Many of the apps demonstrated by the team facilitate collaboration over “content” (their words), that is, the ability to annotate, mark-up and otherwise share ideas related to the content. For example, one app gave the ability for students to highlight text and insert sticky notes for a “power user” (the teacher) to read. We were told that this would be a great diagnostic tool for the teacher to know where their students were up to in their reading and what problems they were having.

Great. Lots of opportunity for feedback, analytic-reflective teaching, and formative assessment. On the other hand…

A lot of the practical applications presented during the seminar place the onus and responsibility for learning on the teacher rather than on the student or on student groups. I’m sure this wasn’t intentional, but as I saw more and more examples, I felt more and more uncomfortable. As a teacher, I don’t want to be responsible for knowing where my students are up to in their reading or reading their annotations on their work-in-progress all of the time. I have far too many students to follow with that kind of detail. I’d much prefer for them to go through self-assist strategies of researching, asking a peer, asking a member of their PLN, etc before coming to me. As a teacher, I don’t want to be responsible for uploading and managing course “content” (which, by the way, I think we should think of as “learning materials” or “resource”). I want the students to be produsers. As a teacher, I do want to be responsible for providing opportunities for my students to learn, but I want them to be responsible as well. And accountable. And I have to respect their right to fail.

But the idea of access to ongoing, point-of-need feedback and facilitating/mentoring got me thinking. There’s a lot of talk about mobile learning and “anytime anywhere” access – access not only to physical resources (books, videos, podcasts, etc.) but also people resources (teachers, tutors, critical friends, PLN communities). So does anytime anywhere learning lend to expectations of anytime anywhere access to teachers/tutors? To formal learning? A lot of tertiary educators talk about the struggle of email and being contactable 24/7. Well, what about apps like the ones demonstrated yesterday where the teacher/tutor/facilitator is the “hub” of learning, and all roads for feedback lead back to them? Certainly, it is normal to take home with you as a teacher (“pull”) but what about when work comes to you at home (“push”)? Ding! You have new mail! Ding! You have a new blog post delivered via RSS! Ding! There’s an annotation in this .epub where a student needs help. Ding! It’s now midnight and you’re still trawling forum posts and you haven’t uploaded that lecture-cast yet…

Some educators set office hours and stick to that rule, and I admire those who do. But I’m still interested in the expectations for and of anytime anywhere learning. Are there expectations of anytime anywhere teaching? In the tertiary context? In K-12? And what does this mean for how we envisage ourselves, our jobs, and our careers?

Recently, a tweet from @jessmcculloch (Twitter is another Thing!) got me thinking. She was moaning about transcription work, and I immediately suggested using Transcriva) to make transcription easier. I realised that I use a lot of tools that others may also find useful, but maybe don’t know about. Hence this post. What are my favourite Things in academia? For working, learning and teaching in a university context and for engaging in research? What would I put in “23 Things for Academics”?

So here’s my list (in no particular order!):

1. Trascriva: a great tool for transcription on the Mac. I don’t know what I’d do without it! Probably curse a lot more at MS Word
2. Blogging: You’re reading it now. My blog(s) act as an online notebook – the hub of my learning, recording, and doing!
3. Zotero: A reference/citation manager that runs rings around EndNote because it cuts down on data entry to the n’th degree and has an online backup system. If you haven’t checked it out, go now! Stop reading this list! Go!
4. Google Scholar: I thought this was a given but I’m continually surprised by how many people don’t use it, and how many lecturers tell their students not to use it! Being able to search effectively, whether that be with Google Scholar or through databases directly, is an important skill in academia. Plus you can see how many people are citing you :). Before there were track-backs there were still citations!
5. Twitter: If you follow celebrities, you’ll find out what they had for lunch. But if you follow people working and researching in your field you’ll find out what has their attention. And it’s likely something you’d like to attend to!
6. Wordle: I find this incredibly useful for visualising my writing in different ways, analysing interviews, looking at over-used and under-used words… it’s on my list not just for Languages teachers
7. Turnitin: I was a bit anti-Turnitin to begin with (how DARE they keep a copy of my work on file!) but as a marker, I really appreciate it. It’s not so much about catching plagiarizers (it’s often oh-so-obvious when it’s not a student’s own work), it’s about building a case against them. Previously I’d have to find the articles/essay/whatever and match it all up manually, building up the evidence that it is indeed more copying than you’d expect in an undergraduate essay. With Turnitin, it’s all there! Brilliant! And it’s a great tool for students (and researchers!) to inspect their own writing and check their paraphrasing.
8. Google Calendar: This calendar has replaced my diary. I don’t know what I’d do without it now. I love how it syncs to almost anything I want it to, that I can share calendars, that I can get automatic alerts for conferences, and that I can colour code everything. It just works!
9. Google Docs: Continuing my ode to Google, Google Docs are fabulous for collaborative work and generating quick surveys
10. A RSS Reader: It doesn’t really matter which one, but a way of managing RSS feeds is essential in academia. Subscribing to RSS feeds of important journals, blogs, and other news sources for the field is essential.
11. PHD Comics: OK, this might count more as a procrastination tool than an ICT tool, but I have absolutely loved following this comic over the course of my studies. It reminds us that we’re not alone in this “journey” and the comic hits so close to home, so often, that I wonder if the author isn’t spying on our office
12. Delicious: One of the best tools for managing bookmarks. Mine’s a bit of a mess at the moment (like many of these things it needs some nurturing and pruning from time to time!) but I have long since given up trying to remember website addresses or keep them bookmarked on my computer. Much easier to be able to access them from Delicious whenever I want, wherever I want! Delicious is also a great place to search for webpages that people have tagged as relevant to a topic/keyword, and not a machine.
13. The Book Depository: Cheap books!! Amazon may still be cheaper for some academic texts, but Book Depository with its free shipping is catching up!
14. LibX Toolbar: Oh how much easier this makes searching the Murdoch Library Catalogue! You can read more about why a LibX toolbar is so useful it in a recent blog post by Kathryn Greenhill. She’s much more eloquent than I in waxing lyrical.
15. Slideshare.net: A great place to publish slides so that they’re embeddable in other media (e.g. blog, wiki, etc) and also to find presentations to inform, adapt, or model on. Check out Death by PowerPoint for an absolute must-view.
16. Search @ CreativeCommons: For making all of those presentations! Copyright free / Creative Commons images are the way to go, and this helps you find them. And then record where you got them from using Zotero! (Thanks Kathryn for that tip!!)
17. The FireFox Browser: There’s just so much more you can do with FireFox than you can with other browsers. I regularly use extensions such as “Scrapbook” to archive websites, “FireFTP” to quickly transfer files, “Firebug” to find sneaky pieces of web code, and of course helpers such as LibX, Delicious, and Zotero.
18. Scrivener: I’ve only just begun using this but I like it so far! It seems to ‘organise’ writing the way that I like to work. We’ll see how it goes!
19. Skitch: A mac app for assisting with screen capture. I use this a lot to create instructions for students, to take quick snapshots of pages (or parts of pages), keep Twitter messages safe, and so on. Also a great tool when constructing PowerPoint presentations.
20. A program for annotating .pdf’s: Adobe Professional ($$$) and Preview (on Mac) both make annotating .pdfs easy. I mark student assignments using Preview by inserting comments and scribbling (literally) over their work. I find it far easier and more flexible (especially with the scribbles!) than using “track changes” in Word.
21. CoverItLive: A great tool for ‘covering’ a conference by bringing in a range of feeds and peoples to a web audience. It can be quite intensive to use (I end up focusing so much on what is really a transcription exercise that I don’t listen/engage in the same way I normally would or make my own notes and meta-notes) but it is one of my favourite tools for relaying conference presentations due to its ease of use. Plus you can always go back and re-visit what was said! Check out my EuroCALL Conference posts to see it in re-action
22. Freemind: An open-source mind-mapping tool. There’s other ones around, but this one is free, easy to use, and offers a range of formats.
23. QuickTime: I do a lot of video editing in my research work and the new version of QuickTime with its “trim” functionality has dramatically reduced the number of steps and time it takes to edit clips!

So there you have it. My favourite web/computer-based Things. Of course, I use a lot more than this (I hardly mentioned productivity/presentation tools like Word, PowerPoint, iMovie, etc.) but in a 23 Things programme, I think these would make the list.

What would you add or replace?

There must be something more interesting for social scientists to do with their computers than coding data.

Mason & Dicks, 2001, p. 441.

And I certainly agree! I gave a “Friday Morning Seminar” presentation to the faculty of Education a couple of weeks ago in which I described how I am using technologies to research technologies.

When I first started this research “journey,” I was highly influenced by what I read in the Horizon Report. I knew that working and researching in the field of educational technologies would mean that my work would be quickly outdated unless I was very forward thinking. My “contribution to knowledge” may be obsolete before I could even start writing! In this goal of forward-thinking, the Horizon Report was of great help. The Horizon Project, for which the report is produced, “charts the landscape of emerging technologies for teaching, learning and creative inquiry.” And so in writing my research proposal, I paid close attention to the ideas and technologies the report charted for 3-5 years time (now!). I was particularly interested in the ideas of “The New Scholarship and Emerging Forms of Publication” and, of course, the many tools that would (could) be used for and in research.

Cue a few technological developments that occurred as I engaged field work, in a very short amount of time. Digital still cameras became far cheaper and accessible, often with video capture; netbooks (sub notebooks) were released and again, were cheap and accessible; USB digital video cameras became the norm rather than tape-based cameras; WiFi became widespread not just in libraries but also in cafes and many schools; wireless broadband coverage increased and became a viable option; and finally the iPhone was released. Online video (YouTube, for instance), blogging, and data storage in “the cloud” also became a part of many web users’ vocabularies. I experimented using all of these tools during my field work to capture, collect, collate and re-present data. With traditions of ethnography in mind, I was looking and seeing (ala Harry Wolcott) technology in classroom case-studies using technology to do so, and now I am evaluating its use. What happened? How? Why? Was there any (perceived) benefit to using ICTs when more ‘traditional’ methods may have sufficed? But my biggest question -

How do we ensure that looking with technology (in ethnographic fieldwork) is good looking?

Stay tuned – this is what I’ll be writing about over the next few weeks. But first, the nitty gritty of the methodology chapter!

]]> http://www.exploringthehyper.net/blog/2010/03/upcoming-friday-seminar/feed/ 0 http://www.exploringthehyper.net/blog/2009/09/eurocall-day-3/ http://www.exploringthehyper.net/blog/2009/09/eurocall-day-3/#comments Sat, 12 Sep 2009 00:00:47 +0000 Penny Coutas http://www.exploringthehyper.net/blog/?p=455

This trip has been months in the planning. Years, even. I’ve always wanted to go to Europe, and this is a great opportunity. Although the university funding only partially pays for expenses, without it I’d not be going at all, so I am very grateful!

I will blog more about my paper presentation later, but it’s my Poster (with a capital ‘P’!) that has been occupying my time recently. Mimpi, my cat, has been a lot of help as you can see.

And the finished product:

In order to demonstrate the value-addedness of digital media, I’ve included an iPod with 5 audio tracks and a digital photo frame with a few photos. I had thought about attaching an iRiver with video footage, but the menu system on those cheap players is too complex for a poster. I’ve tried to keep it as simple as possible so that “viewers” can just press a button rather than having to scroll through layered menus.

I found constructing this poster to be a useful way of planning my methodology chapter, and visualising it in a different way. The challenge of incorporating audio-visual material alongside static, written text was also interesting. The aim, after all, is to value-add and not just to “add”. In this, I’m guided by Coffey et al. (2006, p. 19) who tell us:

“…multimodal research is not simply a mosaic, which adds together various separate forms of modes of data (including visual data). The contemporary technological environment potentially widens the opportunities for multimedia (re)presentation of data and for the emergence of new multi-semiotic forms of analysis and argument – enabling the innovative inclusion of film and video, still images, documentary materials, sound clips, online and other digital data alongside textual representations”

And so I’m enabled to include these on a poster.

We’ll see what the response is :)

You can see the full poster as a Scribd document here.

I attended Educause Australasia on May 04 and 05 in Perth, my home city. Educause is a non-profit organisation “…whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting intelligent use of information technology.” And so although it was not entirely aligned with my own research interests, being very-much K-12 focused, it was still relevant because I am a higher education student engaging with information technologies in order to undertake my research and studies. In other words, I am practicing what “they” are preaching, and exploring how the theory works in practice (on a shoestring student budget).

Many of the streams of the conference were obviously aimed towards the “senior decision makers” identified on the conference website blurb. The high registration fees also made this a somewhat exclusive event, and perhaps had an impact on attendance numbers.  I was lucky to receive a student registration to the conference, and this enabled me to give a poster presentation on my own work in progress and also be part of a panel presentation entitled Personal Learning Environments: What Works for Librarians, representing the library-user voice.

Our presentation was very well received. I had only met one of the other panel members in person before the conference as we had done our planning as a group over two Skype sessions. During the first session, we set up a wiki site to aid our planning, and in second a presentation using Google Docs which we edited during the Skype call. I then “prettied it up” later on, but kept the slide content the same. PowerPoint/slide presentations are a useful way to structure and plan a presentation, and helps get presenters into “presentation space”. Google Docs is a great way of managing/facilitating this “space” for a group effort, even if it does not end up being used. I edited the slides during the presentation itself based on audience responses to our question, “What do you want to know?” We then revisited those questions towards the end of our “chat”. In fact, the audience were our co-presenters throughout the panel presentation and made it both interactive and dynamic. Our presentation was more of a discussion in this way, and it is a format I would like to repeat.

The "backchannel" during our "PLE for Librarians" presentation

The image above is taken from the CoverItLive recording of the second day of the conference relayed through http://librariansinteract.info. Using CoverItLive was a new experience for me. I was vaguely familiar with the tool, having heard about it in the blogosphere, but had never used it as a participant. CoverItLive works by having streams of content from a variety of sources fed into the one place for presentation/embedment in a blog/website/wiki/etc. It is also possible to update from the CoverItLive tool itself, and respond to comments/questions from people who may be “listening in” (“viewing in?”) remotely.

CoverItLive was a convenient way to manage a filtered backchannel during the conference. Twitter * was used by many of the conference participants, and although the official #edaust09 tag helped manage the conversations (we trended under “swine flu” and above “Wolverine” at one stage!), tweets were both formal and informal, and sometimes difficult to keep up with. CoverItLive made the conversations (more) manageable for relaying conference plenaries and concurrent sessions. At times I found myself physically in one presentation but following another!  That said, use of Twitter enabled a sense of community and comradeship (“I’m on my way to #edaust09″; “Looking forward to #edaust09″; etc.) and helped speed up and strengthen the formulation of new frolleagues and so the combination of the two was very effective for me.

Much has been said about the benefits and disadvantages of formal and informal backchannels during conferences. It is only recently that they have become more normalised, however, and only a few years ago I would feel very much like a naughty school child “playing up” at the back of the room whilst using them.  In my view, participation in a backchannel represents more on-task engagement than off, and a deeper engagement with the proceedings than would otherwise be possible: one is commenting and reflecting in situ for a particular audience. However, I also found backchannel participation during #edaust09 quite demanding and that it represented surface-level learning. I found myself relaying information rather than commenting or critiquing it, and that I had no time to write my own notes. The notes I took were intended for others, and I missed the meta-note-taking that I usually write: the notes about my notes and the jotting of ideas as they occur, sparked by something in a presentation.  Many conference tweets were similar: we relayed the main points; made comments about presentation style; organised meet-ups and lunches; and threw in a few quick polls.  Critical discussion of issues and themes presented in the sessions rarely occurred.  That said, this was not unique to the backchannel: questions were rarely asked “in real life” either.    This is where the skills of a moderator, “critical friend,” or provocateur would come in handy – someone needs to ask the hard questions either in real life or in the virtual one, or both.

It was an intensive two days for me, and a very worthwhile experience. The content may not have been new, but the process of participation and engagement certainly was.