Gotta catch ‘em all

I might tell myself that I hate gaming achievement systems and see them as a cynical way of artificially extending the lifetime of content while simultaneously making one loathe it, but I’m still a sucker for a challenge, even if it involves learning how to use MS Word…

Ribbon Hero (yes, I know) is a Microsoft concept test designed to help players learn more about features of Word and improve their efficiency in using them.  Rather than being presented with a cringingly patronising video tutorial, a terse set of text instructions or that paperclip, the player is given a brief task to complete, with hints available if they get stuck.  Successfully completed challenges award a varying number of achievement points depending on whether it’s finished with or without hints, within a certain timescale or with the minimum number of steps.  And it’s startlingly effective.  I learned more about the features of Word in the half hour I spent achievement hunting than I’ve done in the more than dozen years I’ve been using it before today.  By incentivising ‘working it out for yourself’, Ribbon Hero also makes the player think far more about the processes and patterns of how Word works, genuinely improving their efficiency with other tasks outside those offered by the game itself.  I was surprised at just how effective this approach was, and wouldn’t be at all surprised to see similar game-based training systems used in other products.

Spotted via the June 2010 issue of PC Gamer.

2010 ALT Awards open for entries

The annual ALT awards recognise good and innovative practice and achievement in learning technology.  Entries for this year’s awards open this month in three categories: learning technology practitioners, learning and teaching resources and effective use of video.

  • Practitioners who feel they are ‘outstanding in the use of technology to support learning’ may enter the ALT Learning Technologist of the Year Award by Thursday 10 June.  The award is split in two streams depending on the status of the nominee.
  • The Jorum Learning and Teaching Competition which recognises ‘exciting, innovative learning and teaching resources’ will again be presented at ALT-C.
  • Information on the ALT/Epiguem Award for the Most Effective Use of Video will be available on the site shortly.

Awards will be presented at the ALT-C Gala Dinner in Nottingham.  Good luck to all who enter!

Elluminate Live good practice guide

JISC have recently released an extremely thorough guide to using Elluminate Live for events, collaborative working and to support teaching and learning.  It provides a huge amount of information that will be of benefit for everyone from complete novices to expert users, and is available either as a Word document or as mindmaps.  We didn’t have access to this while doing our own research into an online conferencing tool for CETIS use, but it might well have helped solve some of the issues we ran into with the system.  Given current financial and environmental considerations, not to mention volcanoes and pandemics, online alternatives to traditional face-to-face meetings are highly desirable and this guide should provide good support for this as well as more innovative approaches to education.

Whatever happened to the future?

I enjoyed this presentation by Francesco Dorazio of Makers of Universes.  Originally delievered at MetaMeets 09 in Amsterdam, Everything You Know About Virtual Worlds Is WRONG looks at some of the predictions made about virtual worlds and how they’ve actually transpired in reality.

Dorazio also talks about virtual world interoperability (38-9) and introduces the concept of outeroperability (52-3): a gateway service or ‘hub’ that enables visibility of avatars across worlds without supporting portability between worlds which seems to be a version of existing or forthcoming services such as Xfire or RealID (and surely the latter is sinister enough to be going on with).

Thanks to Don Brutzman on the X3D-Public list for highlighting this.

CAA 2010 submission deadline extended

The deadline for submitting proposals for papers and posters to the 2010 International Computer Assisted Assessment Conference has been extended to Friday 14 May 2010.

This year’s conference will be held on 20 and 21 June at the DeVere Grand Harbour Hotel in Southampton, and is jointly organised by the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, and the Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University, and as always promises to be a lively and valuable event.

Transforming Assessment webinar series 2010

The Transforming Assessment project funded by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council and led by Professor Geoffrey Crisp of the University of Adelaide is examining the use of eassessment in online learning, particularly in the context of Web 2.0 and virtual world technologies.

A series of free public webinars has just been announced, starting with a session led by Geoffrey on Wednesday 12 May at 08:00h London time. Sessions will be held in Wimba and run approximately monthly. A number of speakers have already been confirmed, but the team are still interested in hearing from potential presenters.

More information on the seminar series can be found at http://transformingassessment.com/

eAssessment Scotland 2010 – call for papers now open

Those of you interested in delivering a presentation or workshop to eAssessment Scotland 2010 have until 1 June to get your proposals in.   Themes for this year’s event include reports on successful implementations of eassessment within institutions, staff and student views, and emerging trends, techniques and tensions in eassessment.   This year’s conference, on the theme of Marking the Decade, will take place at the University of Dundee on 3 September and will include keynotes, presentations, seminars and posters as well as the second year of the Scottish eAssessment Awards; the event is free to attend and pre-registration is already open.

The investment gap

I’ve just had a short chat with a lecturer who was taking a quick break from the class he’s in the middle of teaching.  He mentioned that he was using a SmartBoard, and his frustration at seeing what he could do with the technology if only he’d had proper training in how to do so – as he said, being one of over 100 people at a 20 minute demonstration 18 months ago just doesn’t count as training, no matter how much the powers that be might want it to.

He also reported a similar situation at another institution at which he teaches, which has invested a great deal of money in technology enhanced classrooms and none in training people how to use them.  As a result, the potential of these classrooms is completely unused, and lecturers are frustrated at their lack of knowledge of how to tap into it.

‘They don’t need to pay us to train!’ he said, suggesting that both institutions simply open the classrooms for an hour or two some evenings with a technologist there to help people out, and let small groups get actual hands-on practice with the technology.  It’s just not reasonable to expect a lecturer to have his or her first experience of using new technology be in front of a class of 50 students.

This lecturer’s enthusiasm for exploring new ways of teaching, and his vision of the things he’d like to be able to do if only he knew how, were inspiring and infectious, and it’s so frustrating to see such a clear example of why new technologies aren’t being made the most of.  The reluctance to invest in adequately training staff to use the new technology an institution has just spent heavily on seems like a terrible false economy.

Only Connect?

Despite being a distributed organisation that frequently works with people across the UK and beyond, we’ve never looked very hard at running meetings and events online.  Environmental concerns, tightened budgets, and simple practicalities such as overly busy schedules or arranging work cover or childcare are issues we and those we work with regularly face, and so we felt that the time was long overdue for us to take our first steps in online conferencing.  We’ve been looking at various tools available with some interesting results, and we thought it would be useful to share them with you.

Our requirements

We were looking for something that would allow voice, text, file sharing, presentation abilities, with minimal support needed to set up and run it.  We were happy to use a paid-for service if it met all our requirements and wasn’t wildly expensive.  We tried three systems, and considered but rejected a fourth without trying it.

The one we looked at but didn’t try was FlashMeeting from the Open University.  Although this is a well respected and popular system, we were looking for something we could use for both internal and public events and the terms of use state that ‘your meetings will be recorded and reviewed and may be used in research publications in professional learning. Do NOT have confidential meetings on this research server!!!’, making this an unsuitable system for us to use.

We didn’t try Wimba, InstantPresenter, Media on Demand or WebEx as we felt that we’d found a good system for us.  We also didn’t try any VNC, IRC and VoIP combinations as we wanted a single system rather than trying to coordinate multiple tools with so much more potential for things to go wrong!

DimDim

The first one we tried was Dimdim.  This is open source, works on Window, Mac and Linux, and works directly in IE, Firefox and Safari (but sadly not Chrome) rather than requiring any installation.  It offers a range of presentation facilities, and ranges from free for up to 20 people, to $75 per month for 100 seat webinars.

We ran into a number of issues with our free trial tests.  The biggest issue was problems with audio and video, with audio cutting out if we had more than one video feed, and we had to find a workaround for getting Flash to recognise the onboard camera on Macs.  It offered the ability to record meetings, but recording can’t be paused and when new presenter takes over, the previous recording is stopped and overwritten.  There’s a neat widget for sending out invites (though again, it doesn’t work in Chrome), but the agenda didn’t seem to be carried through to the meeting room.  PollDaddy integration appealed to our resident widget lovers, but didn’t work as well as we’d hoped, and only the presenter was able to scroll embedded pages which caused problems reading them.  There were too many issues for us to be able to recommend it for trialing in a larger group.

Edit 17/1/11: Dimdim has now been taken over by salesforce.com.  The open source code will remain available on SourceForge although Dimdim will no longer be contributing to it.  More information is available here.

Elluminate

Anyone who’s attended the JISC Online Conference or one of the many elearning webinars regularly on offer will have encountered Elluminate, so we were very optimistic that this would be a good option for us.  Again, we were using the free (vRoom) version, though there are various payment tiers available with vOffice for 20 users at $1536 a year and prices for larger group available on request.  Unfortunately one of our testers was completely unable to get into our vRoom on either Mac or PC, and others have had problems with permission settings and proxy settings giving some odd results in the past.  Despite our expectations and generally positive previous experiences, we felt that it didn’t meet our ‘works straight off’ requirement, and so kept looking.

Adobe Acrobat Connect

I’ve used Connect in its past incarnation as Macromedia Breeze and found it very easy to use and very good quality, so I was keen to see what my colleagues thought.  Our first attempt used the free ConnectNow Beta which is limited to three people, and we then bought a month trial for $62 to run a larger meeting with most of the CETIS staff; annual payments are also available for a lower overall cost.

We did have some initial problems with audio issues, but once everything settled down we were impressed with the quality of the sound and video, and the very pleasant interface.  It worked fine in Chrome, IE and Firefox, but the meeting couldn’t be launched in Safari and there were problems installing the required software in Linux, though it did run eventually.  The meeting administration interface for adding participants and scheduling meetings is far less elegant and intuitive than the actual meeting interface.  There are lots of nice little features, and the overall feeling from both our trial meetings was that this is a mature and stable system that is very pleasant to use.

There was however one major black mark against this system: very poor customer service when dealing with payments.  Buying one month’s access requires a credit card, which is then automatically debited each month until the arrangement is cancelled.  Unfortunately, actually cancelling this recurring payment is not an easy process, and Sharon spent several hours trying to do so online and following dead links on their website before finally learning that the only way to cancel these payments is by telephoning their customer services in the US.  Had we not had other meetings already arranged in Connect by the time we discovered this, this experience would almost certainly have made us continue our search for a suitable system.

Conclusions

We hold our monthly team calls in voice-only services such as Skype or PowWowNow, so we’re all very familiar with these types of virtual meetings.  I was surprised that quite a few of my colleagues felt less connected with the meeting when speaking because there wasn’t any feedback, but I think that’s something that people should be able to get used to fairly quickly.  On my part, I found being able to share slides and the ability to have mulitple webcam feeds really helped me to get much more from the session than I do from audio-only meetings, but that may depend on the individual participant.

A year’s subscription to the system we settled on costs less than it cost for me to travel to our most recent event, and far less than the cost of venue hire, catering, etc.  I’ll be using it for our next QTI WG meeting, and it’s definitely worth noting that this meeting would have been difficult to schedule without having an online option, and it would not have been possible to get everyone who can make the online meeting together for a face-to-face meeting.

IMS QTI v2.1 Implementation Survey

IMS invite developers to participate in an IMS Question and Test Interoperability (QTI) v2.1 implementation survey.

The survey is designed to do two things:

  • establish the ‘state of play’ with regard to QTI v2.1 tool capabilities
  • establish whether there is sufficient overlap in tool capabilities to define one or more profiles.

IMS will publish an anonymous summery of the survey outcomes to all participants.  Survey results will be strictly confidential and data from this research will be reported only in the aggregate.  Your information will be coded and will remain confidential, however if you wish you may supply your email address if you are willing to be contacted to follow up or for additional information.

The survey only poses questions about QTI v2.1 capabilities, which means that it is not relevant for developers of earlier versions of QTI.

The survey will only take around 20-30 minutes to complete.  Information about the QTI project group and results from this survey will be posted in the IMS QTI forum.

This is a great opportunity for QTI v2.1 developers to help steer the future of the specification.