Here Be Dragons

It’s something of a rarity for me to go to a conference or meeting in in Glasgow, however I was so glad that I managed to get to the JISC RSC Scotland Annual Conference “Here Be Dragons“, last Friday (8 June). It was a thoroughly engaging, entertaining and educational event covering topics from cutting edge neuroscience research to mind-reading.

Congratulations to all colleagues at the RSC for organising such a great event and giving the opportunity for colleagues from Scottish colleges and universities to come together and be inspired by future developments from all the keynotes and sessions, and to share and celebrate their experiences of using technology in education through the iTech Awards. I was also delighted that the ExamView project from the JISC DVLE programme (which CETIS has been supporting) won the highly commended award in the Assessment category.

Below is twitter summary of the event.

[View the story “Here Be Dragons – JISC RSC Scotland annual conference ” on Storify]

Some thoughts on web analytics uisng our work on analytics

As I’ve mentioned before, CETIS are in the middle of a piece of work for JISC around analytics in education (our Analytics Reconnoitre project). You may have noticed a number of blog posts from myself and colleagues around various aspects of analytics in education. We think this is a “hot topic” but is it? Can our analytics help us to gauge interest?

CETIS, like many others, is increasingly using Google Analytics to monitor traffic on our website. We are also lucky to have in Martin Hawksey, a resident google spreadsheet genius. Since Martin has come to work with us, we have been looking at ways we can use some of his “stuff” to help us develop our communications work, and gain more of an understanding of how people interact with our overall web presence.

As part of the recent CETIS OER visualisation project, Martin has explored ways of tracking social sharing of resources. Using this technique Martin has adapted one of his spreadsheet so that it not only takes in google analytics from our CETIS blog posts, but also combines the number of shares a post is getting from these social sharing sites: Buzz, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Diggs, Pinterest, Delicious, Google+, Facebook and Twitter. By adding the the rss feed from our Analytics topic area, we get a table like this which combines the visit and comments information with the number of shares a post gets on each of the sharing sites.

social sharing stats for JISC CETIS analytics topic feed

(NB Martin’s blog is not hosted on our CETIS server so we can’t automagically pull his page view info in this way which is why there is a 0 value in the page view column for his posts, but I think we can safely say that he gets quite a few page views)

From this table it is apparent that Twitter is the main way our posts are being shared. Linkedin comes in second with delicious and google+ also generating a few “shares”. The others get virtually no traffic. We already knew that twitter is a key amplification tool for us, and again Martin’s magic has allowed us to create a view of the top click throughs from Twitter on our blog posts.

JISC CETIS Top twitter distributers

We could maybe be accused of playing the system, as you can see a number of our top re-tweeters are staff members – but if we can’t promote our own stuff, then we can hardly expect anyone else to!

But I digress, back to the main point. We can now get an overview of traffic on a particular topic area, and see not only the number of visits and comments it is getting but also where else it is being shared. We can then start to make comparisons across topic areas.

This is useful on a number of levels beyond basic web stats. Firstly, it gives us another view on how our audience shares and values our posts. I think we can say that if someone book marks a post, they do place some value on it. I would hesitate to start to quantify what that value is, but increasingly we are being asked about ROI so it is something we need to consider. Similarly with re-tweets, if something is re-tweeted they people want to share that resource and so feel that it is of value to their twitter network. I don’t see a lot of bot retweets in the my network. It also allows us to share and evaluate more information not only internally, but also with our funders (and through posts like this) our community.

It also raises some questions wider questions about resource sharing and web analytics in general. Martin raised this issue last year with this post which sparked this reply from me. The questions I raised there are still on my mind, and increasingly as I explore this more in the context of CETIS, I think I am beginning to see more evidence of the habits and practice of our community.

Twitter is a useful dissemination channel, and increasingly a key way for peer sharing of information. The use of other social sharing sites, would appear to be not so much. Tho’ I was surprised to see relatively high numbers for linked in. Again this might be down to the “professional” nature of linked in – or the fact that I am an unashamed social media tart, and repost all my blog posts in linked in too :-) We also have sharing buttons on the bottom of our posts which have very obvious buttons for twitter, linked in and Facebook.

In terms of other social sharing sites, are these just more a question of people’s own work practices and digital literacies? Are these spaces seen as more private? Or is it just that people still don’t really use them that much, did the delicious debacle affect our trust in such sites? Should we encourage more sharing by having more obvious buttons for the other sites listed in the table? And more importantly should JISC and its funded services and projects be looking towards these sites for more measures of impact and engagement? Martin’s work illustrates how you can relatively easily combine data from different sources, and now there are some templates available there really isn’t a huge time cost to adapt them, but are they gathering the relevant data? Do we need to actively encourage more use of social sharing sites? I’d be really interested to hear of any thoughts/ experiences other have of any of these issues.

The Strategic Developer

What makes a strategic developer? Or to put it another way, what makes the role of a developer strategic? This was the theme of very thought provoking session where there was no coding but a lot of talking at dev8ed last week.

Led by Amber Thomas (JISC), Mahendra Mahey (UKOLN) and Ben Ryan (Jorum), the session started with Mahendra giving an overview of the JISC funded DevCSI</a project which is actively engaging and supporting educational developers through events such as dev8ed and the well established dev8D. It’s an old cliche that developers don’t get or aren’t allowed out much, and a large part of DevCSI is to provide increased opportunities for developers to ‘get out’, share and learn from peers. As well as running these events Mahendra and colleagues have also been conducting a range of activities around the impact and value of developers including commissioning case studies and a stakeholder survey. The findings of the survey have shown that the institutional value of developers varies greatly, and more importantly that there is recognition of the strategic value of developers.

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But how often are developers seen as being strategic in an institutional context? Like many others, they are often pretty far down the strategic food chain. Of course there are exceptions to every rule and as was pointed out there are a few “super developers” who are involved in strategic planning and know the business process of their institution and are recognised as such. I think particularly in teaching and learning contexts the developers often aren’t as recognised as they could be. They are often seen as been slightly apart from the educational developers/academics who are much further up the institutional food chain than the “techies”. Of course, developers aren’t alone in that respect, as was brought up in the discussion learning technologists and librarians have all suffered the same issues.

As the discussions unfolded I was also reflecting on the the recent Curriculum Design programme meeting, where there was uniformed agreement on the difficulty of identifying the key strategic roles for institutional change to occur. The PALET project, has described the key stakeholders needed to implement change processes as “worker bees” and I think developers often fall into this category. They actually do things that allow other changes to be build on and from but are often not the first (or event the last) names /roles that jump to mind when stakeholder groups are being formed.

The issue of management and PDP for developers was central to the discussion, with a range of contexts being shared including examples from some institutions where developers are at the heart of strategic development and actively participate in teaching and learning committees and the craft/apprenticeship model Joss Winn has been actively promoting.

There was also discussion around the pros and cons of project management techniques. There was much “nodding of heads” when the point was made that the waterfall method actually stopped communication between developers and end users/clients; and equal agreement that agile methodology whilst great for communication between developers (especially paired programming) it wasn’t that great at really addressing wider communication issues.

And communication is, imho, at the heart of the problem. If technology in education is to continue to evolve then all parts of the community need to be sharing developments, aspirations and possibilities. Yes, developer specific events such as dev8D are needed, but I would like to see dev8ed evolve into a space where more there was an equal mix of developers and non developers, where the more teaching and learning focused participants could come up with ideas and work with developers to realise them. That way the strategic role of developers could begin to get more traction from a bottom up approach, and more shared understandings of needs from multiple stakeholders could be begin to be addressed.

It was a really useful session and it is going to be followed up not only by the work outlined earlier by Mahendra and colleagues but also in a workshop at this year’s ALT-C Conference being organised by Amber Thomas.

New CETIS briefing paper on IMS LTI

A new CETIS briefing paper on the IMS LTI specification is now available online.

Written by Stephen Vickers (ceLTIc project and an early adopter, developer and user of the specification) the briefing provides an overview of the specification and illustrates benefits of using it for for developers, VLE administrators, teachers and learners.

The paper is available for download from here.

The role of coaching in enhancing the student experience – webinar now available

Early this week Janet Finlay and Dawn Wood from the PC3 project (part of the JISC Curriculum Design Programme) shared their experiences of embedding coaching into the curriculum as Leeds Met.

The original aim of the PC3 project was “to develop curriculum structures and tech support to allow students to build their own curriculum supported by coaching”. However, as the project has evolved this overarching aim has been adapted so the focus of the project now is to: “embed coaching in the curriculum to provide personalised support for students and to enable them to make independent, informed decisions about their learning.”

Janet and Dawn gave an overview of the role of coaching and how it differs from mentoring,

Coaching diagram

Coaching diagram

and then shared some of the very positive experiences their coaching model is gaining with the BA Sports Management course. As well as embedding coaching as part of the PDP process within the course, the project has also supported the development of student coaching ambassadors and the session included audio reflections from a number of students of their experiences and reflections on the role of coaching in terms of their own development.

The team are now working with other schools across the University to embed coaching in to a range of different subject areas. A recording of this informative webinar is available to download from the Design Studio. The team are also running a one day event on coaching on 31st May in Leeds which is free and open to attend. More information is available from the PC3 project blog.

#jisccdd timelines

As the JISC Curriculum Design projects come to and end and are compiling their final stories of their four year journeys, I’ve been thinking about timelines. So, in preparation for next week’s final programme meeting, here’s a timeline which pulls pictures and videos from youtube and twitter that have been tagged with #jisccdd (thanks to my colleague Martin Hawksey for creating the template to do this).

I also set up a couple of other timelines using the Diptiy timeline service way back in 2009:

This one pulls a feed from the CETIS Curriculum Design web site topic area 

This the #jisccdd twitter feed.

 And this one has various feeds relating to #jisccdd

Digital literacy, it’s personal

As part of the the JISC Developing Digital Literacies programme held yesterday (15th May), Helen Beetham (synthesis consultant for the programme), started the day by giving a very useful summary of key issues and themes emerging from the baseline reports from both the projects and the professional associations associated with the programme.

One of the common themes emerging from the extensive surveys of technologies undertaken by the projects, was is the divide between personal technologies (which tend to be lightweight, flexible, web-based) and more specialised (and largely institutionally provided) technologies, which often have a steep learning curve and aren’t reconfigurable. Digital literacy (and developing digital literacies) is highly personal. To move from adoption of technology to everyday practice there needs to be a high level of personal motivation – providing a system is not enough. This leads to some interesting questions about what should an institution be providing in terms of technologies and what areas should it be actively promoting in terms of developing staff skills, and indeed as Helen asked “what are institutions good for, and what should they leave alone?”

Most of the day was spent in group discussion sharing experiences around a number of aspects relating to the development of digital literacies. Summary notes from each of the sessions will also be available from the Design Studio over the coming week. But in the meantime, I’ve pulled together some tweets from the day to give a flavour of the day.

[View the story “JISC Developing Digital Literacies Programme Meeting, 15 May 2012″ on Storify]

Managing large scale institutional change webinar now available online

Managing changing is an underlying challenge to most,if not all, development projects. Managing large scale institutional change magnifies these challenges and brings a host of new challenges. Over the past four years, projects in the JISC Curriculum Design Programme have not only had to manage large scale institutional change projects with all their internal complexities, but also do that in the wider context of rapidly changing external political and funding contexts of the last four years.

Earlier this week, four of the projects (Predict, UG-Flex, PALET & T-SPARC) shared their experiences, reflections and top tips for stakeholder engagement, scope creep, creating safe and constructive places for dialogue to take place, managing internal and external pressures and expectations. An overriding message was that as with most technology based projects it’s changing culture, and not processes that is key to success. To get sustainability and impact, the former is crucial. As Paul Bartholomew from the T-Sparc project pointed out

“the product isn’t the system you build, the product is the environment you have created plus the people who act within it”

The projects also agreed that when building and sustaining stakeholder engagement you can never underestimate the power of cake :-)

A recording of this informative session is available to download now from the Design Studio.

Some useful resources around learning analytics

As I’ve mentioned before, and also highlighted in a number of recent posts by my colleagues Adam Cooper and Martin Hawskey, CETIS is undertaking some work around analytics in education which we are calling our Analytics Reconnoitre.

In addition to my recent posts from the LAK12 conference, I thought it would be useful to highlight the growing number of resources that the our colleagues in Educause have been producing around learning analytics. A series of briefing papers and webinars are available which covering a range of issues around the domain. For those of you not so familiar with the area, a good starting point is the “Analytics in Education: Establishing a Common Language” paper which gives a very clear outline of a range of terms being used in the domain and how they relate to teaching and learning.

For those of you who want to delve a bit deeper the resource page also links to the excellent “The State of Learning Analytics in 2012: A Review and Future Challenges” report by Rebecca Ferguson, from the OU’s KMI, which gives a comprehensive overview of the domain.