In the past week, the issue of the uptake of innovation or technology has arisen in two of our projects - one considering implementation of new LMS in the NHS, and the other at the usage of e-portfolios (and other e-assessment) in Further Education Skills for Work courses.

So, I've been reading round the subject, looking at a variety of models - the most well known probably being Rogers' Innovation Curve (or Technology Adoption Lifecycle), and have just found
"The pencil metaphor". I like this idea, where Lindy McKeown uses the idea of a pencil (and related puns!) to demonstrate ICT uptake in Education. Some aspects of her ideas match up well with Roger's model, particularly at the 'sharp' end!

Labels: adoption, assessment, education, elearning, furthereducation, ICT, innovation, innovationcurve, model, NHS, technology, uptake

Back in March, I attended the JISC 2009 conference, aptly entitled Opening Digital Doors. It was one of those mega events, where you spotted people across the hall, but got caught up in the melee before you could speak to them. That said, I quite liked the informal nature of the drop in demos in the foyer, even managing to find out what QR codes really are, courtesy of Andy Ramsden.

The morning session I sat in on showcased three projects that had trialled very different approaches to using technology to improve student motivation and retention, all under the theme of "Every Learner Counts".

Nicola Whitton described how alternate reality games (ARG) had been used for supporting University student induction, one of the key stages in retaining students. The Argosi project setup urban challenges, and other "purposeful activities" for meeting people and working together, which wasn't necessarily around going to pubs! There was also mention of an ARG framework/toolkit for supporting student induction, which presumably will be released soon.

Hesan Yousif talked about the SPLASH project (student personal learning and social homepages). SPLASH is essentially a social software portal, where academic information is juxtaposed alongside local information and student generated content, with students deciding what they want on their own homepage. Like an iGoogle for students at Sussex. This is an initiative I'd looked at before, as we have done some other work on the potential of web2.0 portals for learners in the NHS. Great to see a working version, and Hesan gave us some interesting anecdotes to how students are using it. He highlighted how blogs had facilitated a sense of community on campus - topics covered experiences of life on campus, student union engagement, politics, photos, etc. He also noted that staff had picked up on the facility, suggesting they might like a similar resource.

Finally, Lucy Stone from Leicester College described the outcomes from the WoLF project (Workbased Learners in Further Education). On the JISC website this is billed as Pocket PCs to support portfolio development by work-based learners in FE, not such a good acronym but perhaps a better description. This project was focused on teaching assistants in early years settings, many with years of experience, but all subject to the strong governmental driver for minimum qualifications for education workers. As they are only in college four hours a week, every minute (as well as every learner) counts. Also key was keeping in contact with learners. Hence learners were given PDAs, and Moodle was set up as a platform for sharing (see the WoLF site, which also contains much of the project outputs, including this literature review of workbased mobile learning). As all students and tutors were new to moodle, there was an induction session. Given the time issue, it was essential that this was purposeful in relation to the course, and those tutors who really engaged with the concept saw this as well as the value of induction. Benefits could be seen in the use of a reflective journal within moodle, which meant that tutors could gauge student skills earlier than the standard model of course submission. This also enabled students to receive rapid feedback very early on in process.

Labels: #jisc09, conference, elearning, FE, HE, induction, mobile learning, Moodle, motivation, retention, web2.0

Yes, this is a Lego Ada Lovelace, image by Dunechaser via Flickr

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. As part of the celebration, if that is the right word, I've pledged to blog about a female role model. Thinking about it, this is pretty hard, with a background in science I can only remember two female lecturers, a supervisor and one female boss. I don't think any would stand out as a role model for their use of technology.

Image via Wikipedia

So perhaps a woman from history would be fitting. The only female recipient of two Nobel prizes, Marie Curie is truly inspiring on the intellectual and human level. She worked to pay for her sister's education, before attending the Sorbonne University herself. Having discovered that x-rays could kill tumours, she did not patent the methods she and her husband developed to process radium nor the medical applications. Hence both her scientific knowledge and conscious generosity still contribute to many peoples lives today.

Oh, and being a woman at the turn of the century, she was turned down for a seat with the French Academy of Sciences.

Labels: Ada Lovelace, Marie Curie, Nobel Prize

We ran two evaluation workshops last month. Starting each day by exploring what evaluation is. This included some visual representations of how individuals thought of evaluation. Various themes emerged, some related to the overall process of evaluation, with several people referring to evaluation as a journey, some along twisting roads or with occasional diversions along dead-ends that may lead to adapting evaluation strategies. There was also frequent reference to the value of continual reflection, evaluation thus being very much an iterative process where original assumptions may need to be revisited. This was also demonstrated with the view of evaluation of a tree that grows and bears fruit. It also needs to be flexible (also like a tree). There was a lot of discussion of the value of evaluation for capturing learning, although it was noted that capturing the journey is no easy task.

One picture that really caught my attention was this 'evaluation whirlwind', or maybe it was a tornado. I'm not sure what the person who drew it had it mind, but it made me think of evaluation of a process that can pull in all kinds of data, some of which may be messy and windblown, formative evaluation takes place while lots of activity is going on around you, but at the end could filter down to some form of consensus.

Labels: evaluation, JISC, visualisation

Having failed miserably to maintain any kind of consistent blog output, I'm going to try out the new toys route. I've just installed Scribefire, which is an add-on for Firefox. Looking quite easy so far, just click on the button and the lower half of the browser window becomes a blog posting panel. Hmm, no success in linking to my blog account... back to posting from blogger.

I'm also going to try out Zemanta, which bills itself as a tool for pooling photos, url

Image via CrunchBase

s (automatic links even!), highlighting what's happening in twitter, recommending tags, and other stuff.

Zemanta has launched in blogger! It is indeed suggesting tags, and finding (relevant!) photos. Such as this logo

No more excuses...

Labels: Blog, Firefox, ScribeFire, Zemanta