Nothing particularly interesting

The other week I blogged about the myth that Moodle looks rubbish compared to for-profit VLE systems .  Along a similar vein, I have begun to wonder just how many people using Moodle realise the power they have right at the end of their typing digits?

It was interesting, but not entirely surprising to read Phil Hill's blog on e-Literate suggesting a dramatic slow-down in the take-up of Moodle in HE Institutions.  Not surprising because there seems to be a myth about Moodle that has always flickered in dark corners and is fanned into flame by for-profit LMS providers at the nearest opportunity. This myth is that Moodle looks rubbish. Other LMS providers set up a course content page filled with as many html5 gadgets as they can imagine, and compare it to the most basic topic-format Moodle page.  "There we are!" they declare, "Look how rubbish Moodle looks compared to our system!  And in the modern world where students are using tablets and mobile phones more and more, isn't it important that your University LMS looks smart and contemporary?" And so Universities look at these other LMS systems and think: 'Ooo, it has this, or it has that!  Our Moodle doesn't have them!'  Which in turn ...

  I have been using online marking for a couple of years now, using Turnitin's 'Grademark' system. This system seems to be increasingly ubiquitous, and although it has certainly helped to reduce the marking time it has taken quite a long time to get the hang of it. Changing the way in which you mark can be rather traumatic.  Years of marking years that most teachers / lecturers will have a tried-and-tested system, and one of the first mistakes is in thinking that marking online involves having to develop an entirely new system, or dumping the ways in which you have worked in the past.  Of course one of the second mistakes is to then abandon those tried and trusted systems entirely, and think that they are no longer relevant. As with any instance where computers become the tool for certain established tasks, we need to remember that the computer is just that - a tool.  It is not a system.  The trick is in getting this tool to reproduce (often more effecti...

Since I had a very good response to my previous post about creating dynamic reading lists in a VLE course page, I thought it might be worth following up with another little thing which I have just been working on: Image-mapped menus.  An image map, in case you don't know, is a picture in which there are certain areas which act as 'hotspots', and can take you to different links.  It can be a rather neat way of just making your own course stand out a little, and of making it perhaps even a little more fun to use for students who may well be getting bored of standardised and often rather dull templates. There are some specialist tools, which do this job very well - but they are not always the easiest to work out.  More recently, I have starting using a free online resource called image-maps.com - which frankly makes the whole thing as simple as it can get.

This, then is my experiment with reading lists this semester.  It has been driven in part by the extent to which referencing management tool Zotero has become so deeply embedded in my own way of working, and in part by the tentative initial evidence which suggests that the quality of referencing and consistency of criticality in students work can tangibly benefit by using it. To begin with, I have created a group in Zotero called Newham University Centre.  I could, of course, create a separate group for each module I am teaching, but since this is a first-time experiment it seemed simpler to try a generic approach to begin with: This group will now appear in my folder structure online, in my standalone version, or in my browser extension.  From here, I can now drag accross my folders with reading lists - or create my reading lists directly into the group library folders: To manage the group members, I need to go to the Zotero website.  Clicking on the 'G...

When I was starting out in education, I really longed for an exciting range of technological solutions that could engage students from a distance, and encourage online interaction - or what we now refer to as MOOCs. It never seemed to come though, and as the years went by I found myself becoming disillusioned, and later disappointed. My faith in MOOCs as an educational solution wilted. I had believed that online courses could provide a level social playing field for students in a way that no other educational forum could - but when eventually the technology did start to be readily available, it didn’t seem to achieve what it promised. No matter what I did, I could not seem to get students to engage with it. They seemed fixed, rigidly, in a distrust of educational technology, and unwilling to take that leap of faith into the world of discussion forums and online chats. As the years went by, I began to understand why. These students were able to achieve everything tha...

I have a couple of crackers here.  In case you did not know, a word cloud is... well, it is a cloud of words.  I know, it sounds a bit silly, but it can actually be rather nice. more importantly though, word clouds are usually organised in such a way that the size of an individual word reflects the frequency with which that word is used.  For example, the following word cloud uses the text of the American Declaration of Independence: The word 'people' is the largest, as it occurs 10 times in the text.  'Free' (bottom middle) is a lot smaller, as it only appears 4 times in the text.  There are two kinds of word could which you can create.  The first - and the most straightforward - is a cloud of words in which the words themselves are randomly put together in order to create a pattern.  One of the best resources for creating these is Wordle. Wordle Wordle is a really simply little website, which offers a neat range of options from th...

 The second of my recommendations for doing cool things for free online.   Image Maps What is it? An image map takes any kind of image and divides it up into different areas, and creates a separate hyperlink for each of those areas.  For example, I used to run a course on using computers for small-scale surveys, and in order to try and add some interest to the Moodle course page I created the following image map - a basic picture of iPhone app icons, each of which had been mapped to course content area.  The effect is that by clicking on an icon you are taken to the content related to that topic: In the past I used Photoshop for this, but to be honest it was rather like using a sledghammer to crack a walnut - especially when this free online Image Map Tool does the same thing so easily and without the need for a hefty financial investment in software.  To use the site, simply upload your image and use the drag tool to select different areas...

I have a tendency to bore people silly with rather over-excited rants about new websites and online tools.  It is not an attractive trait, but occasionally I find someone just as geeky as me who is foolish enough to want to know more, and for you geeks I thought I would compile a list of some of my favourites.  Here is the first of them. Spell with Flickr   What is it? One of my favourite all-time albums is Bruce Cockburn's Breakfast in New Orleans, Dinner in Timbuktu . Among the many things I love about this album is the cover: A beautiful collage of letters with different images and colours.  Of course, I tried to replicate it - but the many hours I spent wrestling with masks in Photoshop did not seem worth it.  Especially when I discovered this unprepossessing little online tool.  Simply type some words into the box, and the site will extract letters from various Flickr photos and generate your     ...

There are so many books and websites now all clamouring to offer advise on how to study more effectively.  The 'top dog' of study skills guides is Stella Cottrell's The Study Skills Handbook , which is a fantastically comprehensive compendium beautifully laid out and packed with resources, questionnaires and exercises which are genuinely helpful (and not just padding). Of course one of the problems with any books on study skills is that print is a fairly static genre.  This does not make anything in a print text like Cottrell's irrelevant, but the reality is that most students (in fact, most of us anywhere) do most of their work now online: They read online, they research online, they write online, submit their work online and eventually check out their grades online before organising a post-submission party. Online. I have already written about the potential value of using smartphones for study , but actually there is a piece of kit which we use far more intensivel...