Join our Forest of Technology: Promote and Enhance Literacy with Tech!.

CC BY -  flickr photo by kevin dooleyHaving just read @Bali_Maha 's reflective post on the 'Year of Hyperconnecting' I am now in a  reflecting mood myself - it has that positive infectious kind of vibe to it so if you're tired and just looking forward to the Christmas break, head over and smile.As most bloggers do these days, I quite like to post an end of year reflection on all things and this shall be no different. It's actually been nice to go back to my reflective post from last year.It's been a great year for me personally and professionally. I achieved some of the things I'd set out to do in last year's post but not everything happened, such as any involvement with the MOOCs at Liverpool, but that's ok.In January we finally booking our wedding. In Vegas. In February Mrs R got pregnant (I hate it when people say 'we' got pregnant. My body and hormones didn't change at all FYI). In August we got married. In November, just 3 weeks ago today, Max was born and is an absolute gem. Immediately I can sense my perspectives and values are changing.In the midst of my hectic and exciting personal life, I worked to get a couple of modules online, one of which is now complete and went great, as well as working on some staff development sessions (an area I think lacks a perfect solution). I presented at my old haunt #solstice2014 in the summer. I was invited to keynote the eAssessment Scotland conference in September (a couple of days after returning from Vegas) and also presented at #ALTC in the same week. Building relationships at these events were definitely the highlights. I've officially began my PhD (Social networking in Meded) and have plans for focus groups to continue my work on hygiene factors for VLE minimum standards. I also sit on lots of working groups as a Faculty TEL rep, as well as the University Senate (yes, check me out!). This all helped in my promotion at Liverpool which has just been confirmed. Woop.I've been busy all year collaborating with @suebecks, @chrissinerantzi and @drdjwalker on initiatives like #byod4l and #lthechat as well as with @hopkinsdavid on the #edtechbook. I'm a new Deputy Editor for the ALT Newsletter and have/am publishing some research in RiLT, etc. These have all been great opportunities to build lasting relationships with colleague from across the globe. As I've blogged previously, there is real value in social networking and it has certainly helped me in my day-to-day roles and career progression to date. Along with the people I've mentioned above, there are also too many people to mention, like @hallymk1, @sheilamacneil, @dkernohan, @ambrouk, @s_j_lancaster, @bali_maha, @boyledsweetie, @mark_power to name but a few.At Liverpool, VLE minimum standards, EMA, and Lecture Capture have been a key focus as part of the TEL strategy and will continue to be a large focus next year. I'm also wondering how I might have a more direct impact on the student experience. I'm thinking more social media sessions, app swap breakfasts (which I wanted to do this year) and so on.I am interested in how the MOOC landscape might evolve over the next year, and @dkernohan has made some interesting insights in his recent '9 things to watch out for in 2015' post. It would certainly be interesting if, as he predicts, a major MOOC platform will close or move away from their current model. I wonder how this might impact on the many Universities engaging in MOOCs currently? I also wonder to what extent VCs and senior management see MOOCs 'as TEL' and TEL 'as MOOCs'. If their understanding of TEL is limited to just MOOCs, and then MOOCs fail, what will that mean for local investment and support for real TEL initiatives? I think this hangs precariously through 2015. For students though, I continue to believe they are interested in tech implementations that are not really innovative. They want support and convenience consistently across their studies and they have an expectation that technology can/will play a part here. I think we are still some way off real innovation across the board (which feels strange as I'm supposed to be all positive about this type of stuff).Anyway enough for now. Enjoy Christmas y'all.Peter@ReedyreedlesThe Reed Diaries by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License

        View image | gettyimages.com       How do we organize our Curriculum Frameworks to help students build their knowledge and become creative problem solvers in the 21st Century, and will it be any different in 2015 than it was in 2014, or 1984? How we answer this question will ultimately […]

The 8th, and final chat this year, was guest-led by Dr Alison James on the topic of Engaging the Imagination.I think the numbers have dipped as we approach Christmas - our very own @chrissinerantzi at one point thought she might not make it due to the festive activities. Needlesstosay she did and the discussion was still very vibrant around a topic that I admit was a little out of my normal train of thought.The questions for the tweet chat were as followsWho or what fires your teaching imagination? #LTHEchatHow do you nurture student imagining? #LTHEchatAre there good examples of imaginative pedagogies? #LTHEchatHow do you counter things which kill the imagination? #LTHEchatWhat risks come with imagining? #LTHEchatHow can we get better at imagining? #LTHEchatA storify of the tweet chat is available at this link and you can access an interactive version of the network diagrams via this link.What seems apparent in comparison to previous weeks, is that although the numbers of tweets/nodes are fewer this week, there is more of an even distribution of engagement across the community. Typically we see a few big hitters, and lots of very small hitters, and some in between. I think this week is a little more balanced with a good number of incoming and outgoing edges between nodes. As such the betweenness centrality isn't as great for nodes like @chrissinerantzi, @alisonrjames and @annakwood.Peter@ReedyreedlesThe Reed Diaries by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 19,000 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 7 sold-out performances for that many […]

  It takes a lot of gumption to believe that we have the ability to make the future what we want. It takes even more nerve to set out to strive to prepare students for how to deal with it - and in innovative ways nonetheless. I think it starts with the recognition of how […]

CC BY Flickr photo by Scott McLeodAfter 2 weeks leave at Christmas coupled with 2 weeks paternity leave shortly before that, I now need to get back into the swing of things. And what better way than a quick blog post...I've been doing some thinking over the break and I feel that although Learning Technologists (and the variations of the role) are often future gazing and innovative, much of the stuff I've been looking at is actually relatively basic in comparison - things like VLE Baseline / Minimum Standards, Online Submission and Lecture Capture. Now I'm not demeaning these at all as they're very valid implementations in edtech (and perhaps more so considering the student as customer), but not particularly exciting from a technological perspective.So my resolution for the new year is to be a bit more adventurous. Obviously this can be really tough in Universities, but there are opportunities to get some exciting projects off the ground, whether that be things like Augmented Reality or rolling out our exciting Kritikos project into other subjects. I'm also keen to get some other things off the ground too - 10 Days of Twitter (10DoT), Bring Your Own Device for Learning (BYOD4L) and an App Swap Breakfast (for staff and students) are three in particular (and all stuff I wanted to do previously). Staff Development is often a difficult thing to really make an impact with on a large scale, so I wonder if these could be useful - I'm often disillusioned when only getting a small number of attendees so this could be interesting.Of course large scale implementations of the big three I mentioned earlier will continue to be a huge deal for us at Liverpool, as it will be for many institutions, and I like our approach because I'm interested in how we roll out learning technology broadly across the institution as well as specific tools in small scale areas.So what things are looking to do in 2015 and what things will dominate the edtech area?Peter@ReedyreedlesThe Reed Diaries by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License

So yet more tweetchats are taking place this week - this time for the #BYOD4L get-together. Of course at these times I typically capture the chats using @mhawksey's TAGS Tool.The #BYOD4L has run a pre-'course' chat on Sunday, followed by chats on Monday and Tuesday evenings. Although they'll also be further chats throughout the week, this post is just capturing what's happened thus far. So here goes...This first image shows the overall activity related to the #BYOD4LChat hashtag (between Sun evening pre chat through to Wednesday morning). There's not much we can make from this first image due to the sheer volume of activity (almost 2300 tweets). We can see a large tight knitted ball where most of the activity has taken place, with lots of outliers that haven't really engaged much with the rest of the community. Tweets using #BYOD4LChat hashtag from Sun evening through Wednesday morningIn an attempt to make some sense of what's happened in each of the chats, I'll now break this down to just include specific tweetchats.Sunday Pre-ChatThe Sunday tweetchat was a pre-'course' activity which seen over 300 tweets. As you can see from the image below, @whitneykilgore played a significant role in the chat - demonstrating the greatest Betweenness Centrality (inc incoming and outgoing tweets). Essentially she was most influential in the chat. Having said that, the whole group was reasonably active - typically people (nodes) who are not quite so active would be displayed small and on the outskirts. Take @jbj for example. It's clear this user had an incoming tweet from @whitneykilgore but didn't actually send any tweets.  Monday Chat #1 - ConnectingMonday's tweetchat saw over 600 tweets amongst the community. Again there's a tight ball of activity and a number of outlying nodes.The volume of tweets makes it difficult to make sense of what's actually happening in the chat so the following is a more magnified view of that tight ball in the middle. It's clear that the @BYOD4L account and @chrissinerantzi had a high betweenness centrality, but that's not surprising considering their role in the 'course' and tweetchats. Beyond those two, there is a lot of incoming and outgoing edges (tweets) by quite a lot of people - the visualisation identifies 67 nodes (or people) active. In chats like this it's difficult to visualise the differences between a community and a network - A Network is everyone we're connected to, whereas Communities represent everyone that is tweeting about #BYOD4L. As such it's difficult to visualise the concept of Strength of Weak Ties (SWT) - this refers to those nodes who bridge multiple communities and networks. Those nodes have increased social capital - "whom a person is connected to, and how these contacts are connected to each other, enable people to access resources that ultimately lead them to such things as better jobs and faster promotions' (Borgiatte et al, 2009, p898). What we can see though, is a number of people crossing the whole community.Tuesday Chat #2 - CommunicatingTuesday's tweetchat seen over 700 tweets amongst the community. This magnified view again demonstrates the more active nodes and gives an idea on activity.On the whole the #BYOD4L chats (and hashtag in general) has generated a lot of buzz on Twitter and engaged lots of different users. of course there are a core group that have played active roles in previous iterations of #BYOD4L and #LTHEChat tweetchats, but there are also lots of other contributors engaging in rich dialogue within the community. Hopefully they can glean value from their participation in the chats, as I've discussed previously. I've also previously blogged on networks and communities if you're interested.Peter@ReedyreedlesThe Reed Diaries by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License

Isn’t it really just learning by another name? Guest post by Peter Skillen: I would like to thank Deborah for inviting me to write this guest post about knowledge building. With the frequency that we hear the term these days, it is timely to have some conversation about its origins and intricacies. We hear a […]

          Of late, I am very keen on considering the questions and language that we use when implementing and designing the curriculum. Questioning the curriculum itself, in addition to being aware of our questions that we put forth for our students to learn with, is important. View image | gettyimages.com When […]