Notebook

Wiki etiquette for group projects

Draft guidelines for students.

Be polite and show respect to other members of your group.  Give praise for good contributions and make your comments constructive.  But…

Don't take it personally when people comment on or edit your work.

Dive in, add text and edit other people's work.  It's how wikis are designed to work.  If you make a mistake you can always revert to an earlier version.  But…

Avoid radically altering other people's work, especially if you don't agree with them.  Seek out a way to reach agreement by talking to them about it directly if you can, or by using comments or the discussion forum.

Structure the information on the wiki by using section headings, lists, and by breaking it into sub-pages where appropriate.  Review the wiki regularly to make sure it's tidy and the structure's still appropriate to your content.

Reference your work and give full credit to sources, as you would in any other assignment.

Grading multiple-response questions fairly

I've been looking for a sensible way of scoring multiple-response questions (question where the student may select more than one answer).

An attractive approach is put forward in "CAA - It's a MUGS Game! Does the Mathematics of CAA Matter in the Computer Age?" by Michael McCabe and David Barrett (Portsmouth).  Their system gives a mean undeucated guesser's (MUG's)  score of 0 and awards partial marks for partial knowledge of an answer.  They show that this can be achieved by setting:

• score for each correct choice = number of incorrect choices
• score for each incorrect choice = - (number of correct choices)

They touch on the importance of making the mark scheme clear to the students (I think that lots of practice quizzes, with feedback, are the only realistic way to achieve this).

As they point out, their mark scheme is only valid if you tell the students how many responses are correct for each question.  If you simply say "Which of the following..." you just have a series of t/f questions.

They promote the idea of using mathematics to generate other fairer mark systems, for example by using the correlation coefficient to mark ranking questions, but point-out that this would require CAA systems that can handle non-integer grades.

What's so great about software testing...

... or at least what I enjoy about it is that it's a kind of battle of wills.  Finding bugs is (usually) pretty easy.  Convincing the programmers that the bugs exist is another matter altogether.

RSS and information overload

I find that with RSS readers that tell me how many stories I have not read, it's like a game where I want to keep the count to zero.

So I was thinking this morning that what I would like is an RSS reader that doesn't tell me how many stories I haven't read, but will pick me out a coffee-break's worth at random (probably about 3) from my unread stories.  Something more like a Last.fm radio station.

The benefit of being there

With a couple of conferences / events coming up that too many people at work want to go to, I was thinking about the benefit of attending events - not being that you learn anything you wouldn't have learnt from a few hours research on the web (often, even less time) ... but that you come away feeling inspired.  Creating Passionate Users recently expressed very similar thoughts in in their post about SXSW Interactive.

I wonder to what extent the same ideas apply to the discussions about recording lecturers.  In my experience so far, many lecturers are at one entranced by the idea of being recorded and fearful that students won't attend the lectures .. and that it's all a big government ploy to further slash spending on HE.  And even to my other half, a lecturer, I sometimes find myself saying ... so what if it is.

Supposing inspiration and motivation can only really be delivered face-to-face.  Will there be no impact on student attendance - will they come anyway?  Will lecturers who are at the "inspiration" part be less likely to see attendance drop if lectures are available online?  Should students be made to keep attending, for the good of their own motivation?

Checklist for recording lectures with Camtasia

Preparing for the lecture

• Test your presentation on a PC running PowerPoint.  Camtasia will only run on a PC.  If you usually use a Mac it's sensible to test on a PC before the lecture as presentations can look different on a Mac.
• It will help the students if you give the slides meaningful names.

Starting the lecture

1. Check the radio mic it is switched on
2. Put on the radio mic
3. Open your PowerPoint presentation
4. Click the "Record" button in the toolbar.  The first slide of your presentation will appear, with a box in the corner allowing you to check the computer is picking up your microphone.  
5. Say a few words into the mic and adjust the recording volume if you need to. The audio levels should go into the green, possibly into the yellow but not into the red.
6. Click the "Click to begin recording" button

In the Camtasia PowerPoint toolbar, there are a number of icons:

• Record (red dot icon): begin the presentation
• Record audio (microphone icon): on/off
• Record camera (webcam icon): on/off
• Show camera preview (webcam and screen icon): on/off
• Camtasia options (hand pointing to list icon): includes set whether to record mouse cursor, which input to record audio from, test microphone levels.

Audio problems?

If the audio doesn't seem to be working, check that:

• mic and receiver are both switched on
• receiver is plugged into a microphone socket on the computer
• in the toolbar, "Record Audio" is selected
• under "Camtasia options", there's an advanced audio settings button - this will allow you to check that Camtasia is trying to pick up the audio from the right place.  For example, it could be trying to record the speakers rather than the microphone.  Or there may be more than one place ("jack") that the microphone could be plugged into, and it may be recording from the wrong one.

After the lecture

1. A prompt will appear at the end of your lecture.  Click "stop recording".  
2. You'll then be asked where you want to save the file.  Click on "My Compuer", then select "C:" and the folder called "UNIV10001".  You should find a folder with your name - save the file in there.  It doesn't matter what the file name is, but don't overwrite existing files.
3. Remove the radio mic and switch it off.  

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! to develop ethical code of conduct

According to an article in the Register.  Not much information, but they're working with Human Rights Watch, the Centre for Democracy and Technology (CDT) in Washington and Berkman Centre for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and they have said that companies signing up to the code of conduct will be held accountable.  All of which is good.

Finding good podcasts

Now that so many universities are making lectures available online, I wonder if anyone has a system for reviewing and rating them, or for sharing related material.  As the material is on such a diverse range of subjects and each lecture is likely to be an hour long I doubt that one person, or even one blog, could handle the task.

A site reviewing lecturers as well as lectures might be appropriate (and sites for reviewing lecturers already exist - such as Rate My Professors) ... but I'm not entirely sure how useful what 18-year-olds studying full-time think about the lecturer or material would be particularly relevant to me.

There are several sites listing available educational podcasts:

• Open Culture's list of university podcast sites
• Eliteskills.com's list of resources is well organised and highlights video as well as audio lectures

There's also been a converation on lifehacker about transcribing podcasts. The conclusion so far seems to be that it's still a task for people rather than machines, but there's some useful advice in there.

eLearning Reading List

Online journals of eLearning:

• JUTLP (Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice)
• JALN (Journal of Asynchronous Learning Netwoks)
• JLD (Journal of Learning Design)

Events round-up

Some (potentially) interesting events that I've heard about recently.  No firm plans to go to any of them at the moment.

13 March - JISC Conference - Birmingham

22 March - Shock of the Old 6 - Oxford - £90 (academic)
A one day conference in Oxford on Web 2.0 (and "related collaborative technologies").  Call for papers currently open.  Looks very broad.

16 May - Virtual Fieldwork in Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences - Worcester - Free
"This one-day conference seeks to explore, in a relaxed, informal atmosphere, some of the pedagogical and technological aspects of virtual fieldwork... In addition, there will be an opportunity to try out some of the equipment and software used in producing virtual fieldwork content.

10-11 July - Computer Aided Assessment Conference - Loughborough - £460 (early bird)
Topics covered are expected to include accessibility, case studies, evaluation, free text and speech, item banking, national and international initiatives, novel question and assessment design, peer and group work, pedagogy, policies and procedures, services, standards, student experiences, training and support as well as tools and services.