It’s the #LAK15 conference this week and as I can’t be there in person I’ve been following the twitter stream to try and keep half an eye on what is going on.  This tweet from Brian Kelly led me to an this post and paper from Bodong Chen on some work he has called Twitter archeology. Bodon and his colleagues have mined the " Twitter archives from the past LAK conferences to uncover insights about the community." Reading Twitter Archeology of the Learning Analytics Community, summary of a #LAK15 paper by @bodong_c: http://t.co/oBN2auz6Zm — Brian Kelly (@briankelly) March 16, 2015 Now I’m confess I am a complete sucker for a bit of SNA.  I do believe that twitter is an invaluable tool for promoting engagement and fostering and maintaining a sense of community particularly around conferences. Both in the post and the paper, Bodong highlights how their analysis has highlighted the transient nature of the LAK conference twitter community. Very few "tweeters" seem to have engaged in all of the conferences. In the paper I am one of 18 tweeters who seem to have managed to get through all the data processing and have been active in the past four conferences. Unsurprisingly I tweeted most when I was actually at the conferences in person.  I haven’t left the community but due to changes in my job and the fact that the conference has been held in the States for the past 2 years has meant that I can’t justify the expense of going to the conference. The #hashtag allows me (and many others) to still connect with the community. At the moment my involvement is decreasing and I am looking to others in own twitter community who I know are at LAK this year to keep me informed of what is happening. I will of course still be using the hashtag now and then. Sad that I’m not at #lak15 but if I tweet enough it will seem like I am #messingupyourdata — Sheila MacNeill (@sheilmcn) March 16, 2015 Again, in both the paper and the blog post Bodeng and colleagues highlight the limitations of their analysis, and state that they if they did future work they would like to "connect tweets and academic publications, to further construct a more integrated picture of the learning analytics community".  I think that would be great. Speaking personally, twitter is kind of my shorthand or note taking from a conference. I tend to write more considered posts after the event.  These posts have also been part of my wider community building efforts (particularly when I was working for Cetis). However as well as all this data analysis, why not speak to the people involved too? I know reading the paper and blog post has made me reflect on my engagement in the LAK community.  I know this would take time and if LAK were a commercial company, had money to spend, this is exactly what this kind of analysis would allow them to do to help improve their "product" (community). Community is fundamentally about people. As the paper beautifully illustrates, data analysis can give some insights into topics and trends. But I hope that any community is more than the sum of its data. @14prinsp Am I more than my data - (having not reported all the steps I have walked)? #laceproject #ep4la — Tore Hoel (@tore) March 16, 2015 If learning analytics is to become an everyday "thang" for those of us in mainstream education then we need some hear some real stories and voices from the people in the community and not just algorithms and swirly, twirly diagrams.

I was introduced to Trello last year by my colleague Jim Emery. For those of you unfamiliar with it,  Trello is a "free, flexible, and visual way to manage your projects and organize anything." Like many people I seem to have an aversion to most project management tools, but I have to say I took to Trello like a proverbial duck to water. We used it last year when we were developing our open course GCU Games On. In that instance we really used it more for task management,  having a board with three categories - to do, doing and done. But it can be used for so much more than that.  Doug Belshaw has a created a little video where he illustrates a workflow between Trello, gmail and github.  It’s strength really is it’s flexibility and the fact that it works cross platform and on any device. It also embeds into our VLE which is kinda handy too. Earlier this year we recommended it to another of our colleagues, Anne Russell. Anne is a Senior Lecturer on our staff CPD programme. As part of a redesign and re-approval of the programme Anne was looking for a  tool to help her plan, and give an visual overview of her new module structure.  What she has come up with using Trello is, imho, pretty fab.  She has exploited features such as the colour coded labels in a really effective way to breakdown the activities, interactions and resources in each timed block of study. The screen shot below provides an illustration (click on the picture to see a larger version). We are also currently providing support for staff developing fully online programmes. We’ve been using a variety of learning design methodologies (see here and here). Today we ran a session for some colleagues in our school of Health and Life Sciences where we moved from paper based design to actual course and activity structure.  All of the participants today had already developed an outline paper storyboard. At the start of the session we showed Anne’s trello board. Immediately I could see lightbulbs going on. Within 5 minutes they were all totally absorbed and creating their own boards, sharing them with others not at the workshop and generally "having the most fun I’ve had all year". I’ve never really thought of Trello as a learning design tool, but I am now.  It has an almost natural flow with the Carpe Diem and Hybrid Learning Model storyboard/cards approach. The Trello board can be shared and adapted by course teams,  and the overall structure can then be used as they structure for a prototype (or actual) course design. Collaboration, deadlines, tasks etc can easily be built in too. I wish we’d had a tool like this back in the heady days of the Jisc Curriculum Design programme when there were a number of card/paper based design tools developed but a common challenge was what to do next with the paper prototype. We are encouraging our staff to use Coursesites as a prototype area, primarily as our VLE is Blackboard and so it is a very familiar environment for them to work in. However we are also encouraging our staff to think about open, online courses, and Coursesites is a stepping stone in allowing people to make their designs more open and think about run them or bits of them as open courses.  The Coursesites option also allows for far easier peer review as the staff have complete control over who can access their sites. We seem to have a really nice workflow now from paper storyboard to online, sharable, more detailed structure/activities/resources (via Trello) to prototype (Coursesites) to final delivery via our VLE GCULearn.  Over the coming months as this develops I’ll share how it is actually working, but as usual I’d love to hear any thoughts you might have in the comments. Tagged: #GCUblend, #learningdesign, #trello

For various reasons outwith my control,  yesterday wasn’t a particularly good day for me. However there were a few rays of sunshine in my inbox when I got notification of the full set of badges from the recent iteration of #BYOD4L. It always surprises me how good getting a badge makes me feel. I’m still not quite sure what to do with them. My Mozilla back pack isn’t part of my CV,  but I have shared the facilitator one into LinkedIn via the social sharing mechanisms in Credly (the badge issuer system used by #BYOD4L). I was slightly disappointed the badge graphic didn’t appear.  On the plus side, it is something else to add to LinkedIn. TBH I’m not quite sure what to do with that either, but do feel I need to have a presence there. . . Anyway hope lots of other #BYOD4L-ers are getting their badges too and equal feelings of happiness.choice for #BYOD4L) -  was slightly disappointed the graphic didn’t appear. Tagged: byod4l

(Image: reflections on the River Clyde from my flickr collection) I have just finished writing a reflective portfolio as part of our Accelerate CPD framework for accreditation as Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. The experience has,  as they say, been quite a ride. Having the opportunity to take this portfolio based approach is, imho, really useful. Particularly for someone like me who has been around for quite a bit, doing lots of "stuff,  hasn’t had much conventional learning and teaching experience.  In fact until I started at GCU I had never even considered applying for recognition by the HEA.  As I wasn’t actually teaching or a "proper academic" I just presumed I wouldn’t be able to. Luckily for me, our framework has a number of routes to recognition including RPiL. The structure of the portfolio route here involves working with a dedicated mentor to help develop two case studies and a reflective summary mapped to the UKPSF.  My mentor was my GCU LEAD colleague Sam Ellis.  Sam’s support and guidance throughout has been fantastic. From explaining the stages involved and the dreaded framework mapping, to teasing out areas suitable for case studies, to just keeping me on track he has been a constant source of calm and reassurance. Structured self reflection is, I think, one of those painful you know it is good for you but your always too busy doing other things to do it kind of things.  Perhaps because I was aware that starting  a new part of my career I really needed to validate what I had already done.  So for  me the RPiL route was actually very welcome, though daunting.  I have been involved in so many programmes, projects and standards malarkey it was difficult to think what I could possibly turn into two coherent, relevant case studies.  However I did manage to. Over the past 8 moths or so I have been doing a lot of thinking about them and eventually actually writing, rewriting and mapping them to the UKPSF. A crucial part of the mapping process is evidence.  This is where I really feel that my self described unconventional career and in particularly my blogging and open, reflective practice has really paid off. It was really easy for me to look back and find blog posts, presentations. meeting notes and lots of shared reflection. These not only acted as evidence but also triggered my memory about events/thoughts/experiences. My digital presence really paid off.  In fact, in classic displacement mode, before writing it, I created a timeline for one of my case studies that linked to loads of posts and presentations.  What the evaluation panel makes of it all remains to be seen . . . Over the past couple of days I have been putting all my "evidence" into a portfolio in our VLE. Perhaps I was slightly blasé about this bit. The hard bits had been done so surely it was just a bit of a cut and past job. Well to an extent it was.  However, this is where I have to have a little rant and moan about some really simple things that were just so frustrating. Our VLE is Blackboard, and to start on a positive note, there have been major improvements to its portfolio functionality over the last couple of years. Setting up a basic portfolio is pretty straightforward as is creating templates. Sharing a snap shot ( a viewable, non editable version) of the portfolio with anyone via email works a treat.  The majority of my evidence was hyperlinked so no need to worry about creating "aretfacts" and storing them (that’s for another post). Hyperlinking in the Bb text editor is a wee bit clunky but fairly straightforward.  The most frustration thing for me was formatting. There seemed to be far too much random, rogue formatting weirdness. Having fonts and line spacing apparently randomly changing within pages, and despite using the text editor to reformat without success, is, to put it mildly, somewhat frustrating. More of a what you see you don’t get scenario, which kind of defeats the purpose of WYSIWYG editors. Looking at the Bb HTML editor to trying and figure out what is going on html wise is pretty scary even for a tough old bird like me. Now, I know that a lot of this weirdness has probably been caused by my cutting and pasting (in this case from a google doc). However in terms of actual use, I think there is a very strong use case around drafts of extended pieces of writing, particularly reflective pieces of writing such as case studies, happening outside the VLE in a sharable document of a learners choices (e.g. google docs, evernote, one drive)  and being then the text being pasted into a portfolio structure. Ah, I hear you say but you could just upload a beautifully formatted word/PDF document. Well yes, but the whole point of an online portfolio, particularly a reflective one such as this, is that the reader (evaluator) doesn’t have to open multiple other documents, they can just read sections within the portfolio structure. Any additional documents should be evidence, not the main body of the portfolio. I am lucky in that I know a bit of HTML and wasn’t afraid to use that little bit of knowledge along with an HTML cleaner site  to get things appearing as they should. But it took ages . . . and it’s those little things that leads everyone to say " I hate Blackboard" and forget about some of the things that actually do work well.  So come on Bb,  don’t just wait for the new design, lets sort out the text editor in the version(s) we are all using just now.   Tagged: #CPD #eportfolios

(image:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_container#/media/File:Blue_rubbish_bins_in_a_circle.jpg) As part of the research/preparation/blind panic for my #oer15 keynote I’ve been having a closer look at the origins of open washing and in particular greenwashing.  The seven sins of greenwashing website defines greenwashing as "the act of misleading consumers regarding the environmental practices of a company or the environmental benefits of a product or service" As many have pointed out, there are many similarities with open education. Just replace environmental with open and that definition works well. Maybe it’s just my inner Presbyterian guilt, but I have also been slightly obsessed with their seven sins of greenwashing.  These are the sin(s) of: the hidden tradeoff no proof vagueness worshipping false labels irrelevance lesser of two evils fibbing Again lots of parallels with open education practice/resources/products/platforms. The theme of #oer15 is mainstreaming,  religious connotations such as sin are, I think, very detrimental to mainstream practice. Sometimes you do have to scare people into action - particularly when you are trying to save the planet - but for every day educators, I feel we have to be a bit more realistic in the trade offs we make in relation to open education.  Surely it is better to do a little openly than nothing at all because you are too frightened of doing the wrong thing and the OER police coming to get you. So whilst I hold no truck with fibbing, no proof, vagueness, irrelevance I think we have to engage somewhat with "worshipping false labels" and a lot with "the lesser of two evils". I know that practically every day I make a trade off with the lesser of two or even three evils.  Does that make me a sinner, less of an open practitioner?  I don’t think so. Does it make me think about my practice and how I could use more open, open stuff? Yes, of course it does. Mainstreaming is about compromise which can be frustrating but open is still a scary word to some people and a little trade off can led to some big gains later down the line.  Perhaps it’s all a bit Star Wars where we have to see things "from a certain point of view" but again that’s what mainstreaming is all about. I’ll be sharing more next week in Cardiff - so please hold off  striking me down with lightning bolts until then. if you have any thoughts, please let me know in the comments. Tagged: #OER15 #OER #openeducation

This is just a short post with links the slides from my keynote yesterday at #oer15.  I’m still processing all the open goodness that was evident throughout the conference. But a bit thanks to all involved, particularly The co-chairs Martin Weller and Haydn Blackey.  The mantle has now been passed to Lorna Campbell and Melissa Highton for #oer16 in Edinburgh. It’s already sounding like the must do conference of next year. Below is  the script ( in a very loose sence)  of what I planned to say, I think I almost did it but you can watch the video (starts a couple of minutes in) and download the slides from the conference website.   Or you can just look at this fabulous  visual summary by Kevin Mears. (click  here for a link to the final CC version) Kevin Mears sketchnote   Firstly I want to thank the conference co-chairs, Haydn and Martin, for taking a bit of a risk and asking me to present today.  This is my first OER conference I am delighted to be with you all in Cardiff.     As you know the theme of this year’s conference is mainstreaming open education. As someone who works in the mainstream, I’m going to share with you my thoughts on mainstreaming open education, the opportunities, balance and pragmatic approaches I take to open-ness in education As a self declared open practitioner I want to take the opportunity to openly share some of my open washing with you today.     When Martin asked me if I would keynote at the conference, I was a bit taken aback. It was not long after last years ALT- C conference where the keynote speakers, in particular Audrey Waters and Catherine Cronin, raised the bar quite considerably.  After briefly questioning Martin’s sanity, we both agreed that a really strong message coming from both Audrey and Catherine was the need to create and maintain our own narratives about education and for all our voices to be heard.     Taking heart and inspiration from them both, I think my voice; my narrative is one that is as worthy as anyone’s of being heard. It is unashamedly from a Scottish/UK HE perspective. It’s based within a learning and teaching not research context.  That’s where I work, that’s my mainstream.  It’s not from one of the big, the ancient, the always ahead of the curve places.  It’s from about as middle of the mainstream as you can get. I hope it represents and raises the mainstream narrative.     After agreeing to "take the gig", two things simultaneously sprang to mind: the phrase don’t panic and of course the late, great Douglas Adams. I find that there always seems to be an appropriate quote from Douglas for any social situation.  The works of Douglas Adams are also a great place to find inspiration for titles for talks.  I thought I had a perfect, if perhaps clichéd, title of "the hitchhikers guide to OER".  I could weave a tale or two around some of my adventures in the crazy world of open education.  There were so many analogies between the characters, it would be funny, it would be heartwarming, what could possibly go wrong?   As I continued with this train of thought, my certainty began to waver.  Particularly as I began to think more about the cast of characters I could weave into the presentation.  Would I be a female Arthur Dent armed only with my dressing gown, CC licensed towel wandering in bewilderment around the OER galaxy?  Who would be my Ford Prefect? My Trillian, my Zaphod?  It also began to occur to me that in fact I was probably more likely to be cast as Marvin, the paranoid android, . Not because I have the brain a size of a planet, I am the first to admit that I most certainly do not. Rather, everything I was thinking about seemed to end with me saying in dulcet monotone "yeah, but back in the real world we can’t do that".  However I was still quite taken with the idea, particularly with the Vogons.  They could be the venture capitalists destroying our lovely OER world just at the point where it was about to get interesting. Or actually doesn’t their fondness for bureaucracy makes them more akin to certain members of university administrative centres and procedures? I mean just how many committees do you really need to go to get an OER policy approved?  At this point I realized I should probably stop as I could be in danger of getting sued.   And so another classic tale came to mind, that of Alice in Wonderland. Not because of the equally madcap cast of characters or the rabbit hole. Both have similarities with mainstream and open education.  I was mainly drawn to " eat me, drink me moment".  This really made me think of a key moment of realization within my own experience of open education.   When you take a bite of the open cake  (and I know I am straying from the original here, but I think if Lewis Carroll had been writing today he would definitely have featured cupcakes) it can lift you into a new world, where you start to make connections with all sorts of people and organizations. It can be an amazing experience to connect with new people in new open ways.  You become part of the swirly, twirly mass of goodness and open-ness.  I know,  only too well, that feeling of egotistical joy when you spot yourself  in that mass. Conversely, the opposite can be true.  A drop or two of the open juice can make you feel very small, insignificant and isolated. How can you possibly make your voice be heard, make any connections within the vortex?  I know I have experienced this particularly when participating in open courses.     This the scary part of open, and the part that can be really challenging for mainstream.  People, quite often senior management, have a tendency to see things only from the eat me point of view.  They think anything open will automagically be viewed, talked about, exploited  by "everyone". The reality is, as we all know, somewhat different.  As with everything there is a balance to be struck.  This is equally as true for institutions as individuals.  Deciding how open you want, or indeed can be, takes time. It is a constantly shifting balancing act.     Creating balance requires flexibility.  In my life, I take a fairly flexible approach to open-ness.  For example I built my slides for this presentation using Haiku Deck, mainly because it provides integrates a Creative Commons image search capability. I know the images I am using are openly licensed.  I have added some of my own photos and drawings, which are also openly available and licensed on Flickr. Other tools/things I, and I suspect many of us use maybe called open but are they really? I’ve used list.ly as an informal reference list tool for this talk which I’ve shared.  And so the open washing begins.     As part of preparing for today I had a closer look at the roots of open washing and in particular the greenwashing movement.   Just change green to open and their definition stands "the act of misleading consumers regarding the environmental practices of a company or the environmental benefits of a product or service"   As I blogged about last week, there are also comparisons to be made with their seven sins.  However, I am wary of using that type of emotive, religious language. Particularly when we are talking about mainstreaming.  There is a fine line between being an evangelist, and a person who everyone tries to avoid in case they try to convert you/bore/scare you to death.   Looking at the greenwashing sins in an educational context, I agree that many of them need to go straight into the sin bin.  One thing I think we are all really glad of is, the growing amount of evidence we have around many aspects of open education, open publishing and access.  This conference and, all you presenting here, is making another significant contribution to that growing body of research. We do of course, still need more, but we are starting to get "proper" evidence to take to senior managers to show the impact, value and cost benefit of open-ness.    However, I’m keeping the lesser of two evils, worshipping false labels and hidden trade offs out of the bin just now.   In mainstream education we have to deal with these all the time. I know I have, and continue to, make many trade offs, through choosing the lesser of two evils, to get the trade off of getting some kind of open into a project and/or people’s minds.   As some of you may have seen at my lightning presentation yesterday, my team at GCU developed and ran an open event online event last year in that ran in conjunction with the Commonwealth Games.  It was open in many different senses of the word. We did do some "proper" reuse of some open content, but we did use a so called open platform, which is only open to use by existing customers of their "paid for" platform . . . I could go on.   But, the big trade offs for us were that in a very short space of time we were able to firstly get something online, using things we were familiar with, that didn’t involve any above the line costs. Secondly, and perhaps more strategically important, it allowed us to get and keep the interest of our PVC Learning and Teaching.     That bit of open washing moved open-ness quite significantly within our context. And that was my main aim. I don’t need to ask forgiveness for any sin because in my context the means were more that justified by the end.   Context is critical in any situation. I remember Stephen Heppell at a conference many years ago saying, "if content is king, then context is majesty".  So, where does open fit in our context just now?     If we look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs where does open education/content/access sit? How does it vary between our personal needs and our institutional strategic aims and values?     At the top of the pyramid there are obvious links to personal and institutional needs/visions around esteem and self worth.  Open fits nicely into those. You could probably argue a case for each one, but the links aren’t always obvious to our senior managers.  There are lots of competing priorities within mainstream education. Whilst we may laugh at the fact that Wi-Fi is now a defacto new, underpinning layer into the pyramid, I feel it is a timely to ask ourselves how, why and if, open, in its broadest sense fits or if it should be subsumed into all of the layers, embedded throughout rather than being a distinctive, separate need.       To help us answer this, we need to look to what current drivers for mainstream education  actually are. It’s also timely to remind ourselves of what mainstreaming actually means. In this instance I think that the Wikipedia definition is pretty good "generally the current thought of the majority".     In the UK there is no better place to get the thought of the majority than from ALT. If we look at the most recent ALT member survey we get a really clear picture of UK HE/FE mainstream priorities for learning technology.   Looking at the results for the current  and increasingly important drivers in terms of learning technology we can clearly see the complexity and the range of other "things" open-ness is competing with.     Whilst it is encouraging to see that open education practice, resources and policies are on the rise, they still have a way to go to be top of the list and indeed even be mentioned in the same breath as some key drivers such as assessment.     In my own institution, we have just surveyed our staff and have used some of the ALT categories for sectoral benchmarking. Whilst I haven’t had time to analyze the findings yet, at first glance in terms of open-ness they pretty similar to ALTs but open is a bit lower down.   However, going back to the hidden trade off, we can leverage open-ness within key priorities, particularly in my case with online developments.  And on the plus side I know anecdotally that people are talking more about OER more than when I started about a year and a half ago. When I asked people do you use/create/ OERs I was met a lot blank faces, and shaking heads.   In an attempt to explore mainstream practice a bit further, and find out how people actually mainstream open, back in February I wrote a little blog post and asked for some feedback and examples of how people are mainstreaming open education. I was overwhelmed by the response, and many of you that did respond are in the room today, once again thank you all.   I do have to give a special mention to Pat Lockley for almost single handedly responding and extending the debate.   Whilst I urge you all to go and have a look at the responses, I’ll try and share what I took away from the discussions.     To help me cut through some of the complexity of  the discussion I thought some visualisations might help. A simple word cloud of the comments makes for quite a pretty picture, but doesn’t really tell us anything.     I tried to be a bit clever and do a bit of text analysis.  Again a nice picture but it doesn’t really do justice to the depth and complexity of the discussions.     What struck me most was the difference and tension in views between how and why of OER and OEP. The comments drifted from the "how" of mainstreaming more to the "why" and back again. On the one hand there was strong advocacy for clarity and rigor around licenses and content, and on the other a desire to experiment and extend practice more. For mainstreaming I think we need the more of the latter.   Education is more than resources; I again refer to context as majesty. I want our students to be open practitioners, to be able to express themselves and interact appropriately and openly, not just be consumers of open resources.   I was delighted then, with Tony Hirst’s contribution to the discussion. Tony pointed out that we are all OERs.  We are the most important resource our institutions, our society have.  If we want to move further up the mainstream then perhaps that is something we all need to work on. I know over the past couple of years I have begun to self identify as an open practitioner; we need to enable more of our colleagues to do so.   And so it comes to the point where I have to address whole battle for open, and some of my reservations about it in terms of mainstream education.     Martin and I have a good-natured difference of opinion about the battle metaphor. One of my issues with it is that a lot of people in the mainstream don’t actually realise that there has been a battle, let alone who has won.  As Martin added to the title of his book, winning a battle sometimes doesn’t feel like victory.  If we look to recent UK politics, losing a battle for the SNP certainly didn’t end the "war" the way the UK establishment presumed it would.  But I digress.   My main problem with battle and war analogies in the mainstream is far simpler. Working in the mainstream can be very rewarding but it can be really hard and you do have to go over, and over a lot of "stuff’. I don’t want to have to engage in yet another war, take part in another battle everyday. I don’t have the energy for that.  Those of us in mainstream education have enough "challenges" to deal with already.     That’s not to say I’m not ready to fight for what is right. I just have to choose my battles very carefully. Mainstreaming is about pragmatism; it’s about patience; it’s about the long haul. We take our small victories as and when we can. Going back to the mainstream priorities we looked at, we have lots of priorities to deal with.    So instead of battling about the battle,  I want to talk about some at the other end of the spectrum. I call this my HAHA moment.   I want to take to you to the world of landscape gardening.  Gardening, cultivation is a much more apt analogy than battles and wars for education in general not just open education.  Education is fundamentally about nurturing, sharing, growing.      For those of you not familiar with a HAHA , it is a device used by landscape gardeners to help create and maintain views/vistas of usually very large gardens.  Pioneers such as Capability Brown used them to create pastoral scenes for large country houses. The Lords and Ladies of the house could enjoy seeing their live stock in the distance, but the ditch prevented said sheep/cattle from getting too close to any more tended, precious areas of the garden.     In many ways our universities are similar to large country estates; they sit within extensive physical and increasingly digital spaces.  Our senior managers tend to sit in large offices where they can peruse their estates.  There is perhaps a metaphorical haha between "them and us".  Like country estates, economics have an affect on how our universities are run and how their estate is tended.   There is a cost to open-ness , which has huge implications for mainstreaming. Some institutions have a lot of money to spend in adding formal, open spaces, in tending their flock and developing open as part of their mainstream priorities. They tend to have the capacity to subsume and develop open research initiatives. Some may be selling the proverbial family silver to keep up. Others, mine included, don’t have that luxury and are looking at a strategic level to invest, maintain and grow different parts of their garden and the staff who maintain it.     I have benefitted from being a very luxurious position during my time working for Cetis, where my open practice was supported. That allowed me to evolve into the practitioner I am today. Not many mainstream educators have that luxury today.  Speak to any typical lecturer and they will reel off the reality of trying to combine teaching, research and admin priorities.   In the UK since the Jisc/HEA funding there has been a dearth of specifically open funding programmes. There could be a danger of a small number of open silos developing, money following the money if you like, a new "open club" of those and such of those. That is not mainstreaming.      However, it’s not all doom and gloom. There are still opportunities for open-ness to take root and flourish.  I give you the guerrilla garden.     In the same way that people are taking over abandoned patches of ground for gardening, we can take our patches of activity and do some guerrilla open educational development.  It appears, and takes root before anyone actually realises what’s happened. I have described our Games On development as a guerrilla development. A lot of bottom up open development happens in this way, my colleague Marion Kelt has taken a similar approach to developing our OER guidelines.  Which will hopefully be actual policy soon.   Going back to  "I am OER", we need to find more ways for staff and students to have, perhaps initially, pots or window boxes of open-ness that they feel comfortable with tending and maintaining. Hopefully they will then "get the open bug" and move into and take over/ create more formal and informal learning spaces.     Walled gardens are not a new concept to education and are an important part of our mainstream estate.  This brings me to another open paradox.  Whilst declaring myself an open practitioner, and supporting open-ness in its widest sense wherever possible, working the mainstream we need to have our walled gardens.     The picture in my slides is of a walled garden on the island of Islay on the west coast of Scotland. It is a very windy place so gardening can be tricky. The walled garden there provides shelter and a safe place for a variety of flowers, plants and shrubs to grow. Some will be eventually be put into the open garden; others will always stay inside those walls. Similarly in education, we have a duty of care to our students, and indeed our staff, to provide safe areas where they can develop and grow. Places where we can develop their digital literacies and competencies so that they are informed and empowered to make the most appropriate decisions themselves as to where, when, why, what and how they can share and interact openly.   I want to finish with this thought, we can be open anywhere.  Spaces like the wonderful High Line Garden in New York, which was derelict and forgotten, is now a thriving, open space that encourage and sustains community activity in ways I’m sure New Yorkers never dreamed were possible.  The same is true with open-ness in mainstream education. We have to be wary of being to hung up about definitions; we have to learn to live with a bit of open washing.  Open-ness can allow us to be agile; to share, to inspire, to connect, to meet our wider goals of civic responsibility, but it has to be flexible. There is no one size fits all but we have to allow people to be open anywhere they choose, that way we can flood the mainstream with open-ness and extend this community even further.   Tagged: #oer15

I was invited to speak at the Learning Analytics Session at the TalisInsight conference earlier this week in Birmingham.  It was a good opportunity for me to reflect on my personal journey in learning analytics from being at the heart of some early work around horizon scanning and community engagement and awareness during my time at Cetis, to my current position where at GCU where I’m dealing with the realities of trying to get a learning analytics initiative up and running. Although my presentation might have been slightly tongue in cheek, it can be very confusing to actually navigate around all the analytics options offered by practically every service these days.  There is still a lot of work to be done around figuring out what we are measuring and what actually has any influence on actual learning.  Just now I think at GCU we are very much at a baselining/housekeeping  stage. We need to get some information to help us see just what exactly is being used or not used and then start to delve more into the patterns that may be emerging. It was useful to hear from Niall Scalter about the open analytics architecture work Jisc are developing.  This is something I will be exploring more with colleagues to see if that would be of use to us. The panel session with Niall,  my former colleague Adam Cooper, and David White was also fun to be part of and I think we covered a lot of ground. I think a recording of the session will be available from Talis in the next few days.  In the meantime here are my slides. Tagged: #TalisInsight

I haven’t done one of these posts for a while and there have been a few things that have caught my eye so I thought I’d better do a quick round up. There’s been a lot of #oer15 love still going around with some really great reflective blogs coming out from people including Catherine Cronin, Viv Rolfe, Mairke Guy, Grainne Conole. ALT have a nice piece in their online newsletter too. I’ve been adding these anything else to my list: Things for OER15 This week Jisc have released their draft Code of Practice for Learning Analytics for  public comment. Like many others,  I have sent some comments via ALT.  I think it’s a good starting point but needs a bit more work,  particularly around use of staff data and our duty of care to staff as well as learners. We need to ensure that analytics isn’t seen as a big brother management tool for staff. Workload models and time allocation for fully online development and teaching are still evolving. We don’t really have a clear equivalent of time to develop and support fully online activities. We, and I suspect many other institutions, are still working in the traditional hour long lecture paradigm. Whilst some analytics work could help us explore this more, there is still a huge amount of activity, particularly thinking and prep work that happens either totally off line or in non institutional systems that we aren’t collecting data from.   I also think it would be useful to have some kind of community template that institutions could use when negotiating with companies to ensure that we can get our data, when we want, in a format that suits us. I remember talking about this a couple of years ago with colleagues from SURF and John Campbell. We had a really fantastic online development workshop here earlier in the week with Christine Sinclair, University of Edinburgh (you can read all about over on the GCU Blended Learning Blog).  Christine reminded us of the online teaching manifesto her team had developed and are currently updating. We’re going to see if we can create a GCU version now too. More goodness from the Digital Cultures team in Edinburgh came in the form of a new paper from Prof Sian Bayne ‘Teacherbot: interventions in automated teaching’.  A fascinating account of post humanist approaches to digital learning, teaching and play through the use of a twitter bot in a MOOC. I love that even just reading a paper by Sian makes me write in a more intellectual fashion - if only for one sentence. Innovative and groundbreaking stuff which leads nicely onto a discussion on the ATL mailing list about the nature of academic innovation. Innovation, it’s one of those words that gets bandied around a lot without any real shared understand. HE Institutions are constantly being told by governments/business that they need to be innovative; senior managers constantly tell us that we are going to /need to be more innovative and more often than not that if followed by the announcement of investment in the new shiny thing; we all just keep going.  I was really pleased to see this contribution to the discussion from Panos Vlsachopoulos: "Let’s take a minute to think of the  etymology of the word innovate. It comes from latin "innovationem"  (noun) which contains the words "in" (into) + novus (new). To  me innovation  is all about new from within…meaning renewal! It’s different from invention  (which is about creation of a new). Philosophically speaking, to innovate is not to renew a process but to actually renew your thinking, your attitude, yourself in order to renew the ways you see things and you do things! It’s about people’s minds and thinking not about processes.  Of course, as with many industrial and post industrial terms, we often take a materialistic approach to things and we reduce them from their true essence to something that is measurable! An invention is not always innovate and an innovation is not always new. I think that in Educational Technology innovation  is something that we do really well as we always think to renew, rethink our standpoints in education because of technology. The tools help us to rethink, which in turn often leads to innovate and our usage and practice makes designers of products of educational technology to think and eventual invent something for us to innovate with!"

I really enjoyed Chrissi Nerantzi’s session at #oer15 "Nothing stops us now" on open, collaborative CPD".  Having participated in the #BYOD4L open online course (developed by Chrissi and Sue Beckingham) initially as a participant and earlier this year as a facilitator and institutional partner,  I know first hand the power of collaborative development and sharing of practice. It really helps build confidence and an extended sense of community and participation. The session made me reflect on my most recent CPD experience preparing a portfolio for my HEA application.  I haven’t shared much of this experience "openly", which is quite unusual for me as I do try and share openly most of my professional "goingson".  I want to use this post to explore and share why I think this has happened. The main reason I haven’t openly shared my developing portfolio is probably down to fear and uncertainty.  It has taken quite a while for me to believe that my work was relevant to, and could be mapped to the UKPSF. That may sound a bit odd, and was partly down to my lack of understanding of the framework, and my misconceptions that you had to be a traditional lecturer/academic to apply.  With the support of my mentor Sam Ellis, I have been able to contexualise my professional experience and map it to the framework. My portfolio consists of two case studies and a personal reflection. Each part requires supporting evidence. For me this is where my open practice and sharing really came into its own.  My blog is really my portfolio. If anything important/interesting happens I tend to document it there. So for my case studies I had "loads" of  digital evidence from blog posts (and comments on them)  to  papers to presentations that I could find easily and use. Most if not all are openly (with CC licences and everything) available.  This body of evidence and personal reflection helped me remember and contextualise my role in certain developments.  I can’t begin to explain how helpful that was when starting think about what areas I should base my case studies on. "Thank God I blogged" became a bit of a personal mantra. One of my case studies is around Learning Analytics and I broke my involvement into 3 categories and had great fun developing a time line for one of my case studies. It may have been a slight distraction from writing . . . but it did clearly show how much "digital" evidence I could quickly draw upon. Developing and sustaining reflective practice is challenging. I make the time to keep blogging and reflecting and doing that in an open way, it is a habit for me. I think that is why so many people don’t keep blogging. They just get out of the habit. Blogging is  different to the established academic reflective practice of peer reviewed published work.  Personally I prefer a less formal approach. I find that it really helps when I have/want to do the "proper" stuff. Importantly I actually enjoy it. I know I’m not the best writer the world, or the most insightful but, dear reader, you seem to like it too so that keeps me going. Which leads to my second reason for not sharing openly. This may sound even odder, but it’s almost too personal to share. Writing my case studies and reflection wasn’t like writing a blog post. I couldn’t be woolly, half baked, self deprecating. I had to reflect and represent my professionalism, my contributions, my worthiness. That has taken me to a personal open boundary. I am more comfortable with that piece of work only being available to the those who will  assess it (and me) and ultimately decided if it is worthy of gaining the professional reward. I am still scared that I will fail, that I am not worthy of professional recognition. So it’s easier not to talk about it openly. If I fail, well only a handful of people will know. It’s another open paradox. Open professional development can indeed help build confidence but I, and I suspect many others, am still scared of open, professional failure when there is an externally validated award involved. As I write this I am wondering if I should wait until I hear the outcome of my submission? I think not. Just writing this post has helped me to begin to overcome another personal, open boundary. Tagged: openpractice

Inspired by David Hopkins at last year’s Blackboard conference in Dublin I stared to do my own form of sketch noting/visual note taking or probably more accurately doodling. Over the past year I’ve started to use this more visual and colourful method at conferences/events. I find it makes me listen in a different way, and the words/doodles do jog my memory. I just draw onto my iPad using an app called notability. I like it because you can zoom in and out of areas, it has a good colour palette, and drawing features and a very handy undo/ redo button. Other people seem to quite like them too and I share them (with a CC licence) via a Flickr album. More and more people seem to be doing this - or maybe I’m just more aware of them. I’ll never be a Giula Forsthye or Kevin Mears but I think I’ll continue to doodle for another year. Tagged: sketchnotes

Last week along with some colleagues I was shown this Microsoft promotional video of the, not too distant, future. You’ll probably have seen several similar things. It’s full of lovely shiny, images and lots of swooshy-ness with images and "stuff" moving seamlessly from walls to watches to tablets to shared boards. Now whilst I put my hands up to liking a nice bit of shiny swooshy-ness as much as the next geek, these types of videos always make me slightly uneasy, and do bring out my inner dystopian fears about the role of technology in the future. Although full of shiny, happy people I can’t help but want to scream "who is in control? how is this all paid for? " They all seem to be working with - aka moving stuff around on various devices/surfaces - and contributing ( in very small ways) to just one set of data. Everything is coming from and going to the one place. And of course in this case, it’s Microsoft. They are not alone, every technology company has a similar videos and visions.  In terms of education shouldn’t we be creating videos that show our students and staff working with and contributing to multiple data sets? Making decisions about what data to use and how to analyse and present it?  Ensuring that we are  creating shiny, swooshy stuff that everyone can benefit from?  This video and others like it seem to be alluding to a very digitally passive future. The day after seeing the video I was still thinking about it as my day unfolded. I was going to Edinburgh to the Jisc Learning Analytics Network meeting. My day started with a Skype call which I took on my phone as I walked to the station. As I was buying my ticked, holding my bag, trying to get my card in and out of the machine whilst muting and un-muting my phone, I couldn’t help thinking that a few of those contactless, swooshy features would have been very handy. Once on the train I thought I would check my slides for my presentation. Obviously I had them stored in the cloud. However the free wifi on the train was a bit slow to get onto and actually wouldn’t let me look at anything as image heavy as my Haiku deck slides. I had also forgotten my phone charger so after the Skype call my battery was a bit low so I didn’t want to use it all up on the train.  Again in the future tech video power seems unlimtedless wherever you are, be that underwater, in the jungle, in Shiny Towers, power is limitless. Even if I had remembered my phone charger there weren’t any power points in my train carriage. When I got to the Jisc meeting - the train was late but I tweeted I was on my way to the organisers - I got online instantly via eduroam, listened, tweeted, did my presentation (from the backup copy on my data stick), retweeted a link to it and by the end of the day over 200 people had viewed it. After the meeting I met an old friend and had some posh cocktails in a swanky bar, so of course pictures were shared via Instagram. There were a few quite funny comments which I was able to respond to on my way home on the train as my phone battery slipped further and further into the red. My day wasn’t quite as shiny as the video, but there were shiny elements to it. But more importantly to me, was it as passive? I hope not, but I am not so sure.  As well as having very useful face to face conversations, which will be very helpful in terms of things we are planning to do at work, I also had several useful exchanges via twitter both with people in the room and further afield. The constant thing throughout the day though was connectivity (or lack of) and communication. Was I though just moving things around like in the video? As we march to our seemingly inevitable digital future and developing digital strategies and universities (whatever ‘digital’ in those context actually means), I do fear we may be creating new forms of digital passivity disguised by seemingly meaningful connectivity and communication. Is digital passivity our future?

(image http://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone#/media/File:Two_Cell_Phones_2.png) I can remember at the turn of this century ( always wanted to start something with that sentence - not sure if it makes me wise or just old! ) there was a person, who will remain nameless, who kept popping up at events and conferences I attended. I used to get a bit fed as in every presentation this person did, and they did a lot, they used to bring out their mobile phone, wave it about,  and say "this is going to revolutionize everything in education." "Yadda, yadda",  said I and others, and we went back to our desks, our metadata, our content packages, our baby VLEs and websites.  15 years on, and it turns out that mobile technology (not just phones) are actually incredibly important in all our lives - not just in education. For me the I think the change has been evolutionary, each handset I’ve had has been allowed me to do just that little bit more, be it take a decent picture or video conference.  There have of course been a couple of revolutionary moments. Thank you Steve Job and co for ipods/pads/phones.  Although I hate to admit it, I do feel slightly lost without my phone. Without it, I feel just that little bit less connected to my world, my family and friends and not just work. Last week I was at a Jisc event where we were asked to develop some radical ideas, things that would be revolutionary not evolutionary - and of course be able to be sustainable potential funding ideas for Jisc.  Peter Reed has already written a  great summary of the event.  Whilst I’m still not sure if any of the ideas were actually that revolutionary or radical, one thing that did strike me was that a lot of the ideas were dependent on mobile technology. Many of the ideas built on geo-location services like Yik Yak or extending personalised notifications on phones. It was also pretty easy to get not to far away from a not to shabby mock up of apps, and have confidence that the backend technology to make them happen was pretty much available already and we were all confident that things would work.  As someone said in the room, if this had been 10 years ago at a Jisc meeting, the technology would have been central to the discussion. We would have spent 2 days designing the database, not what anyone was going to do with it.  At this event, it was really the ideas, people and processes that were top of the agenda, and amen for that. One of the delegates was head of estates, and I found the perspective of "the voice of the estate" fascinating. Intelligent, dynamic room booking based on real time pre attendance information; that probably is the not too distant future. That said, it was also noticeable that there was focus on services to make the wider student experience better for students, and there wasn’t as much focus on learning and teaching itself. I was in one of the groups that did focus on learning and teaching. We started with the idea of "what if?" What if you didn’t have to go to meetings, give one hour lectures, mark essays, what if you could actually  get more time to "do stuff"?  That evolved from something that blocked out time for staff to experiment, to the google 25% idea, to what we called the "total curriculum" where everything from 1st year to PhD, was based on real world projects. Of course, there is a lot of project based curriculum already happening across all levels of education from primary schools to universities, but what if we extended it more? Of course there would need to be radical changes to our learning and teaching structures (like timetables and exams) to more meaningful self directed learning with negotiated assessments. Perhaps we could start with more evolutionary steps like 1 week  learning festivals, maker fests and building up to one month, one semester, one year, three (four) years. Would that bring about a revolution or just another step in our evolution?  I don’t know, but it was fun talking about it and realising that just like with some of the technology for the other ideas, it isn’t too difficult to image actually happening. Tagged: #jisccreativity

It’s a common plea within HE, can’t we just get rid of the lecture?  But there is safety and comfort in the lecture so getting rid of them is easier said than done. I was delighted then to hear from the mental health nursing team here at GCU this week who have actually taken a unanimous decision to ban lectures in their models and move to a more directed study, reflective, workshop approach. Starting from wanting to create an learning experience that really engaged students, and just as importantly worked to the strengths of the team in sharing their experiences of actual practice, the team now create weekly "storyboards" which provide resources, readings, videos, guidance and questions for students. Lectures have been replaced by workshops. These start with a  debrief of the week’s study board following by small group work focusing on key areas of knowledge for that week. The students have individual learning logs (using the campus pack blogs within our VLE) and are encouraged to reflect on their own learning/experiences and resources they have found during their pre-workshop activities.  The module has a #hashtag, and students are encouraged to tweet through out the module. The team are using Storify to create the storyboards.  Mainly because they find it is easy to use, and students can access it in and outwith the VLE. It also does look a tad nicer than a page within the VLE!  The team can easily update the boards, and update resource/tweets. I’m a big fan of storify but I hadn’t thought about using it this way. Until I saw this I had it boxed in my mind as synthesis/ after event tool.  But of course it works just as well, if not better, in this way. Another really neat flip!  You can check out the team storyboard dashboard here. The team have found that this change has really increased engagement in the workshops. The enjoy the workshops much more as they feel it allows them to facilitate learning far more effectively. The can see more engagement, vicarious and peer learning.  The team did admit that it did take time to "let go" and adjust to this new way delivery, but now they would never go back. Each storyboard is carefully planned, and is very explicit about the time, topic, resources and most importantly questions for students to consider and reflect on each week.  It has taken time to develop the storyboards, but the effort has been worth it.  The storyboards can easily be updated for each new cohort, so the initial effort pays back with time saved in the longer term. The team have also found that this approach allows them to provide more personalised guidance, particularly when dealing with some of the very challenges issues involved in mental health. Although the team haven’t done used it yet, the embed functionality in storify means that boards/stories can be embedded within the VLE, as can #hashtagged twitter widgets. In terms of open practice this is also a fantastic example of sharing approaches to learning and teaching with the wider community.

The Open Data Glasgow meet ups are now back on track, and last night saw the 5th meet up of the group. Thanks to the UBDC for hosting the event and providing refreshments. I really enjoyed the mix of speakers at the event, and the focus from them all on how open data can help communities and people. That makes a nice change from the big data, big money commercial focus of many data conversations. It also raises key issues about data literacy and how we need to ensure the everyone can access and keep getting access to public data and in turn be more aware and empowered about how their own data is being used. Thanks to Graham Steel not only for doing much of the co-ordination for the meeting but also for live streaming the event. I’ve  collated tweets from the evening into this storify, and you below is the recording of all the speakers.

Last week I attended the Scottish Government’s Digital Participation Advisory Group at Holyrood.  The Group advises the Cabinet Secretary for Culture, Fiona Hyslop who chairs the group.  I was there  as part of a mini delegation (well there were 3 of us, Bill Johnston, John Crawford and me)  from the Information Skills for a 21st Century Scotland Community of Practice. We were fortunate to have been allocated quite a bit of the meeting to discuss information and digital literacy and the potential for closer links between this Advisory Group and the CoP. You can read our briefing paper Scotland’s Information Culture briefing paper (feel free to add any comments too). There were a number of updates from other projects including the Let’s Get On campaign which has been traveling the length and breadth of the country and encouraging people to get online.  Whilst listening to the update  from the Wheatley Group on their pilot project offering low cost broad band access to their tenants in a Kirkton project in Glasgow. The findings of the evaluation are showing that if you provide low cost access and in some cases devices, people will go online and start reaping benefits. These include saving money in taxi bills by doing online grocery shopping and using comparison websites. The requirement for online searching as part of job seekers allowance is also more easily fulfilled. I was humbled whilst listening to  the difference having access to a reliable and low cost wireless connection can make to peoples lives.  I was reminded just how privileged a life I lead.  Wifi is ubiquitous in my life, both at home and work. I don’t have to make a choice about eating or getting online. Comparison websites are more a game than a necessity for me. It seems though, that there is still a disconnect between interactions with other key public services. The next steps are to explore that more fully. It might be due to the fact that many government services aren’t fully useable with mobile devices. So whilst it is great to see these initiatives and the confidence and opportunities they are bringing people (particularly children who in the project come out as very much being digital champions) there is still a lot of work to be done in terms of sustaining greater digital participation and the developing of peoples confidence and ergo their digital capabilities. Digital participation is where Universities can play a pivotal role in the digital agenda.  Particularly a university like my own, GCU, whose mission is "for the common good" or  as it was originally stated ‘the common weal". We should be a key part or digital hub if you like, looking for more ways to link initiatives like the ones mentioned above with our own work in widening participation for example the Caledonian Club and GCU College Connect far deeper into our formal and informal curriculum. Last year I proposed this model of engagement for us, pitching us as a digital agora, or hub   In the week when UNESCO released its Rethinking Education: Towards a Global Common Good? report, embracing digital participation could be a crucial way forward for all of us. I’ll be exploring the understandings of the digital university later this week at the EDEN conference where I look forward to extending this discussion more. Tagged: #scotinfolit, digital participation #digitaluniversity

(image https://pixabay.com/en/marketing-advertisment-ads-791202/ : CC0 Public Domain) The thorny issue of students as customers has been raised a notch over the past month. Firstly at the Jisc Student Experience Creativity Workshop  and in matters closer to home that I will expand on later in this post.  Due to undergraduate fees, my colleagues in Universities south of the border are probably slightly more comfortable with the term, it does still irk me a bit. However we do have fee paying students at my institution, we need more to survive, and whatever way fees are paid, we certainly all need to be meeting and exceeding our students expectations of their university experience. Last week I was lucky enough to meet and spend some time with Jim Groom along with some of my favourite ed tech commentators including Audrey Watters and Martin Weller at the Eden conference. Not surprisingly, lots of our conversations centred around, APIs, the domain of one’s own project and Jim’s new venture reclaim hosting. A couple of years ago whilst doing some work for the OER Research Hub , I used the API analogy for researchers within the project.  Just like APIs, researchers provide hooks into research and its applicability in the real world. Or in the case of any educational research, the classroom. Of course we can think of the university in a similar way. It could be seen as a massive API providing links between numerous services including learning and teaching, research, support, administration and many more. Just now at GCU our new CIO is starting work on developing our Digital Strategy. Unsurprisingly there are many references to the "customer journey" usually preceded by words like  "improving" and  "transformation".  Ensuring our student facing customer journeys are aligned with our establishing and constantly evolving learning journeys and curriculum development journeys is going to be crucial. This is where I think the term service user may be more appropriate. Much of the work that needs to be done in our context is around our technical infrastructure and improving the integration and interoperability of our existing systems - our basic service provision if you like. At this stage, the focus is very much on the "digital " too. As we still have to come to consensus about what being a "digital university" means in our context ( I have one or two thoughts on that as you, dear reader will know and that was the reason I was at the Eden conference), why not be a bit more up front and talk about "service users" just now instead of customers? I think that would be more meaningful and help us frame some of the conversations around just what being a digital university means in our context. As part of the research that Evelyn McElhinney and I did last year around students use of technology, highlighted that we need to be thinking more about how we interact with what we called boundary spaces - the spaces we all find useful (e.g. youtube) - but don’t own and our bounded spaces (e.g. VLEs) in terms of learning activity. You can read more in our final case study. If the first step on this journey is to improve our technical service offerings, get the quick wins to our essential service then why not make the shift to thinking of our IT infrastructure as an API? Once that first layer is in place, then we can start to think about the more complex learning and teaching, research, administration journeys in the wider context of digital transformation through  digital participation and our mission for the common good.  Just like with software, the Universiy API provides the basic connections that allow the really exciting stuff to happen. At the ALT Scotland SIG meeting this week, it was interesting to hear that GLOW (the Scottish Schools digital environment) is taken the API approach too. I realise this isn’t ground breaking stuff, and it’s one of the reasons I like Mark Stubb’s tube map. I think that pretty much sums up the journeys most universities need to be thinking about. "Customer" or "service user" may appeal or oppose in equal measure. But just now, I think the latter might be more appealing and engaging for where we are at in GCU.  It might also help separate the technical infrastructure from the people driven transformation that we aspire to. Dave White has also written another take on this, the student as product. Even more food for thought.

Typcial! The day I on holiday is the day that the announcement about the retirement and refresh of our national open learning repository, Jorum, is announced. I think the news came as a surprise to many, partly because it’s not quite clear just what the refreshed version will actually be, and just what kind of open it will be. Unlike some of my former Cetis colleagues like Lorna, I haven’t had any direct involvement with the development of Jorum. However, I have always had a bit of a soft spot for it. Mainly because I felt it got an lot of unfair press in its early days, and that was due it being an idea just a little bit ahead of its time in terms of easy implementation and adoption. I remember the struggles trying to get instituitions to sign up to use it - legal-ese heaven for some; the struggles with content packages, the metadata, the federated searche engines - happy days😉 Back in the day, there was always a bit of eye rolling and sighing from certain quarters whenever JORUM ( and at that time it was upper case) was mentioned. I think many of those people forgot that any system at that time would have had to contend with the early licence issues, the technical issues of uploading content etc. Despite all of this, Jorum kept going, growing and developing. Its transition form into an open repository was a testament to all who worked on it, and also to Jisc in terms of supporting open education. Like many others, the news this week has surprised me and made me feel a little bit sad. This is where I have to "fess up". I have never put anything into Jorum, and can’t actually remember the last time I looked at it. But, and of course there has to be a but, I have always encouraged others to use it whenever and wherever I could. It was like Elvis said, always on my mind, when taking about OERs and indeed educational resources in general.  So, maybe a new app/refresh approach might actually help me and others like me to share my stuff in/on whatever the new Jorum might be. It could be another step forward in the cultural and practice issues around sharing "stuff" which is at the heart of opened education. In the meantime tho’, it does feel a bit like that Joni Mitchell song  . . . You don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone . . . And maybe in this case it’s a bit orange taxi . . .  Tagged: #jorum, #openeducation, oer

I’m on annual leave just now and this week I’ve been attending a week long summer painting school at Art4YouScotland. I have had an amazing time experimenting with different mediums and have gained a lot of confidence in my own abilities. I’ve also met some lovely people. This is primarily a face to face learning experience - painting and drawing are very hands on pursuits. I have been learning loads from our lovely tutor Ewen and from my fellow students in the incredibly supportive and creative studio environment. All of the individual and group discussions have been enhanced by technology. Particularly in terms of research and accessing the works of different painters, techniques, materials etc via "t’interweb" both in the studio and at home. Seems I can’t escape blended learning 😀 I love the mission statement for all the classes too. 2 and 3 I think should be part of every learning experience. "1. become a better artist 2. feed your soul 3. enjoy the process" Below is a little collage of some of the things I’ve been thoroughly enjoying creating this week.  Tagged: #art4youScotland

I’ve been on leave for the past 3 weeks so this week has been a bit of a blur ( in more sense than one as I’ve just got new varifocal glasses #slightydizzystandingup) of catching up and getting back into work mode. One thing that seems to have taken off this week is #blimage. I was thinking of getting involved but after mentioning it on twitter, the @GCUBlend account was thrown a challenge which I responded to yesterday. This post is a response to that - maybe a slight egocentric circle going on here, but it is a good way to get back into blogging after the holidays. This is the image yesterday’s post invited comment about. The picture is of a part of the major campus refurbishment that is taking place at GCU just now. It triggers a raft of emotions and thoughts for me including excitement, confusion, blind panic, will it all be ready for the students in September? For most of us working in education, summer more than New Year, is the time of new beginnings, new students, new starts.  Summer is often that mythical space where everything that you haven’t had the chance to "get round to" over the past year will be done as well as all the new things that you want/have to do for the new semester.  It can be an exciting and scary time, and more often than not "other stuff" is thrown into the mix which takes priority over all your (half baked) plans. I think my brain is a bit like that picture just now with bits and pieces of things sort of blocked out, but lots of stuff needing to be done to make sense of it . So maybe it is the perfect welcome back to work #blimage. What do you think? Tagged: #blimage

What rights do you have online? If I’m honest I don’t actually know. I think I’m probably digitally savvy enough to be conscious of what I share online, with who and why. I know that I share too much data with Tesco and Amazon but I comfort myself with the fact that I get some trade off somewhere. I’m also lucky (aka getting old), in that when I was doing stupid things when I was growing up, they could only be shared within a relatively small circle - not potentially the world via Instagram. The mistakes I made, are now long forgotten and would take quite a bit of effort to find. As we all know it’s not quite like that anymore. Like many this week, the i-rights campaign and this article by Suzanne Moore about the importance of the right to forget have caught my eye. "iRights is a civil society initiative that seeks to make the digital world a more transparent and empowering place for children and young people (under 18) by delivering a universal framework of digital rights, in order that young people are able to access digital technologies creatively, knowledgeably and fearlessly." The 5 i-rights highlighted by the campain: the rights to: know, remove, support and safety, make informed and conscious choices, and digital literacy are actually universal - not just for the under 18s.  Being connected online should allow us to share, connect, explore, make mistakes as and when we choose. But in the Big Data world it’s not that straightforward. "The exchange of information is an essential component of the digital world. However, it is inappropriate for a third party, commercial or otherwise, to own, retain or process the data of minors without giving them the opportunity to retract it or to correct misinformation." We believe children and young people should have the unqualified right, on every internet platform or service, to fully remove data and content they have created. This must be easy and straightforward to do." Our data should be ours, not the plaything of big businesses and advertising. As I said at the beginning of this article I am aware of some of the data I am willing to "give away". I’m equally aware that I am probably giving away far more than I realise, and that I have little control or indeed options about getting it back or deleting it. Education is central to the well being all parts of society,from pre-school to university and beyond. So let’s all start asserting our i-rghts and provide our children, young people and not so young people with the capacity to live, work and create useful, safe and when necessary, disposable digital environments where individuals not businesses control their data.

This is a probably going to be a bit of a rambling post as I haven’t really blogged for a couple of weeks as it’s been a busy couple of weeks here at Blended Learning Towers. This year there has been quite a push on developing more fully online programmes. I’ve blogged about how we have been supporting staff through the curriculum design process, and developing our suggested workflows and tools.  We’re now developing this into a series of support materials which we can use and share with more staff, and develop into some form of online staff development.  Just now we’re internally reviewing our "stuff" but I will share it as soon as it is ready for open consumption. As part of that process we are developing a set of principles for the GCU Online student experience. Following up from their presentation at the recent Eden Conference 2015 proceedings, I was able to catch up with Nelson Jorge from TUDelpht to discuss their approaches to staff CPD and online course production. They also have a set of principles which they are now starting to use as part of their evaluation process. They are a bit ahead of us, and have a dedicated unit supporting online developments, as well as a process for staff to get time off "normal" teaching duties, we don’t have that - yet. As always it was great to share with like minded colleagues and have the comfort that we are all facing the same issues of lack of time and resources. A recurring theme for us around online developments has been templates. <sigh> Templates are tricky, some of people are very keen on them; more often than not  as they seem them as a quick solution. However as you well know dear reader, it’s not that simple. We do have a default template in a sense in our VLE with our standard menu, and  Blackboard does provide an extensive set of pedagogically based teaching styles templates too. However staff have the freedom and flexibility to structure their modules as they see fit.  What we are trying to do is encourage a team design approach so that there is consistency of naming conventions and approaches across programmes. In that way templates naturally evolve.  As ever consistency really comes down to planning, and that needs time . . . As the new semester draws nearer, we’re having more discussions with colleagues about trying new approaches in their modules which is great. We have a number of programmes that have very large modules (over 600 students) so I was really interested in these two posts from Fiona Saunders at Manchester on her reflections on large class teaching and designing assessments that are equitable, meaningful and manageable. Fiona makes some excellent points particularly about equity in large class scenarios. Yesterday we met with Paul Bailey and Niall Sclater about the Jisc Effective Analytics programme.  Our work in learning analytics had stalled due to changes in our senior management and lack of CIO. However with our new CIO and IT Director now in place it looks like we will be moving ahead in this area and be part of the Jisc pilot. So look out for more posts around that. And finally, I am now officially a jolly, good (HEA) Fellow.  I originally submitted for Senior Fellow, which I always knew was going to be a bit of a challenge, mainly because of my lack of actual teaching practice and slightly non traditional career path. And the feedback I got did confirm that. I also think my case studies weren’t focused enough on institutional impact. They were more based on work and experiences before I started here.  So after feedback from my initial submission I resubmitted for Fellow status and now have a nice shiny certificate. Tagged: #analtyics, HEA, online learning

The annual #altc conference has yet again left me reeling.  This year it seemed bigger and better than ever, with over 500 delegates meeting in Manchester, with many more joining via the live streams and twitter, over 180 presentations and the addition of robot wars in the #altcgame. When I got home on Thursday night, I did feel a bit jet, or conferenced, lagged. It’s always great to catch up with old friends and make new ones at the conference, but with so much going my mind was spinning and I’m only just starting to make sense of it all. As ever the keynotes gave contrasting but complimentary views on not just issues around the impact of technology in education, but the impact of new distribution models (often owned by the establishment) on global developments and society.  Whilst Steve Wheeler, very ably assisted by two students, discussed "learner 2.0", Jonathan Worth added a set of very considered  challenges facing young people today. Whilst we may have a generation of "digital by default" learners, who as Steve illustrated have their digital footprint created before they are even born, are we in education creating as state of "statutory vulnerability" for our learners? How can we take ownership and control of the right to forget? (see speakingopenly for more on this)  Whilst sharing and connecting are incredibly powerful for learning, the channels of control and ownership of data are increasingly important. I know that I am in many ways far too ambivalent about my data. For ease of access and connectivity I all too readily tick those terms and conditions boxes.  I don’t think I’m alone in this digital paradox of knowing the dangers and big brother aspects of data ownership, but I go along with it anyway and console myself that the benefits outweigh the risks. Listening to Laura Czerniewcz’s quietly assured keynote on equality, I internally vowed to do more to be part of reclaiming the connected society. I hope that my sharing of thoughts and practice does in some small way add to that. Again data was central to many of the issues around equity of access to education Laura highlighted. It is the cost of data not the device that is key, particularly in the global South, where increasingly people have mobile phones (and in fact mobile commerce in Africa is far more advanced than in Europe), but the cost of data can exclude many from participating in education. If you can’t afford to access data heavy educational resources then you are excluded. I don’t know if this requires a new type of pedagogy (tbh I think we have enough "gogies") but it definitely requires more thought in our learning designs to ensure equity of access and experience. Phil Long the final keynote brought another aspect of data use in education around  learning sciences, technology and learning activities. He questioned why so many existing learning and teaching practices don’t consider what we know about learner motivation and success, and the differences between learning and performance.  It could be that we are at a stage now where there digital tools can actually provide more personalised learning pathways. I’ll need to check out the  Cerego personalised learning tool/service he highlighted. In one of the best online exits ever, Phil’s video connection cut out as he was about to tell us what "the reality is . . ." You can catch up with all the keynotes via the conference website, all worth another look and my visual notes of each are available on flickr And whilst we need to think about data ownership, sharing data can lead to great visualisations of our community like this one from Tony Hirst. Tagged: #altc, #data, #digital, #GCUblend

As an additional #hashtag activities at this year’s #alt conference, participants were asked to use the hashtags #my #altc to highlight their "best bits" of the conference. I had high hopes for the "are learning technologies fit for purpose?"  session, however despite Lawrie saying he didn’t want this to be a re-hash of "is the VLE debate" of a few years ago, it did seem to turn into a bit of VLE bashing, with the underlying inferences that learning technologies = VLEs and they weren’t fit for purpose.  I did have to have a bit of a rant at the direction of the discussion leading to #my #altc moment (which did seem to go down quite well with the rest of the people at the session @leohavemann @Lawrie @DonnaLanclos thank you — Sheila MacNeill (@sheilmcn) September 8, 2015 //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js To VLE or not to VLE, that seems to always be THE question.  It is, imho, actually the elephant in the room. We have them, so can we just move on please.  It’s how we use them that’s important.  Martin Weller has a good post on the session too, and blame him for the VLE sediment phrase! As all the keynote speakers either explicitly stated, our digital footprints, data and access are all changing.  Even our so called "learners 2.0" spoke about the ubiquity of technology in their lives but the scary moment when you have to use in "in the real world" in your job, in their case as they were trainee teachers, in the classroom. Confidence levels can swing dramatically from using digital "stuff" for your own purposes to when you have to use it in learning and teaching.  I know in my institution we have many new teaching staff who come directly from professional practice and their knowledge of "learning technology" is very limited, and based on their own experiences. What’s new there, I hear you ask dear reader. We know that all teachers just do what their favourite teachers did.  Well yes, but just now not everyone has had experience of blended, and or fully online learning. They are often still trying to figure it all out as well as cope with a very different working environment. In the discussion the issue of time came up. Some people think this is a non starter as if someone wants to to do something,then they will make the time. Which is true to an extent. But, if staff member isn’t confident in using whatever their institutional VLE is, then the chances of them being able to find the time with increasing teaching loads gets smaller. New technologies (learning or otherwise) alone won’t solve this. If we want to create digitally confident learners and teachers we need to give time for digital experimentation and failure. A closed, (relatively) safe space such as a VLE is good place to start that. Almost exactly a year ago I wrote a post called "Living with the VLE dictator", a year on my thoughts are much the same. However, I do see an opportunity to reframe the debate around people digital capabilities and use of (learning) technologies not just the technologies themselves. Tagged: #altc, #digitalcapabilities, #VLE

It’s been a busy couple of weeks what with the start of the new academic session, and I’ve been using up bits of annual leave so haven’t really had the chance to blog for a while. I didn’t want to let another week go by, it’s too easy to let the blogging habit slip, so this is just a quick update post. One project that is going to be taking up quite a bit of my time this month, is our involvement in the Jisc Effective Analytics programme.  GCU is taking part in the discovery phase of this programme. This means that we are working with consultants, in our case from Blackboard, to assess our institutional readiness, from cultural to infrastructure, for analytics. My team have been trying to get a pilot project around learning analytics going for about 18 months, however due to various changes internally progress had stalled. However, now we have a new CIO and Director of IT, we are ready to start again. The support from Jisc gives us a great incentive to reappraise our current capabilities, and will give us a trusted, objective view of our capabilities. The analytics infrastructure Jisc are developing also gives us a possible route to develop our provision further as well as share our experiences within the programme and beyond. We’ve already had meetings with the consulting team and so far we are impressed with the approach they are taking. Just now they are reviewing lots of documentation, including our new very recently launched 2020 Strategy. Having effective data and analytics capabilities will be crucial for us as we work towards the aims and objectives of the strategy. I’ll be sharing more as the project progresses, particularly nearer the end of this month after the onsite workshops and interviews have taken place. Coincidentally earlier this week a video of the invited talk I gave at the Talis Aspire conference in April was released (yeah, I take a while to edit me!) Anyway in it I had a bit of a rant about data, analytics etc.  I’m hoping that through this project we will indeed start to get some actionable insights into our learning and teaching and student journeys. Tagged: #learninganalytics