My Open Story for #101openstories

Open complementing closed - PLE and LMS - why, what for and how?

As an engineer with a keen interest in software development and the web I suppose I come to “Open” with a philosophy formed from my exposure to the Open Source Software movement. I remember reading Raymond’s The Cathedral to the Bazaar, and being fascinated by Richard Stallman, the Gnu Project, and his idea of Copyleft introduced by the Gnu General Public Licence (GPL). When it came to YouTube and Flickr, making my works available via a CC-BY licence seemed the right thing to do. On the web, I’ve used Wikipedia extensively (as you can see from this post) and would agree with others that it’s one of the greatest Open Educational Resources that exist. I have a source code repository on GitHub where the sharp eyed may find the odd teaching resource made available to the public without necessarily having the right permissions.

As a practitioner, I suppose my Open Educational Practice began when I launched this Blog back in 2004. Fresh and Crispy (the name is a pun on my initials) was originally hosted on Blogspot. It has moved a couple of times to a various hosted WordPress and Ghost blogs on shared servers and virtual private servers before ending up hosted on WordPress, albeit with my domain name attached. Most of my early posts were around programming technologies like Java and Web applications. I joined Twitter in April 2007:

and a lot of my early tweets are about the Swansea Learning Lab, an early community of practice here at Swansea University. Here’s a typical (rather depressing) tweet:

I suppose a breakthrough for me came as a ed blogger came when I joined the Connectivist MOOC Plenk 2010 in September of that year.

I remember being dragged in and becoming somewhat obsessive about curating the discussion boards in that MOOC — the evidence of which seems to have sadly disappeared — but I was honoured by being called a Meerkat by one of the participants:

I started tweet chats quite early, #lrnchat (still going strong) was one of the first as the tweet above testifies.

Since then I’ve attended virtual ALT conferences, JISC and HEA events, been a participant and mentor on #BYOD4L, and an organizer on #LTHChat. and one or two further MOOCs.

I find it difficult to reflect on what benefits there have been for me, but there must have been lots. It’s even more difficult to judge what impact I’ve had. But I must have gotten something out of it along with sufficient positive feedback from my virtual friends and real colleagues otherwise I wouldn’t continue to be engaged.

Drafts that will never get written

Inspired by friend and colleague Debbie Baff’s “Homeless blog posts“, I’ve just had a look at my own WordPress draft posts folder. I clearly had things that I wanted to say 3 months ago and I had a critique of HEA fellowship (still not resolved) a month ago. I also haven’t posted anything that wasn’t a tweet since March 2.

2017-04-20_1634

Perhaps we should all share our drafts (suitably redacted) from time to time, if only to spark us to get back on the blogging-bike.

Getting Started with Assessment and Feedback in HE

On March first, Prof Sally Brown, recognised expert in Assessment and Feedback for HE, delivered a Webinar on Getting Started with Assessment and Feedback as part of the Transforming Assessment series. The recording of the seminar, both as a Blackboard Collaborate session and on YouTube is now available and well worth watching as part of your CPD.

The link to the seminar page provides access to the  many resources for beginners in HE assessment mentioned in the Webinar. Sally Brown (twitter @ProfSallyBrown) and her partner Phil Race (@RacePhil) are both regulars at the weekly #LTHEChat. Both they and the Transforming Assessment resources are well worth getting to know.

[Cross posted from Getting Started with Assessment and Feedback in HE, Learning and Teaching Enhancement Centre (LTEC), College of Engineering, Swansea University.]

#BYOD4L: What will your story be?

Cross-posted from the LTEC Blog.

It’s new year. Winter seems to be coming. The students are busy. Time for some useful CPD?

On Monday 16 January 2017, the five day short online course Bring Your Own Device for Learning (#BYOD4L) starts its fifth run.

Structured around the five Cs: connecting, communicating, curating, collaborating and creating, this course aims to provide you with practical experience and ideas of how you and your students might exploit your mobile devices in your teaching to enhance your students’ learning. The course was conceived, created and originally facilitated by Chrissi Nerantzi (@chrissinerantzi) of Manchester Metropolitan University and Sue Beckingham of Sheffield Hallam (@suebecks). After 3 runs it has become a community facilitated event that gets bigger every time.

The course is free, informal, and fun. I should know, this will be my fourth time! It takes place on-line in WordPress, Twitter (hashtag #BYOD4L), and Google+, and any other pop-up on-line communities that the participants might establish. Every morning the topic of the day is published (follow @BYOD4L or, if you prefer an email notification, subscribe to the BYOD4L web site). Every evening, at 8:00 pm GMT, there’s a fast and frenetic Tweetchat (think ‘Tw’eminar) on the topic of the day which you can join in by using hashtag #BYOD4Lchat.

Best of all, you can collect open badges for participation gather evidence of CPD that you can bring to your PGCertHE, HEA fellowship (initial application or evidence of good standing) and PDR. Mindful of this, for this run the organizers are encouraging us to share the stories of our experiences. So, to get your thinking, here’s one of mine.

I’ll be helping the facilitators Neil Withnell (@neilwithnell), Sheila McNeill (@sheilamcn), and Alex Spiers (@alexgspiers) as a volunteer mentor along with my SALT colleague Debbie Baff (@debbaff). LTEC will also be retweeting interesting snippets throughout the event as @sultec4.

Hope to see you there.

My #BYOD4L Story (Part 1)

In advance of the fifth run of bring your own device for learning (#BYOD4L) and inspired by Sheila McNeil’s post “#BYOD4L A story of personal and professional needs and wants“, I thought that I too would reflect on my experience of my last three #BYOD4Ls.

Looking back at my Twitter Archive, I find that my first #BYOD4L contribution was a retweet on 14th July 2014:

I’m struggling to find any blog posts from what was then the 2nd run of #BYOD4L (the first looks to have been in January 2014) so I probably only engaged via Twitter and Google+.

I note that I was sticking my nose in quite early!

For curation, it looks like I was favouring these tools:

Reviewing these today, Diigo, is being updated automatically, I’m an inactive curator on Anne Hole’s BYOD4L Flipboard, I’m still using “favourites” on twitter but have stopped using Pocket, Pearltrees and Evernote!

I’ve had a dig around the Google+ site and Twitter but can’t find anything that I actually created that first outing, but here are a couple of shares that are worth revisiting:

And some opinions that I expressed:

As this post is already getting quite long and #LTHEChat 72 is about to start, I’ll stop there, and continue this story in Part 2 tomorrow.

Alternative Virtual Learning Environment

My contribution to #101 Creative Ideas

Contributor: Chris Jobling @cpjobling

Idea: Use Microsoft OneNote class notebook as a VLE and set yourself and your students free.

Practitioner comments: Students have access to my content on any device, I can annotate my notes in class, there’s a shared space for individual and group work, students can provide a portfolio of their work that is easy for me to mark and give feedback.

Credits: I was inspired to try it by Marjolein Hoekstra curator of OneNote Central (@OneNoteC)

Links: www.onenote.com

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