All 21 entries tagged Warwick University

Against the division of academic and social blogging

Follow-up to Selling Warwick Blogs to Warwick from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

Quick answer to Dan: opinion is divided as to whether there should be a formal division between academic and social blogging. But there are some strong arguments against it.

Firstly, here's a sweeping generalisation: people from the sciences and engineering have a more clear division between work and socialising. Is that because they work in spaces that are more formally designated as working spaces: the lab? Whereas people from the Arts do much of their work in spaces that accomodate both social and working activity. For some people, blogging is about recording and reflecting upon real-time events, which for people from Arts, may combine work and social. In fact they may not even concieve of a strong difference between the two. In the distant past, when Kieran and I first thought about the combination of social and academic in a single blog, I think we decided that forcing an artificial division on people would be wrong. Instead, they are left to make the distinctions themselves, if they want a distinction. The method through which they can make that distinction is categorisation, and if they so wish, also permissions control. Categorisation is not perfect, but it does allow for social and academic blogging to happen together in combination. A single entry may record the social and the academic aspects of an event, even when that event is more academic oriented. But as I said, this approach leaves it up to the individual.

A second, and perhaps more pressing requirement is this: we want undergraduates to develop confidence in their abilities to write about what they are doing, and implicitly, to become more confident about what they are doing. Confidence is a big issue for first years. We do not expect them to start writing academically sophisticated blog entries right away. If they can write cogent accounts of their university experience in general, then that would be good. If they then include some details of their academic activities within those more general entries, that would be better. If they go on to writing accounts of their academic activities, that would be superb. The PDP people at Warwick, whose job is to work out ways to improve personal student development, have seen blogging as a means of encouraging students to develop a joined-up whole person view of life at Warwick, and to make the transition to thinking and speaking confidently about their academic and social activities together. Forcing them to see the world as divided between academic and social activities may work against this.

Robert O'Toole : 20 Dec 2004 09:53 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (4) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Selling Warwick Blogs to Warwick

Selling blogs to Warwick, that's a part of my job. Or at least I should say that part of the still significant task of selling blogs to the University, the whole University, is up to me and the small team of people that I work with. I am the Arts Faculty E-learning Advisor, one of four such advisors, each assigned to a different faculty. I am also one of the people who convinced IT Services and Elab to build Warwick Blogs. Why did I do that? Partly because I want to use it for my PhD, and partly because I wish I could have had it when I was an undergraduate here ten years ago.

If you are reading this entry then almost certainly you have already bought into Warwick Blogs, you have been converted. Maybe you are even addicted to it. But you have probably bought into just one specific idea of what Warwick Blogs is about, one that is quite different to the many ideas that I am trying to sell people. That in itself is OK, but you have to realise this:

Warwick Blogs is a powerful and sophisticated tool. We tell people that it is just a clever kind of notebook or journal, but in fact it is far much more than that. It's potential is huge. It's applications numerous. That's why the team who visited us from Oxford University this week were in awe at what we have done.

There is a need to be open minded about blogs. For all of those people who have done so much to make it their own, to define what it seemed to be to anyone looking at its old homepage, think of the potential uses and the users who might interpret things quite differently. Think of the researcher for whom it might be a useful writing tool, or the international student showing his funders back home what he is part of.

At the moment the system has been occupied by a small percentage of those potential users, using it for a small fraction of its potential capabilities. That's good for them, but we are here to support the whole University in using IT to improve what they do. And this is a big and diverse place. Cultural change in such an environment will always be difficult, and must be handled with great sensitivity. As one of the people who has to sell Warwick Blogs to Warwick, I have a simple message to our current bloggers:

Selling new working/studying practices is really hard. Convincing people to adopt new IT practices is also really hard. Getting people from a diversity of social/academic/national cultures to adopt change at the same time is more than just difficult. The combination of these things makes for a very difficult job, and ensures that selling Warwick Blogs beyond its early adopters is quite a challenge.

I'm the guy who has to do this, and I am telling you that we are facing a big challenge! If the system needs altering to help us to meet that challenge, then it has to be altered. Trust me, I work on this every day. I'm out there talking to people every day.

As a user of Warwick Blogs, you can either help us with this, help us to reach a wider range of people with a wider range of users, or you can decide that you would rather keep the system to yourself, to people just like you. What would be the right thing to do? Here's a little exercise to help you understand (perhaps you could answer it on your blog):

1. think about why you use Warwick Blogs, list the things that you get out of it;
2. consider how those values are dependent upon the ways in which you like to do things, and upon your working, studying and social practices;
3. consider how lucky you are that the University has developed a system to help you do those things;
4. now try to consider people with different values and different practices – if you can't come up with lots of examples, then you really are narrow minded!
5. consider if your view of what Warwick Blogs should be like will also provide a system that is attractive to them;
6. consider if this will lead to an un-feasibly complex system;
7. now think about the difficult task that eLab has in pleasing as wide a population as possible.

Hard isn't it!

A summary

I think that the changes to the Warwick Blogs home page are about making it more neutral. I am saying that this is essential if we are to sell it to a wider range of people, which we must do.

The old home page presented a view of what Warwick Blogs is being used for now, rather than what it could be used for. Unfortunately, potential users look at the content on the home page and think "that's not for me, that's not what i want my activities associated with". And they turn away. Yes, the changes are a marketing move. The home page was intended as a marketing tool. And as such, it has to represent a wide range of possible uses.

Robert O'Toole : 16 Dec 2004 16:46 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (41) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Plan for introduction to PDP using blogs for history students

Later today Kay and I will be doing a presentation to all of the History Department 1st year undergrads. We will explain to them PDP, convince them that it is essential, and show them how blogs can help them with it. The plan for my half of the session, specifically about blogs, is below…

What is a blog (show blog and demo features)?

• a sophisticated online notebook or journal;
• belongs to a single person, the blog owner;
• the owner chooses the title and design of the blog;
• the owner creates categories into which they can organise their entries.
• the owner writes entries in the blog;
• the owner decides on who can read and comment on each entry;
• every blog has a url that starts with http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/ and includes the name of the owner.
• a blog directory for finding people's blogs (see blog homepage).

Get them to write down my url, then comment on this entry.

How does using a blog help with skills, PDP and academic work?

Your PDP category:

You can use your PDP categeory to:

• write about how you have used, developed, and are improving your communication, IT, problem solving, study and research skills;
• record and share your plans;
• write about how you are organising your time;
• reflect upon your learning and your successes.

You can easily share these entries with your fellow students, your tutor, or the whole world. You can also restrcict access to yourself. Demonstrate writing an entry.

Academic and other categories:

You may be asked to create a category that is linked to a module. You may want to create other course related categories. You can use these to record and reflect on:

• meetings, lectures, seminars, tutorials;
• your responses to questions and ideas asked by your lecturers;
• your ideas, work and writing;
• books and other resources that you are using (book reviews);
• definitions of key terms.

Your blog is an ideal place to try out ideas and to see what other people think.

A good thing to do is to record your academic work in these categories, and then reflect upon the PDP aspects of them in your PDP category. You can use the write follow up option to write a related entry (demo this by writing a follow up entry).

Soon you will also recieve emails that suggest things for you to write about. These are optional, but hopefully will be useful. We call them prompts.

More things that you can do with blogs:

• you can very easily write book, CD and DVD (movie) reviews;
• you can find people's blogs in the blog directory;
• it includes an "About Me" page that you can use as your homepage;
• you can upload images into galleries and use them in your entries;
• select key entries from your blog to add to your CV;
• more coming soon!

Get a blog at http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk

Sign in, then register.

Robert O'Toole : 09 Nov 2004 11:51 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Blogs, the scope of offensiveness, and the democratic process.

To legislate against 'offensiveness without intent', whilst at the same time failing to specify the legally admissable scope of offensiveness, would itself be dangerous. There are many countries where this happens. The uncertainty acts to discourage people from speaking publicly, from taking any risks at all.

One solution would be to try to comprehensively define the scope of offensivness. That can of course only go so far, and may only be based on a concensus.

We should step back from this debate and consider what has gone wrong with society to lead to it. To begin with we do want people to be uncertain about the scope of offensiveness, we do want them to be self-critical. But we also want people, especially university students, to be adept at testing out the boundaries and feeling there way through the moral issues in a safe and controlled environment. Indeed we want them to learn how to set up and maintain such environments.

Traditionally, one would have friends with which one would talk, testing ideas (sounds rather Ancient Greek!). Of course that group of friends should not be entirely like-minded people. Friends with whom one can experiment, offend, be corrected, and be forgiven.

And then there must be extensions out from these groups of friends, networks into which ideas and opinions can be tested in a wider and less unpredictable environment.

And finally, once one is certain of one's ground, it is safe to go public.

I had thought that was what universities are about.

The blog system that we have designed aims to work in this way. Blog collections based on existing academic groupings already exist. We will, very soon, have the ability to create our own collections of arbitrary blogs and publish them. This will encourage the operation of the process described above. Temporarily, as a means to publicise the system, we have an entirely open blogs homepage onto which anyone may get their ideas published to the public without developing that safety. This is in some instances has a detrimental effect, but as the system gets more sophisticated in how it encourages groups of friends, this effect will subside.

Personally I see blogs, when properly implemented (and we are near to that point), as a powerful means for developing democratic society.

Robert O'Toole : 08 Nov 2004 09:12 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (32) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Simple way of doing semantic mapping in blogs

Follow-up to Semantic cartography to support conceptual development through blogs from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

And some simple ideas on how it could be done…

1) user creates list of personal favourite blog entries and urls
a) by browing someone else's entry and selecting 'add to blogroll';
b) by selecting an 'add to blogroll' option when they write an entry;
c) by selecting an 'add to blogroll' link when viewing a SiteBuilder page;
d) by typing the url into their blogroll.

2) they give the link in their blogroll a keyword.

3) when writing the body of a subsequent entry, they get a link picker that allows them to easily create a link to one of the items in their blogroll.

4) when the entry is created, the link is formatted in a special way that indicates that it is a link to a blogroll concept, with the keyword appearing on mouseover.

5) a special collection page is created for each blogroll entry showing where it has been refered from.

Robert O'Toole : 07 Nov 2004 18:10 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Semantic cartography to support conceptual development through blogs

Blogs recording the academic process

For a while now I have been using Warwick Blogs both for developing academic research and for recording my activities as an E-learning Advisor. It works well for both of these purposes. It is most effective in how it allows me to very quickly record an event. Such events may be meetings, lectures, seminars, readings (of a book chapter), or even just sessions of thinking. Theses are recorded sequentially as they occurr, within the datetime ordered structure of the blog. And I can easily jump back to a point in time to see the recording of events from that time.

Real-time engagements

We could say that these recordings are recordings of real-time engagements. Such real-time engagements are always engagements with more than one distinct but related concept. For example, in philosophy I may have a seminar that deals with modularity of mind and with artistic confinement, as two explicitly stated and applied concepts. The resulting blog entry should record how these two distinct concepts have operated together, or at least how I moved from one concept to another. These concepts are then the explicit subjects of the meeting and the resulting blog entry. Our expectation has been that the recording of real-time engagements would also result in the recording, as implicit concepts, of other aspects present in the engagement. For example, I may wish to identify that I used a specific skill. That skill and my use of it becomes a concept when I start to define it's nature, scope, and my capabilities. Other such implicit concepts may concern the intentions, agendas, perspectives, and subsequent and consequent trajectories of the engagement.

In this way, real-time engagements always consist of complex assemblages, formed from both explicit and implicit concepts, and reflectively recorded as involving both explicit and implicit concepts. These may be represented in a more or less effective way in a blog entry about the engagement.

One of the reasons for developing the Warwick Blogs system was to support the development of these concepts, both explicit and implicit, over an extended period of time. We know that concepts only get defined, skills only get developed, when they are applied to each other, in relation to each other, in real-time engagements. This is how the research process actually works. To support this development we have two mechanisms that seek to link together real-time engagements and the concepts that appear within them: categorisation and follow-up entries.

Categories as developing concepts

The most obvious mechanism is the category. By placing a series of entries in a single category the blogger indicates that they develop the concept represented by, or held within, that category. For example, there may be a category called PDP, and the concept that it represents is the quite nebulous concept of Personal Development Process.

It is true that, as entries are created in a category, over time they tend to define and develop the concept behind that category. But these categories and the concepts that they represent are broad. PDP is a big and potentially all-encompassing idea. To achieve a greater degree of granularity, one could define many different categories to represent all of the concepts that will be developed in a blog. This could ,ake for a very complex top-level view of the blog. We would also lose an important aspect of categories, a role that they perform at the top level view of the blog, in that they provide a means for dividing up the various uses of a single blog (social, academic, etc). We could use sub-categories to deal with this, but again categorisation gets quite complex.

There is, however, a more serious limitation with the method of categorisation. We know that blog entries usually report on real-time engagements. These engagements always include more than one concept, implicitly or explicitly. In the case of PDP, the engagements are likeley to be explicitly related to a subject-specific concept, and only implicitly related to PDP issues. If categorisation were to be our mechanism for identifyng the concepts dealt with by an entry, the entry would have to exist in more than one category. We could allow a single entry to appear in more than one category, but that would be both complex and unintuitive. Consider this scenario. I go to a seminar on "the transcendental deduction". The seminar deals quite intensively with Kant, but even so I notice during the seminar that I am using my notes in a different and more effective manner in response to some PDP work that I have been doing. I get home and just about have time to write a single entry to record the engagement. This entry mostly deals with Kant, but with a brief mention of the use of my new skill. Do I then classify the entry under both PDP and Research? Would my PDP category get cluttered up with academic entries that have some hard to find mention of PDP? But if I didn't in some way identify that the entry contains something of relevance to PDP, the important event of an advancement in my PDP agenda would just be lost within the complex body of entries within my Research category.

Thus categorisation is not sufficient.

Follow-up entries extracting and refining concepts

The second mechanism that we have for developing concepts in blogs is the 'follow-up' entry. This is designed to deal with the limitations of categorisation. It works as follows: I write an entry recording an engagement, I publish the entry, at a later date I re-read the entry and have some further thoughts (or possibly I have a related engagement), I use the 'write follow-up' link on the entry to write a new entry linked back to the first entry.

We had hoped that bloggers would use this to explicitly develop a concept that had been only implicitly recorded in an entry about a more complex engagement. For example, I may have a seminar that involves, amongst others, an implicit PDP related concept. I would intuitively, and due to time-constraints, record that in an entry that deals with all of the concepts involved in the engagement. In order to isolate an develop the implicit PDP concept, I would write a follow-up entry that extracts that concept out of the complexity of the engagement, defining it and reflecting upon it with greater concentration.

Note that this only works one way, I cannot currently take a set of concepts dealt with in their own blog entries and then write an entry that deals with all of them together. So a key process, synthesis or summarization is missing. However, the 'follow-up' mechanism still does present a powerful tool for working with concepts.

In reality, it is probably the case that very few people use the follow-up system because they are just too busy recording those complex real-time engagements. They hardly ever get a chance to abstract out the single concept and work on it in isolation. We may be able to encourage the use of a pedagogy that gets students to work with concepts in this way, but I suspect that even then it will not become the intuitive mode of operation.

We can therefore conclude that the 'follow-up' facility is very useful, but for the concept development that we are after, it probably requires just too much extra work to be done on a consistent and widespread basis.

Semantic mapping of real-time engagements

To find a more intuitive solution, I have concentrated on what has to be the only realistic strategy: model intuitive and commonly used workflows for concept development, and use the technology to replicate them, but with some key enhancements that give the new tools an advantage over traditional methods. I'm sure there are several ways in which researchers and students develop concepts, reflecting the diversity of methodologies between and within disciplines. Although I think we should not overemphasise this. But to start somewhere, I will start with that with which I am familiar: philosophy. So how does it work in philosophy?

Firstly, what is a concept? Without delving too deeply into the relationship between mind, language, technique and material, we could simply say that it is some repetitively appearing notion that makes a definite and reproducible difference to the way in which an aspect of the world is conceieved. For example, the concept of 'human-rights'. When this is refered to, whether I agree or disagree with the proposition within which it is deployed, I will always concieve of a human as something that may or may not lay claim to a universal right. A concept doesn't prove anything, but it does raise a set of questions, it does posit the existnce of some thing or some attribute. And most importantly, it alters the outcome of an argument or a decision.

Surprisingly, when an individual concept is introduced to a student or first encountered by a researcher, it is rarely done so with much of a definition. A concept new to the student or reader tends to be applied immediately. We may provide some indication of the key concepts that need to be observed, possibly with a rudimentary definition, but that is all. The concept is quickly deployed to make a key difference to an argument or a decision. In the context of that argument or decision, in relation to the other more familiar concepts used, and in relation to the outcome of the argument or decision, the student gets a feel for the concept. Not necessarily a complete understanding, but at least a sense of it. This sense is fundamentally a cartographic sense, a feeling for the layout of arguments and discourses with the relative and repetitive positioning of concepts forming the peaks and contours. Intuitively the student develops a semantic map of the meaning of the concepts.

As the concept is then re-encountered in different contexts, for different arguments and decisions, that sense becomes more definite, or at least greater. The students gains a stronger orientation and sense of the landscape in which they are operating. In fact the concept itself, as it is put into action repeatedly, changes and gains definition. It rises from the background cartography, with features extending outwards to meet with other concept. The activity of definition itself, textual definition, usually only occurrs at this later stage. They know where the mountains are and now set out to conquer them. It is primarily concerned with setting out the scope of the concept, stating what work it can do, what difference it can make to arguments. We could say that this activity of definition, scoping and tracking the use of concepts, is one of the most important, if not the most important, academic activity.

If we now return to a consideration of how the blog system could be used in academic activity, we can see that it fits with this analysis of the workflow and entities involved in philosophy. For example, we want first year undergraduates to encounter the key concepts of PDP as applicable to their own activities and decision making processes. We may give them a primer that identifies the useful concepts, a rough map, with some sense of their scope, importance and suggested directions. But to actualy make sense of those concepts, the student needs to start applying them. And as has been made clear, the use of those concepts, the development of that understanding, happens within real-time engagements. The same is true of philosophical concepts. So we need to give them the ability to identify when they have used the concepts, directly within the context of their use: the blog recordings of the real-time engagements. We need to make it obvious when more than one of the concepts is used in relation to another. We need to allow them to track and visualise their use of the concepts over time, as they develop. And finally, we need them to focus the application of the concepts into the development of definition. The actual functionality that is required to help with this is as follows:

1. Priming of the development with a set of key concepts to be recorded in the blog. This could be more or less self-directed. The process of identifying key concepts and adding them to the list could be the responsibility of the student/researcher. A tutor could provide the list in the module blog, module web pages, with the students creating their own instances using 'blog this'. Or they could just be suggested in lectures and seminars. Or the student could be prompted to record these key concepts and register them in their blog. We could even pre-load a blog with an entry for each key concept. Would there be a separate category for 'Key Concepts and Definitions'?
2. Use of the concepts during the recording of real-time engagements in the blog. A simple means for identifying words or blocks of text that refer to a concept. This should trackback the use of the concept to the entry in which it was defined/introduced. More than one concept can therefore be used and linked to in a single entry.
3. When reading the entry it should be clear which concepts have been used and where they have been used within the text.
4. A search facilities that returns a list of instances in which the key concept has been used, or where a set of key concepts have been used together.
5. The student extends the entry with which they define the key concept as they use the concept within their blog.
6. Relationship specifiers that identify the relationships between key concepts as they appear in entries.
7. Visualisation tools that demonstrate the relationships between key concepts and the blog entries that they appear in – concept maps of the semantic cartography.

Robert O'Toole : 07 Nov 2004 17:17 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (4) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Warwick Blogs for PhD students – intro session

I'm running a session tomorrow morning for the Graduate School to introduce some PhD students to using blogs for research work. I will start of by covering these 10 key points about Warwick Blogs:

1. a blog always has an owner, usually an individual, sometimes a team;
2. the owner chooses a title, a description, and a style;
3. it consists of a series of entries written by the owner;
4. the latest ten entries are displayed on the homepage, you can use the calendar to see older entries;
5. every entry has a category, there is a page that shows all of the entries in a category;
6. there are (currently) five types of entry, including standard, follow-up, and review entries;
7. you can allow people to comment on your entries;
8. images can be uploaded into galleries and used in entries;
9. the blog owner can control who can view and comment on each entry;
10. public entries are indexed by Google.

And then I will get them to think about ways of using blogs in the research process, for example:

• Publishing agendas
• Reporting on meetings
• Recording and commenting on reading
• Recording new ideas
• Developing ideas
• Reflecting on skills, performance etc
• Recording experimental results
• Reporting on lectures, seminars and conferences
• Book reviews
• Writing about blog entries by other researchers
• Writing about other online resources
• Publishing photos of experiments and field-trips
• Evaluating technologies and techniques
• Recording and reflecting on the development of documents.

It will be interesting to see what other ideas they have.

Robert O'Toole : 22 Oct 2004 22:45 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Be aware, Google will find your blog!

Follow-up to Chasing Che book review from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

Since the launch of Warwick Blogs i've been constantly telling people that if they write entries that are accessible to 'anyone', then Google will index your blog. Our system attracts such good Google rankings that your entry will come to the top or near to the top of peoples searches.

For example, I recently wrote a review of the book Chasing Che. If you do a Google search for that book, my review will be listed near or at the top of the results. This is a really good thing if your want your work to get noticed, and has the potential to promote Warwick's researchers. You will also probably find that, after a short time writing a blog, doing a search for your name will list you very high in the results returned. You blog is associated with your name. Which is also good.

But if you don't want your entries to be quite that public, you need to make sure that Google can't index them. To do so, you must restrict access to the entry to Staff/Students, Staff, or Students or some other defined group.

Update – if you do a search for Motorcycle Diaries review, my entry on the movie comes 11th, with only reviews from magazines etc before it in the list!

Robert O'Toole : 19 Oct 2004 16:52 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Warwick better than Oxford?

Writing about an entry you don't have permission to view

OK, some of my friends work at Oxford University Computing Services. But when I heard they are starting a blogging project, I jokingly said that 'we got there first'. To which one of them replied 'it's not a competition'.

We have a lot in common with them. Warwick and Oxford generally use an approach called 'research based teaching' which is very different and much more advanced than most other UK universities. It also expects more from the students. Blogging, we think, could be an essential element in that. And lots of others around the world are starting to agree. So despite the fact that we should work with them, it's still nice to be able to say that we're surpassing them.

A friendly rivalry!

But of course it all depends on the quality of the entries. So maybe the Warwick Bloggers can help to make us the best in Britain.

spanish america

Robert O'Toole : 19 Oct 2004 08:25 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (4) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The future of creativity software

Writing about an entry you don't have permission to view

Steve Rumsby's entry about note-taking tools that can supplement and extend blogs, along with the ensuing discussion, has made me realise just how close we are to seeing the emergence of software that supports creativity in a way that will revolutionise how we work. I think there are three key aspects to this that are being actualised in separate systems, but which at some point soon will converge.

1. Sophisticated systems for organising ideas and notes into a variety of useful rhizomatic structures. Microsoft OneNote provides a platform for recording large numbers of connected-up notes. Concept and mind mapping tools offer new ways of forming links. And the 'write follow-up' functionality in Warwick Blogs offers limited concept mapping that I hope to see become more sophisticated;
2. The software is becoming increasingly outward-resource focussed. Sampling and commenting on external resources is essential. OneNote allows the user to take screen-clippings and include them in their notes. Warwick Blogs has reviews, 'blog-this' trackbacks etc.
3. We are finding ways to extend the 'track-back- principle to other resources, and possibly all resources. For example, some of our new learning objects can be recorded in the users blog, giving the individual a record of what they have done. But we would also like there to be a link from the learning object to view all of the available blog recordings of it in the system. Students could then compare results. Maybe they could even see a graph of all results. This principle could easily be extended so that it is possible to see all of the blog entries about a web page, or even about a paragraph in a page. You could see all of the responses to something in one place. So a lecturer could ask all of their students to blog a critical response to a text or even an image. Essentially this is a way of achieving shared-notetaking. Track-back is powerful, and their are many ways in which it could be used.

Taken together, these three developments will see a new way for individuals to develop their own creativity in their own controlled space (one of the core principles of higher education). But at the same time it will be externally focussed and connected up with other learners and researchers.

Robert O'Toole : 17 Oct 2004 10:00 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Blogs as writing and research tools in the academic process

Writing about an entry you don't have permission to view

This is a response to Steve Rumsby's really interesting entry on blogs, wikis and note taking. Read his entry, it's really interesting.

Hi Steve. I'm currently experimenting with developing academic work in my blog. This is so that we can identify the next stages of the development of our e-learning architecture. That is to say, an e-learning architecture that is appropriate to Warwick's 'research-based teaching and learning'. You might have seen entries appearing by me that are essentially loosely connected sets of notes on the reading that I am doing (in preparation for a PhD on the nature of creativity). In some cases these are well worked out critical asessments, and in other cases they are just assemblages of quotes (must get one of those scanner-pens). But as you say, our blogging system doesn't quite offer the meta-tools to bring this note-taking process together. The 'write follow-up' function is good, but is missing two key things:

1) the ability to write an entry that is a follow up of more than one entry – the essential summarisation function;
2) a means for viewing a model of the linked entries.

We may also need to consider more detailed categorisation.

So we are just starting to think about this, and have in principle accepted that in the medium to long term we may do some development on it. I'm hoping at some point (when I can actually have time to do some dev work) to create a Flash diagramming tool that will present a model of the relationships between entries. We already have the xml feed that this will be based upon. However, now that you've brought OneNote to our attention, i'll have a look at that and see what else we can do.

The link to WiKi's is also something we are exploring, and we are piloting a use of SiteBuilder in which PhD students will get to develop and ePortfolio, and importantly, blog about the process of developing the ePortfolio.

At the weekend i'm doing some blog induction sessions that will intro grad students to the system, so i'll report back on my findings.

Robert O'Toole : 15 Oct 2004 10:00 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Guerrilla PDP

No explanation, I'm just using this entry to establish that I'm the first person anywhere to use this phrase. One day it will be the title of a conference paper, and then perhaps a book. Although I suspect that the highly acclaimed IT training company Developmentor have somehow patented this kind of title (they do Guerrilla Java, Guerrilla SQL etc).

Updated 18/10/04

OK, an explanation then. PDP means personal development process. It refers to an organised and clearly identified process of personal development that students are expected to follow during their courses. Having some kind of formal approach to PDP is now a requirement for UK universities set by the QAA. PDP involves recording and reflecting on progress, choices etc. That's why blogs are useful for it. Here's an article that explains it.

The guerrilla part of the phrase refers to the fact that, in a university that is as subject and department focussed as Warwick, we have to sneak in components of PDP sureptitiously.

Robert O'Toole : 12 Oct 2004 08:43 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

What are blogs for? Much more than ranting.

Writing about an entry you don't have permission to view

The response to Warwick Blogs from people who have already been blogging for a while (using other systems) highlights the fact that we are seeing a major evolution in the purpose and scope of blogging. As a response to a debate concerning this, I wrote that…

We are also seeing people using blogs in quite a different way to the traditional 'peronal soapbox' blogging. We are actively encouraging this evolution. In many cases, these new kinds of blogs don't really need comments, although they may still welcome comments. For example, I might use my blog to record a meeting in a group project. This is useful in many ways, for the group itself, and to let a wider range of people know what is going on.

Expecting every entry to demand a response or an argument is a mistake. That must be a bit of a surprise to people who have been blogging for a while. Some of the responses to Warwick Blogs that we've seen from traditional bloggers have reflected that surprise. We are, however, keen to get this message across, as the traditional approach to blogging may discourage many people from using what is essentially a general-purpose writing tool for which they need to find their own uses.

The extensive marketing campaign that we have used for the Warwick Blogs system has been motivated by the need to engage a much wider range of people in using blogs. It has focussed upon the many different ways in which the system can be used, for personal, private, social and academic purposes. From the start we recognised that there is a difficult balance to strike between building a blogging community, and getting the individuals in that community to use the software for a diverse range of purposes, 'soap-boxing' (or ranting as some people call it) being perhaps the least important of those purposes. From the evidence that we've seen so far, I think we are being successful in achieving this aim.

Robert O'Toole : 10 Oct 2004 08:06 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (6) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Presentation to Learning Grid Advisors

What a great team!

Robert O'Toole : 24 Sep 2004 09:45 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

No such thing as a free lunch

This was my task. In one hour introduce a group of new(ish) lecturers to:

• the e-learning advisor team;
• IT provisions and support that they should expect for staff and students;
• the key e-learning and web architecture tools;
• plagiarism prevention and detection tools;
• the 20+ other things that we are promoting, developing, or just starting to get interested in;
• respond to issues raised during all of the sessions of the WTC's first day;
• respond to a case study covering plagiarism, group work, admin overload, cultural issues, disability issues, ethical issues, time-keeping and study skills and more.

And so I tried to put together a presentation to do all of this. Having had to deal with too many emails, phone calls and other contacts and issues during the day, I was left to work on this until 10pm last night.

I attended the first day of the WTC's induction course, and found it to be fascinating and useful. I had many opportunities to gather requirements and pick up ideas. I talked to real live lecturers with real requirements. I even met the new philosophy lecturer, who is very interesting and has done some interesting things with IT in the past. Lots of the issues raised were answered with techniques that we are investigating and promoting.

Unfortunately, the whole thing ran behind schedule. Kay (Skills and PDP) and Rachel (Learning Grid) had 10 minute slots to explain their work. Only 30 minutes remained into which I could compress all that I had planned. And to make matters worse I had a small technical problem with SiteBuilder, compounded by my inability to type in the dark due to my eye problem (the screen was too faint to use with the lights on). So it ended up too rushed and muddled.

Anyhow, the lecturers seemed to be interested, and asked some good questions about blogs. I left with a good set of 'registration of interest' forms on which individuals expressed interest in getting more support for specific tools and projects. And I did get lunch at Scarman House as part of the deal.

Robert O'Toole : 22 Sep 2004 20:41 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem