring project management into your e-department.

TwitterFall

Well after numerous times to get interested in twitter, I finally came trumps. Twitterfall is a superb online application developed to classify and segregate the information that you require based on keywords. Students or lecturers could use this to find the most up to date information on whatever subject they wish.

For example I have listed Modern Warfare 2 as my keyword and it shows up any tweet that mentions it. This has helped to view sneak peec videos etc.

Who are we to play god?

With the advent of social networking sites, peers were able to link up relationships with others.  There was no heirarchy with regards to the relationships unless you count the people who collected others to look popular.  Now that is all and well, but what happens when a University or Company introduces these capabilities.  The lecturer if in the group now becomes the lead figure and this create heirarchy and accountability.

That gives a lot of power to the University, we now not only control and administrate the students education system, but we are now trying to control and administrate their personal information.  We can see who is more popular, who is the alpha's. Would that slip into the way academics perceive students, will the lecturer use that to their advantage?  Others might feel left out of a group if they start Uni and see that there are already groups being formed.  It is an interesting topic, and one that should be experimented with first to ensure that these details do not come to pass.

Will the uptake be as well without a heiracrhy or with?

University e-Learning Scale

Recently a colleague attended another University to have a look at what their e-learning set-up was.  It was interesting to hear what other Universities are doing.  I thought I would spend a few minutes visualising what I think the different stages are of a Universities e-learning structure.

Have a look at it and feedback any comments changes or where you think services should be placed.

Next generation web---Illuminati?

Step back in time and the world generally learnt english to communicate with each other.... well http://www.babelwith.me/ has certainly thought outside the box. Everyone thought web 3.0 would be semantic or mobile.  Babel have thrown in to the mix the ability to communicate with people in their own language.

This cool website which is in alpha, would if integrated into the web properly allow for some really powerful chat applications, for example second life and allow people to speak comfortably with each other.

Using Second life to replicate real life enivronments

The Institute of Quarrying in conjunction with the University of Derby has been working on a project called the Virtual Quarry. This project has been designed to showcase the capabilities of using a virtual environment to simulate real world scenarios and without doubt the project has shown what is possible.

With the help of SME's and second life developers we were able to sit down and work out different hazards which could come into play in a real life quarry, this ranged from fawlty traffic lights, to full on torrential rain and also included things like unsafe roads and blast sites. In reality in my own opinion I did not see the second life having chance of being able to complete this as I saw Second Life as a play area for novelty, but I must admit my eyes were opened.

From what I gather what you can do in second life mainly depends on the quality of SL developers at your disposal and your own imagination.

A step back to go forward?

Its been a long time since I have posted to a blog, mainly due to circumstances cloading my judgement and thoughts.

I thought I would kick it back of with a thought on some end user tools we are piloting. The first one I will talk about is XERTE (http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xerte/)

Now academics currently use a system called Wimba Create to create webpages etc and we are looking at other supportive tools to help with the process.

XERTE

Now xerte is something familiar to myself having worked with Authorware for years I have heard of the main developer of Xerte. It to me seems to have taken some ideas from authorware and transferred them to flash. What is bothering me is that we seem to be taking a big step back in time to enclosed learning objects. This does not take into account the functionaility and flexibility of the web (hyperlinking etc). I myself find it difficult to navigate a Xerte project and find the menu structure unworkable sometimes. I dont disagree it is a useful tool to create enclosed learning objects, I am questioning though whether taking that step back in time is worthwhile for the student. Especially losing functionaility like tag clouds etc regarding importance and a whole lot of other web related features.

The problem we had with Wimba Create was the opposite of Xerte and that is that it is very difficult for academics to create quizes/flash interactions. So personally I think neither is the solution and we will have to wait for an ideal system.

So the question is do we take that step back in time to go forward.

Using Data visualization within Education

With the high end graphics and data manipulation the internet/ computers today can handle and process a lot of data. What has been progressing over time, is an increase in the knowledge and easiness to create data sets and visualize the data in an easy to understand format. The most common of which and is dying slowly is the tag cloud.

The tag cloud is just one example, others include the advanced communication world map which was released recently. Imagine if you could create that on a small scale see, use it to see which departments communicate with others, which student access materials the most etc the list goes on. I feel that does not happen enough within the University and would help in the change that technology gives us.