See my story: Collaborative Inquiry #toldwithvoice #ontCL #ossemooc #npdl http://t.co/NropGOARS9 — Deborah McCallum (@Bigideasinedu) September 12, 2014 Deborah McCallum

CC BY-NC-SA flickr photo by giulia.forsythe I know every now and again there’s a discussion about why we include the ‘e’ in eLearning. Or maybe even eAssessment. Surely after all this time it can be taken for granted that technology plays a part in our daily workflows and subsequently has a role in assessment and feedback?I’ve been giving some thought to the ‘e’ in Feedback lately and wondered, does it even matter? What role does technology - the ‘e’ - have upon the student experience of receiving (good) feedback? What proportion of students are really all that bothered about the feedback in the first place? Some literature suggests up to 20% of students don’t collect their feedback. Other literature suggests students only access feedback if their mark differed from what they expected. I’m also pretty sure I read something about students not returning to ‘old’ feedback e.g. last year’s work. [I'll try to dig out these links/papers again].For those students that are concerned with feedback, what actually constitutes ‘good’ feedback? I think ‘good’ feedback has to boil down to scaffolding students to achieve the set learning outcomes e.g. improving performance and perhaps feed into future assessments. Literature might tell us there can be a trade off between quality and timeliness of feedback. For example brief but timely feedback might be of more value than more detailed feedback provided 4 weeks down the line. So there’s a balance to be had here. Time Vs Detail.So where does the ‘e’ fit in here? Beyond the obvious benefits of reduced paper and travel, does it matter?To muddy the water further, I wonder what students evaluate as being good. Is it the same as what we think, pedagogically, is good? I’ve seen some work that suggests students liked receiving audio feedback as it was something they could return to easily or that it was more personal and had more of a human touch to it. However, my own work showed that less than half of students in my survey (n=860) were interested in receiving audio feedback - is that because they may never have experienced it? Other work has suggested formative audio feedback did not improve student performance in summative work (in comparison with written feedback sample). So I think questioning the impact of the 'e' here is valid so that we can really introduce systems, processes and procedures that are fit-for-purpose.I think ultimately, students would accept good/useful paper based feedback over poor eFeedback. But moreover, I wonder if we might reach a point where what we think is good from a pedagogical perspective doesn’t align with how students evaluate it/us in the NSS. What will happen then? Do we change our practice so students really are customers or consumers or do we stick to our pedagogic argument? With the invasion of silicon valley into the education landscapes, this could be an area to watch. Peter@ReedyreedlesThe Reed Diaries by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License

In part I of this series, we talked about the preparation of existing content as you move toward conversion into online delivery. As we discussed, we first perform analysis to identify the updates and changes to the content since its last revision. Then we spend time trimming off any excess information that’s not needed for our objective. In part II, we’ll look at the last two questions that I used to guide me through the process of moving content to the new format:          How do I organize the content?          How to I put it all together?

We are in an era of urgent need for digital and media literacy skills. Our students cannot, not should not wait anymore. As a result, pedagogical changes must be made now in order to facilitate the process of students acquiring the necessary skills, while still increasing their achievement. The power of digital media is already […]

#125145242 / gettyimages.com The following is a basic Thinglink that represents the different levels of reading difficulties and basic strategies for scaffolding instruction:   //www.thinglink.com/card/552293768997371904 Common Reading Difficulties and corresponding strategies. Related articles Metacognition, Common Reading Difficulties & Edtech ThingLink Now Lets You Annotate Videos, Too Tagged: Big Ideas in Education, education, Google, IPad, Literacy, […]

Sheila MacNeil's recent post 'Living with the VLE Dictator' really got me thinking and questioning the role of the VLE and the different narratives bounding around HE at the moment. From her post, I came across D'Arcy Norman's post: 'On the false binary of LMS Vs. open', and via a twitter discussion between Sheila and Martin Weller, to this post by Jim Groom and Brian Lamb on Reclaiming Innovation.For quite some time it's felt like everyone is against the VLE. The cool thing to do is to rip it apart and be 'disruptive' (a term in itself which I hate). Remember 'the VLE is Dead' debate? These go beyond Blackboard Vs Moodle Vs Whatever. Often the debate is about the actual presence of any restrictive, centralised, corporate, closed, VLE. But I have many issues with these debates and as Sheila points out, getting rid of the VLE would cause mayhem.The reality of higher education today is that some mechanism is needed to support learning, teaching and assessment (and its administration, etc). We have the VLE. Yes we know VLEs are not the most innovative products in the tech industry, but do they really need to be? My work in surveying students to attend to VLE Minimum Standards / Baseline suggests what they're asking for is relatively basic stuff - access to information (contact details, etc), notes/slides or even recordings of lectures, and to be able to submit their work online. So just because students practically live in Facebook, it doesn't mean we have to be there. And just because they'll create groups and discuss work there it doesn't mean we should control it. Or even replicate it.Now I don't mean to pick apart Jim and Brian's post here as I respect both of them massively, but there are just too many points that I disagree with - so what I have to say here is less about me disagreeing with them in particular, but more with these popular debates that have been circling for a while.The notion that the closed VLE encourages silos is hugely false. Yes I'm an advocate of openness as well but the culture within HEIs is not all that open. Yes there are certain places doing good stuff and some wonderful people doing amazing work, but by and large the 4 HEIs I've worked at over the past 10 years balk at the idea of putting their content 'out there' (and even more so at level 7 where content == CPD income). I've worked on funded OER projects but beyond the scope of the project and its funding period, rolling that innovation out wider is unbelievably difficult. So no, the VLE doesn't encourage silos, it is the modularisation of education which is inherently silo based, and thus is reflected in the system which serves and supports it. A drastic change to the structure, administration and teaching of higher education will be followed by a more reflective/reflecting system.Something else I disagree with is the view of doing everything possible to 'minimise reliance on an enterprise VLE'. This is awful advice, not least because generally, the institutional support is there to ensure the system is available and working. Those free and open services you might come to rely on could start to charge (as we've seen many times) or even worse, close shop all together. That would also be relying on academic staff to be skilled enough to find and use an open site to publish on, and then confident enough to be able to migrate content to a new platform when shit hits the fan.On a related point, I kind of recognise that VLEs don't encourage wider digital literacies or web skills, they only develop skills that are useful to that setting and irrelevant when the student leaves. Well, to some degree this is true, but navigating a 'clunky' VLE is not a million miles away from navigation a clunky web, and the practice of communicating in a VLE forum is not a million miles away from interacting on some other platform. So there is some transferability there, but that situation wouldn't be any different if we used Wordpress or anything else out there - we'd be conditioning people to a particular system. Furthermore, D'Arcy highlights his 'Law of eLearning Tool Convergence' which is relevant, in that: "Any eLearning tool, no matter how openly designed, will eventually become indistinguishable from a Learning Management System once a threshold of supported use-cases has been reached". I believe this is true. The very nature of education and its accountability and quality processes demand control. Going off piste just wouldn't work!The reality of 'disruption' in education is not what many commentators suggest. Yes MOOCs have got the attention of the media and of many VCs, etc, but to think that they will completely transform education is a huge falsity. What was the last thing to truly disrupt education - and I mean to disrupt it so much that it fundamentally changes learning, teaching and assessment? The web as a whole, yes. An individual system, not so much.I think many commentators have to be either utopian or dystopian about technology in HE. Considering those at either end of a continuum, you'll find 'Reality' somewhere in the middle. Technological advances will seldom have a truly disruptive effect on higher education because it is not a tech industry. It's a people industry. And as such, the success of any technology will ultimately depend on a) how it's implemented and b) how it's received by the people that use it (students and staff). That's not to say technology doesn't or won't have an impact, but we're talking about higher education here. Things take waaayyy toooooo long to change!Peter@ReedyreedlesThe Reed Diaries by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License

http://new.livestream.com/accounts/5816473/events/3433004/player?width=560&height=315&autoPlay=true&mute=false

CC BY-SA flickr photo by quinn.anyaSo as of the 1st October, I'll officially be a part-time PhD student. I'm registered within the University of Liverpool and supervised by Helen O'Sullivan (internal) and Chris Jones (external) from Liverpool John Moores University.I'll be studying the use of social media within medical education, and in particular looking at how student use of various social media tools and practices. Or at least I think that's what I'm going to be looking at - I've been open in that this is an area I'm interested in (SoMe) and have reasonably good access within our School of Medicine. I've engaged in some literature early on and hope that a systematic review will help narrow down exactly what it is I am asking.I'm sure this will be a challenge, especially given mini-me will be arriving in November, and I'm really looking forward to learning more about research and being a researcher. I've done bits of research over the years and published a few times, but I'm aware there so much for me to learn. I'm also conscious that I will have to curb the varied topics I'm really interested in.So here goes....So as well as the other stuff a blog here, there'll be some #PhDProgress posts as well :-)Peter@ReedyreedlesThe Reed Diaries by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License

First Nations, Metis & Inuit cultures are built upon oral traditions. From time immemorial, Talking Circles have been essential to maintaining and passing down important information of a culture. This strategy is also a great tool that can be used to create a metaphorical ‘bridge’ between teachings of the First Nations, Metis, Inuit, & Western […]

As I've blogged previously, last year I done a reasonably large 3 phased piece of work to audit existing practice within my Faculty at the University of Liverpool, as well as survey academic staff and students. Well I'm happy to say the staff survey part is now published in the latest volume of Research in Learning Technology.The staff survey didn't exactly receive a huge amount of responses but I think it's of interest because of the topics it covers. I hope people find it useful anyway.Further to earlier work carried out by the student union (SU) along with strategic discussions regarding technology-enhanced learning (TEL), this research aimed to identify the attitudes and experience of teaching staff in relation to specific uses of technology in learning and teaching. Data obtained through an online questionnaire (n=100) suggest that teaching staff are generally agreeable to the need for consistency in the virtual learning environment and identify specific criteria to be included within ‘minimum standards’; have some experience and interest in solutions to enable online submission, marking and feedback; and whilst there is more resistance, there was still interest in the provision of recorded lectures. Respondents overwhelmingly identified lack of time as a significant barrier to engaging with TEL, as well as other factors such as lack of skills and support. Reed, P (2014) Staff experience and attitudes towards Technology Enhanced Learning initiatives in one Faculty of Health & Life Sciences. Research in Learning Technology. 2014, Vol 22.Peter@ReedyreedlesThe Reed Diaries by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License

Education. It’s not Rocket Science…. Right? You just follow the expectations set out by the curriculum, follow along the prescribed chapters from the textbook, read the standardized books, and make sure that all students meet all expectations. Right? Why would we do anything else? Why do we have so much difficulty understanding the Inquiry Process, […]

As some people will already know, the Bring Your Own Device for Learning initiative was a great success. One of the key highlights was the flurry of activity around the synchronous tweet chats that took place on each of the five evenings.Reflecting on the 'non-course', Sue and Chrissi suggested we could try to introduce a more general regular tweet chat outwith #BYOD4L. So after months of deliberation and back bench heckling, we can now introduce #LTHEChat - a weekly tweet chat that will cover a whole host of topics related to learning and teaching in higher education, and participants will be able to vote for topics that we could cover in future weeks.DetailsTwitter Hashtag: #LTHEChatTwitter account: @LTHEChatWhen: Wednesday evenings, from 8-9pmLaunch: Wednesday 29th October, 8pmWebsite: http://lthechat.comFacilitators: Sue Beckingham, Chrissi Nerantzi, David Walker, and me, Reedyreedles.So we hope you all get involved and look forward to tweeting soon :-) If you have any suggestions for topics to discuss in the earlier sessions, feel free to tweet one or all of us!Peter@ReedyreedlesThe Reed Diaries by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License

What do we want students to learn, and how will we know when learning has happened? These are 2 amazing questions posed to me once by a Principal whom I greatly admire. I now take these questions with me into each and every lesson that I do. Today I have related them to a conversation […]

Over the years, I’ve been asked to design and develop blended content several times. As I think about these projects, I’d say that there was only one common thread in the requests from the customers: the desire for content that could be consumed both through instructor-led training (ILT) and through an eGuide that the learner could use independently. However, beyond the request for these two delivery modalities, the door was left wide open in terms of what the end product should look like. In this post, I’ll discuss two models that I found to be incredibly successful and effective for handling such requests.

I came across an interesting paper this morning - Instructional Design Quality of MOOCs in the journal 'Computers & Education'. The abstract reads:"We present an analysis of instructional design quality of 76 randomly selected Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The quality of MOOCs was determined from first principles of instruction, using a course survey instrument. Two types of MOOCs (xMOOCs and cMOOCs) were analysed and their instructional design quality was assessed and compared. We found that the majority of MOOCs scored poorly on most instructional design principles. However, most MOOCs scored highly on organisation and presentation of course material. The results indicate that although most MOOCs are well-packaged, their instructional design quality is low. We outline implications for practice and ideas for future research."So, MOOCs aren't great from an instructional design perspective. Tick.MOOCs are well organised and presented. Tick.It was an interesting read. My first impression went something like this - let's say what we think is good practice, and then see if these MOOCs live up to what we say is good practice, even though we know what the answer is a big fat No!But as I read on I think I was being harsh as there is more rigour to study, but it still leaves me with a few questions.Firstly, how would traditional face-to-face undergraduate courses fare in this experiment in comparison with MOOCs? There is a whole lot of chalk and talk still taking place in HE - the analogue counterpart to many MOOCs, and I wonder if they would be less organised. Granted it would be difficult to sample...Secondly, whilst the instrument used looks reasonably comprehensive (albeit rather subjective) it's not clear if the researchers went through every single topic in each of these MOOCs.Finally, although the authors tip their hat towards such research, it would have been nice to see some comparison between MOOC platforms e.g. Futurelearn vs Coursera, etc. That is of course, if some of the points in the instrument are even related to the platform or if it's solely course design.Regardless of my questions, it's still an interesting read. Head over to the journal to read for yourself (sorry if it's behind a paywall)...Peter@ReedyreedlesThe Reed Diaries by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License

I recently attended and had the privilege of presenting at the YRDSB edtechcamp conference where Holly Clark and Tanya Avrith were the AMAZING keynotes. Motivating speakers whose presentations served to engage us and motivate us to take our instructional practice to the next levels. Tanya did a superb job of sharing an informative and engaging […]

Evaluations, surveys, or feedback (whatever you want to label it) has always been important to me as a corporate trainer and now as an instructional designer. My goal in any area of my life has always been to keep learning. One way I can make sure I’m on the right track is to ask for feedback or an evaluation on what I’ve presented. However, the typical evaluation has some drawbacks. If I personally ask the consumers to provide feedback and mention (in passing) that I’d really appreciate all 5’s on the form, am I getting the results to help me learn? If I ask customers to fill out the form before they leave the training and they just circle "Excellent" on all the questions, how do I improve for the future?

Don't read any further than this paragraph. Just take 10 seconds to sit back and visualise a learning technologist. Think of them in work. Are they at a desk? Do they have lots of kit around them? Is their office like a store cupboard brimming with cables, old desktops computers and printers. Keyboards and mice? Ok you can read on now...I've just finished an asynchronous written interview with @hopkinsdavid related to the chapter I'm writing in the upcoming #EdtechBook. I suggested to him that the interviews would be great in a video format, and began to visualise the scenes with each of the authors. I quickly thought that each of us would be sat with varying pieces of technology surrounding us - computers, laptops tablets and smartphones. Maybe even having some code on a screen. In fact, David sent through the latest book cover the other day, and as well as those obvious things, there are some printed books (remember them?), a coffee mug, a video camera (more kit), a satchel, a kit kat and a twix (ok, they're just for +Sheila MacNeill).But then I sat back and thought about this. My chapter discusses the variety of people that hold learning technologist positions and the things they do on a day-to-day basis. Do they fit this mould? Is that a representative picture of all of the learning techs I've worked with?I think the answer is a resounding no! Learning technology is primarily about learning. The technology comes second. We're always quick to put pedagogy first and technology second, so why do visualisations of learning technologists emphasise the technology so much? By these views, we could be programmers or web developers. In fact, some LTs may even do these roles. But all of them? Is it representative?I think this isn't just questioning the visualisation of learning technologists in general, but I also wonder if this might harm the role through such a techno-determinist portrayal, or at least put a dent in the message we often try to portray to academic staff....Would love to hear your thoughts on this one...Peter@ReedyreedlesThe Reed Diaries by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License

Let’s look a little closer at each level. Organizational scorecard What’s the most effective talent management strategy for improving organizational performance? You use a roll-up of both the macro and micro scorecards to understand your company’s business model and define what constitutes value. Through the scorecard, you’ll discover where and how this value is created, and connect business processes and talent management interdependencies. Functional scorecard Use the functional (macro) scorecard to track activity and efficiency. For this type of scorecard, it’s important that you identify the audience before you design the scorecard. You need to consider all uses for the data that you receive and the requirements for the source data. Then, pilot test your scorecard with a sample audience before releasing it for broader implementation. Micro scorecard The micro scorecard will be a one- to two-page table of activity metrics and should list business objectives. This is where you can really see the impact in a granular way. You should evaluate on each the following levels: Satisfaction Learning Application Business impact Return on investment (ROI) For this type of scorecard, you need to make sure that you plan for evaluation before and during the design of the scorecard. You want to keep it simple and conservative while accounting for the influence of other factors. Most importantly, you should involve staff and management in the process of planning and executing data collection. This is where you can gather very specific information about how each person in your organization aligns with the business objectives.

Originally posted on HBR Blog Network - Harvard Business Review:Reid Hoffman, co-founder and executive chair of LinkedIn and investor in Facebook, Zynga, and Groupon, sees networks. "It’s not like The Sixth Sense," he told the crowd at TED on Wednesday. "I don’t see dead people. But I do see networks." This lens has given…

So you may have heard by now, but that +David Hopkins (@hopkinsdavid) has had another brainwave of putting together a new book covering a range of aspects of educational technology. I'm very pleased to be writing a chapter for the book, which also includes chapters from other people like the wonderful +Sheila MacNeill (@sheilamacneill), David Walker (@drdjwalker) and Sue Beckingham (@suebecks).My chapter in particular is one of those that can set the scene - given the various roles in the different HEIs I've held, I'll be discussing the variety of roles we see within the 'Learning Technologist' job title - perhaps becoming something of an umbrella term for #edtech roles. I'll also be discussing the variety of institutional approaches to technology enhanced learning support - what works best? Central provision or devolved school/faculty responsibilities? You get the drift.Anyway, I've recently finished a really enjoyable interview with David about the chapter that he's published on his blog. He's asked some very interesting questions that got me thinking a lot. He asked how I use different tools to support my role and my tips for other people new to such tools. I think the interview got more interesting as he probed into deeper depths, teasing out how we might get colleagues engaged in wider open networking, the implications of (not) doing so, and considering the work-life (or working 9-5) balance. In response to a question about technology taking over our lives, I responded:"Over the past few years I’ve come to believe that a career is a significant part of your life. A career isn’t ‘just a job’ so you don’t (or can’t) leave everything at the office - not "can’t" because of any requirement, but "can’t" because you’re always engaged. You read books, see programmes and speak to people, and relate all these things to your role. It’s something you care about beyond just a pay packet each month. You might get an idea that would work in implementing a strategy or a cool idea for a staff development programme. These happen at all hours of the day, on every day of the week!" Anyway, I'd encourage you to head over to David's blog to read the full interview. The interview itself led me to think more about what a 'typical' learning technologist looks like, so why not read that post too :-)Peter@ReedyreedlesThe Reed Diaries by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License

A long-time Microsoft editor recently posted the following link to the company’s main distribution list for editors: Science Says You Can Split Infinitives and Use the Passive Voice http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/10/inquiring-minds-steven-pinker-style-bogus-grammar-rules What initially caught my eye was the Steven Pinker reference in the URL. Pinker, a one-time Noam Chomsky acolyte, is well-regarded across a wide range of language-studies schools of thought, and I’ve had a generally positive impression of him. So, that headline gave me pause—could Pinker really be taking issue with Richard Lanham’s advocacy of the active voice as a way of cutting through the gibberish of The Official Style, the self-serving spin of the government or corporate bureaucrat? (Example: "Mistakes were made.")

I feel very privileged to be a part of the movement to join Michael Fullan and others in the Global initiative to radically rethink education. This project is called New Pedagogies for Deep Learning. It is not just a new journey, but more like an expedition or exploration of new worlds. We are reminded that […]

"As a language changes from beneath our feet, we feel the sands shifting and always think that it’s a deterioration," explains Pinker. But Lanham might reply that language, just like other cultural and political institutions, doesn’t just shift and evolve naturally like the wind and tide patterns. Rather, language is a field of battle and contention, and the underdog who aims to speak truth to power needs to analyze how the language of the entrenched and powerful works to hide the role of those vested interests in manipulating information into very particular, self-serving narratives.  Lanham’s critique is a corrective against the blinkered, uncritical adoption of the passive-voice statements that mark The Official Style. But because his message hit such a nerve and became so popular (especially among college writing instructors), we’ve supposedly seen the active voice turn into a new sort of dogma. And true enough, it’s sometimes pushed ignorantly and without careful attention to context and circumstance. Pinker fastens on this in promoting the cliché that it’s the grammarians who are the real elitists, and that their "bogus rules … serve as a tactic for one-upmanship." And although he eventually exhibits a degree of nuance about the issue, the article title goes out of its way to cite the push against the passive voice as a classic example of this unscientific, elitist rule-mongering.