Suzi's Notebook

Contact tracer - weeknotes s1e3

The poetically named Teaching Block One is now in full swing. Everyone is busy. Everyone has freshers flu, or we all do at least.

My bit of my team is gearing up for online courses and online marking. A team we are working with, who I thought planned to do a lot more of what they were doing last year, turn out on closer inspection to mean by that they would like to do a whole range of things, more complicated things. This will be fine, and it is not their fault at all, but it’s ... a teachable moment for me I guess.

We had detailed and careful conversations with them about their use of technology, helped them decide and supported them, but didn’t then involve ourselves when they had conversations about what should happen next year. Then came a kind of chinese whispers… there should be a term for the way information about what technology is and how it works is gradually distorted in large organisations as chains of people who don’t have the full picture (and maybe have taken hold of bits of other pictures) describe it to each other.

Anyway, I should have stayed more involved and at least kept repeating some of the key messages, as they were - in retrospect - bound to be forgotten once the initial discussions were over and they were no longer relevant.

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My working pattern now makes it easier for me to go along to PM Studios for their lunchtime talks, and I’ve seen a couple of fantastic ones recently.

Last Friday it was Awais Rashid talking about using a cooperative game to explore professional / organisational cybersecurity strategies. The game is Decisions and Disruptions. Fascinating project and a great talk.

Before that I saw Chloe Meineck talking about the work of her design agency, which focuses on mental health and wellbeing. She talked in detail about her Music Memory Box and Trove projects.

I loved the projects, in part, for their non-digital interfaces. There’s something magical about physical objects doing the kinds of things that we expect screens to do. Life is so saturated with screen time, and this week I read was yet another report on the negative effects of screen-time.

When we introduce technologies, should we be measuring how much screen time and sedentary time we are adding to how many people’s lives, what that’s replacing, whether that’s justifiable?

The best technologies are the ones that make things happen in the real world. Painful and poisonous as I’ve found the level of debate on social networks recently, I love them still because they’ve allowed me to meet real people in the real world, to go along to events I would likely not have known about otherwise, to organise and connect with other people in my street, my kids’ classes, at my work.

Meineck’s work was inspiring. She seemed to have a very genuine insight and connection to the people she was designing for. That wasn’t talent or disposition alone. She talked passionately about listening to people, understanding what they feel they need, involving them in generating the ideas, co-creating in the design process. I’m thinking again about my lack of connection with our students, even with our academics. The relatively minimal interactions I have with everyone outside my team, because we are so busy and so are they. And I *hate* wasting people’s time. And it’s hard working honestly and openly with people because you can’t hide your mistakes or the gaps in your knowledge. But that contact is so important.

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(On titles - couldn't see a way to use Black Bob's Hamburger Suit or Wives of Great Men so I've skipped right ahead - I hope anyone who has a clue what these are about will excuse me.)

We love you: that's why we're here - weeknotes s1e2

Spent a sunny lunchtime sitting in Woky Ko eating their duck noodle salad and reading Hail the Maintainers, both of which I’d recommend. I liked the idea that innovation is what used to be called progress, only without the claim to actually improve anything.

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Next week is Welcome Week - Week Zero - when the students return. This is preparation time for the university. For me that’s meant chasing people to find out what they are expecting from us, and documenting things, and working through last year’s stuff to decide what is still relevant. Housekeeping, maintaining.

I like this time though. The university always seems to me to have a rhythm and a prevailing mood. The beginning of the year is the most hopeful, optimistic time.

With a colleague I’ve been talking about trying to help network staff who are interested in teaching using games, and those who are doing so already. I hope that people would like to share, partly because I’d like to hear what they’re doing and partly because (I think) this is a relatively fringe area of teaching and it would be helpful for people to know about others who are doing it. At the moment though all we have is a stone and we can only hope to end up with soup.

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I’m writing this post at the weekend rather than as I go, which isn’t what I intended for this. As well as housekeeping, the last three weeks have been about balancing - failing to balance - work and home. Littlest started school and that brought with it the dreaded Settling In Period: three weeks of short school days which don’t remotely fit with having two working parents. Well, we got through it.

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And now it is the first day of welcome week. The week when we should see the students arrive and move slowly and block doorways and generally be new. But our new office doesn’t put us anywhere near this, and I do feel very disconnected and I do miss it. Working so removed from it makes more of a difference to what my job seems to be than I would ever have guessed.

A very long way from anywhere - weeknotes s1e1

What better time to start blogging about work than when I’m on holiday?

But today - a day from our staycation week - I found myself working on the reading for the next reading group, and then going to a shop, and the person who helped me in the shop was a current student. They wanted to talk about their experience of the university (they feel disconnected - so few contact hours, so many connections outside university) and about online marking (approves on the whole, very much approves of less paper, picked up one lot of essay feedback on top of a mountain using their phone because they could, finds the feedback less thorough than when people mark with pen and paper). Sees being my age (in your mid-40s) as old, and a good enough excuse for not being comfortable with technology. Yikes.

Anyway, I am sitting in a cafe a stone's throw from the office, choosing to think about work, on my day off. So maybe I like my job better than I give myself credit for.

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Small aside from our week by the sea.

On the pedalos, eldest declaring that as she was steering we were going to zigzag across the lake because “if you’re going in a straight line you’re not really steering”. This is a common misconception in the world of work too.

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And now we’re back.

I was thinking again about the student I spoke to and how different their experience of what university is seemed to mine - in particular the lack of connection.

When I was at university it was all-consuming. Everything was the university. I lived in halls for three years, I didn’t have a job, I knew no one there who wasn’t a current student or a member of staff. I didn’t have contact with friends from home while I was there. Only occasionally did I venture into the parts of town that weren’t effectively part of the university.

Being disconnected sounds like a problem, and it was one of the first things the student said to me so maybe they felt like it was a problem to them. But it may have advantages compared to the strange and secluded life I led as a student. Anyway, it’s different and it’s good to be reminded of what I don’t know.

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I found the weeknotes idea via @jukesie, like many good things. I'm note sure this really counts as a weeknote as it covers two weeks and those weren't working weeks. But it's a start :)

OER18: a new hope

A couple of weeks ago I went along to OER18, a conference on open educational resources. I'd been once before back in 2013 and as this year's was in Bristol I was really pleased to have the chance to attend. These are my, somewhat tardy, notes from the event...

Though I’m by nature a bit of a cockeyed optimist (in every sense) I’m finding hope a bit thin on the ground at the moment. My impression is there’s a lot of this about, living as we do in interesting times. So this slide, from Catherine Cronin’s talk, struck a chord with me:

“To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable.” Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark

And for me, OER 18 was above all a very hopeful, positive event.

I was also very pleased to see lots that was critical, self-critical too. People were questioning who benefits and whose voices are amplified when you make things open, and how you can foster genuine participation. This reminded me of debates around open software and how open it really is - and many years back of reading A Room of One’s Own and thinking it should be required reading for open software advocates.

The conference gave me renewed motivation and the chance to meet a lot of fantastic people doing a lot of fantastic things. But there was plenty on the practical side too so here are some of my favourite stealable ideas...

Helping staff understand copyright for reuse

Glasgow Caledonian found that understanding copyright was a barrier to their staff reusing content so made a quick, self-service copyright advisor. It’s very easy to use and has a traffic light system to indicate whether you can go ahead, need to investigate further, or can’t use the resource. The advice is cc-by licensed so could easily be repurposed, and they are currently developing an HTML5 version.

Approaches to institutional repositories

Southampton have developed EdShare for managing and hosting open content, with EdShare Hub now being developed to bring together content from the institutions using EdShare. It has been integrated into their systems and processes with their comms and marketing team use EdShare behind their iTunesU and their medical school having MedShare. For further information see this presentation on EdShare from the ALT 2017 Winter Conference.

Edinburgh have an OER policy but they don’t have an institutional repository. Resources are shared on whichever online platform is most appropriate. They have accounts on Vimeo, Flickr, and similar services and through this approach hope to encourage true openness and adaptability. They also have a media asset management platform called Media Hopper.

Teaching API’s through Google Sheets

Martin Hawksey ran a good session, introducing the basics of APIs using a practical Google Sheets / Flickr exercise. Martin’s slides and the associated worksheet are available for reuse (cc-by).

Microlearning: TEL cards

Daniel Hardy and Matthew Street from Keel showed us the cards they had produced to promote various practices to staff. These sit within the VLE. The TEL cards code is available on GitHub.

Provocations

In the Breaking Open session, we were given a series of provocations relating to who is excluded from or disadvantaged by open education practices. I like the way we (in groups of 6 or so) were asked to interact with these provocations:

• Choose one of the statements to work with
• What is the worst case, the worst things that could happen
• What could you do to make that worst case happen?
• What are you doing that might be contributing to the worst case?

The session worked well, although on my table at least there seems some defensiveness and a fixed idea that: open = good. I appreciated having contributors videoconference in and form their own virtual workshop table for the activity. Further information including the provocations are on the Towards Openness site.

Lightning keynotes

The final keynote was left open and people were invited to, during the event, come forward if they would like to give a 5 minute reflection during this session. Honestly I was a little sceptical about how this would work but it was fantastic. I was particularly pleased to see two of the people whose earlier sessions I had found most interesting, Taskeen Adam and Prittee Auckloo, giving their take on what they had seen.

Inspiring student projects

Addressing shortage of materials / perspectives through OER

Lorna Campbell, in her keynote, mentioned an Edinburgh project addressing lack of materials around LGBT+ healthcare, with students adapting existing materials.

Welsh Wikipedia content

Jason Evans, National Wikipedian at the National Library of Wales, works with university and school students to help them write and contribute to Welsh-language wikipedia. Basque universities have used a similar model with their students.

Moving witch trials data to Wikidata

Ewan McAndrew from Edinburgh talked about working with MSc Data Design students to move an existing Access database of information about witchcraft trials onto Wikidata to make it available to researchers. Students also produced videos using the data.

Geoscience Outreach course

Stephanie (Charlie) Farley from Edinburgh talked about a course within Geoscience on co-creation of OERs. Students are paired up with community organisations, schools, etc and work to produce a piece of science communication or educational resource for that group. Students have produced events and apps and board games, as well as video and learning materials. The university hires student interns over the summer who work with selected students to polish their projects and promoted them as OERs.

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.