Gripes with the way social networking is done

Havnt posted for a while but thought I would just keep this blog up to date.

Why is it all social networks are standard to deliver to everyone.  Why not as the initiator of a conversation you could bring people in when you needed to.  So you type something all your friends can see it and some people comment on it, could those comments not be hidden until you 'open' them up and bring them into a conversation?

Fixing the financial system

With the advent of technologies and GPS.  It should be possible to track the flow of money through the world.  Especially digital transactions.  Without identifying people we could see how much money is swallowed up and where.  You could see where investment was needed or track how much money goes out of the country from foreign workers.

The downsides of OER

Having recently tried to use some OER in anger, we download a QuestionMark questionset from a well known repository.  On installing the qpack, we noticed that there where questions with graphics missing.  There was a name and an e-mail next to the releaser, so I thought may as well drop them a line to see if they had the graphics handy.  The releaser it seems was not the releaser of the materials but the author of the questionset. So someone else had released the materials without giving it a proper review.  The releaser was very helpful though in getting the images to us, but as they mentioned they are under extreme pressure in the normal work instances.

A lot of people might not be aware of the extra workload and communication involved in OER and really should.  Someone might get in touch and expect an answer, others might be after more information about a specific subject.  Quality control is something that needs to be rigourus especially when releasing materials out into the wild and people need to be aware of the possible extra time after publication.

Creating a Plug n Play framework for OER in HE institutions

As part of the Oxford ripple project we are looking into a kit of software called OERCA.  This kit of software basically makes the copyright clearance process for #OER much easier.  What could be done to further improve the process would be to have an end point where the clearance could say safe for exposure, from where the software automatically uploads it into JORUM or Xpert or some other repository.

In that case an institution could install this software and they almost have a full working process from start to finish.

Teaching students real world skills

Was approached today by an academic who wanted to incorporate version control in their engineering course.  Now VC is something which is used in the 'real world' and is an industry standard practice.  This also includes project management methodology, so why not start introducing them to project management tools!

The academic wishes to create groups and wants the groups work to be locked down to that group. But also have a place for them to discuss the project.

So some of the things we will have to look into is

• Who will support the technology (IT,e-learning)?
• What tech would be best suited?
• How can we link into what we are doing into other similar modules

This is a showcase of some of the places we as education have to go, by replicating real world scenarios and infrastructures.

Some of the ideas is using elgg/sharepoint as the communication platform, subversion as the version control and microsoft project/Trac as the pm.

Gaming in E-learning

Gaming/Movies has already been proved to be very influential in the way we learn.  For example think about after you have played need for speed, when driving have you thought, Im just going to try to slip stream that lorry or take the inner lane on a corner.

It intrinsically builds into you the desire to replicate the game into real life.  Same as real life replicates into the game, you see UFC and you want to control Brock Lesner in UFC Undisputed and you want to elbow smash into Frank Mir.  All these things are exiting, which is at the core of learning, if you have motivation and excited about something you will want to learn.  If its dreary you wont take much in. 

One of the most important aspect of gaming is levelling, you want to test yourself against certain situations that allow you to progress.  If you are on a linear module designed to cater for all skill levels you will either fail to learn enough important stuff or if you are on the higher end feel less stimualted to learn and so pass along the module course like its a breeze and it doesnt challenge.  The role of the teacher in that sense is to try to gauge the level of the course based on  their own academic and peer experiences, this is hard when most academics in the field are not teachers first they are content experts.

In order to build these quality gaming simulations takes time, money and experience.  All of which poses a major risk especially in this economic climate.  It is still something which I would like to triall and if the chance ever came about would like to partake some research on.

Timelines

First post in a while, been busy learning OER stuff and just getting to grips with my new post.

Well this post is going to be about time!

Time is generic, if there was no time , there would be no then??

Well anyways, one of the concepts that we have identified is that it would be useful for almost every course if there was a generic timeline tool created.  Even better if this tool could have overlays, sort of like you used to get with the transparent slides.

So one of the projects we have commisioned is to come up up with a generic tool that would have a database backend that would feed into a site with checkboxes, sort of like autotrader.