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… “Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair” February 22, 2012

Posted by ianinsheffield in Inspiration, Musings, Web 2.0.
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golden gate bridge

cc licensed ( BY ND ) flickr photo by www.frontendeveloper.com: http://flickr.com/photos/alainpicard/4175214747/

It only seems like a short while ago that I first became aware of the Open Badges movement:

Learning today happens everywhere, not just in the classroom. But it’s often difficult to get recognition for skills and achievements that happen outside of school. Mozilla’s Open Badges project is working to solve that problem, making it easy for anyone to issue, earn and display badges across the web — through a shared infrastructure that’s free and open to all. The result: helping learners everywhere display 21st century skills, unlock career and educational opportunities, and level up in their life and work.

[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Badges]

badges competitionThe project we’ve recently been working on in school (ICT Quests) seemed to be being constructed in a way which could benefit from the principles of Open Badges. So when the DML Badges for Lifelong Learning competition was announced, the possibility of offering an entry seemed to make sense. Well I’m not quite sure how, but we seem to have dropped lucky. Our submission not only got through the first round of selection, but we’ve been invited to the finals! They’re taking place in San Francisco next Tuesday & Wednesday, with the overall winners to be announced on the first day of the DML Conference.

Our entry was in the ‘Learning & Content’ stage with the ‘Design & Tech’ stage being undertaken by different groups to follow. For the finals we’ve been partnered with an open source development team from Catalyst IT, led by Richard Wyles (Project Lead for Mahara) in New Zealand. Their entry was “Moodle as Issuer, Mahara as Displayer” and clearly links with our ICT Quests through Moodle, our VLE – good matching by the competition organisers.

So now it’s all hands on deck to prepare our pitch for the judges. It’s not a massively big ask, but clearly competing against other teams adds a certain … edge! Bearing in mind we only have a maximum of 10 minutes to cover what our project can offer to the Open Badges movement, ensuring that the criteria for the content and tech strands are both covered and that they marry together to deliver a coherent whole. Condensing all that into a meaningful pitch is proving to be quite demanding. Given that projects can attract up to $200 000 of funding, it’s taking quite a bit of thought what to include and leave out … let alone the style! A bit like condensing Hamlet into a single Tweet.

So next Tuesday after the orientation and information dissemination session at the California Academy of Sciences, Richard and I will be knocking our pitch into shape, distilling and refining the content and finalising our budget ready for the judges on the following day.

Excitement and fear often do hold hands don’t they?

Edtechcc Assignment 3: Comic Strip February 5, 2012

Posted by ianinsheffield in edtechcc, Resources, Tools.
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signpost

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo by sparetomato: http://flickr.com/photos/sparetomato/3223220181/

You know how sometimes you set off down a road and you’re not quite sure it’s the right route? I’m sure there’ll be a mathematical formula for balancing how far you travel, thinking there might be an off-shoot that’ll set you back on to the right track, weighed against the further you go, the further you’re going to have to back-track when it all goes pear-shaped. It’s occasionally happened to me whilst out cycling or running and it certainly tripped me up on this assignment. Kept pressing on regardless until I eventually realised I wasn’t even in the same postal district as where I wanted to be.

Anyway the starting point for our assignment was:

Make a comic-strip style set of instructions for a practical task. The task you choose is entirely up to you. It could be something that relates to your subject area, or alternatively you can do something more generic like starting up and shutting down a computer, how to set an alarm clock, or how to use the office photocopier.

My stimulus came from an issue we’ve been trying to resolve at work where colleagues have been struggling with classroom projectors not displaying the output from their laptops. Since we changed staff laptops (and the docking stations went) this has been quite a problem for some. The time was due to re-issue a reminder of the most efficacious way to connect a laptop; unfortunately the assignment came just too late, but it got me wondering how I might have provided the instructions if it had been in comic format … and how that might have been received by colleagues. My planning in one sense had already been done since I’d laid out the content whilst producing the instructions I issued a short while ago. Mistake 1! This is a different medium and demands a different approach. OK, I may have had a notion of the information I needed to convey, but ended up bending it into the comic medium. Was that the right thing to do?

I opted to use ToonDo rather than Chogger, simply because I already had an account, had used it before and thought I could get up and running a little more quickly. Mistake 2! It was so long since I’d last used it, there was definitely a lag whilst I got back up to speed. The real time-sucker though, was finding the image which best conveyed the message I was trying to deliver, whether from searching the Internet or browsing the extensive gallery in ToonDo. Eventually I got there, but soon hit mistake 3: I didn’t have enough panels and quickly discovered that ToonDo only provides a maximum of four … it is after all a cartoon creator rather than a comic one. As always, “Fail to prepare and be prepared to fail!” Anyway here’s my effort:
Projector

By IaninSheffield | View this Toon at ToonDoo | Create your own Toon

Maybe there’s a plus-side to only having four panels though. It does tend to focus your mind more, in the way that condensing a message into 140 characters often requires you to think carefully about what you want, or rather *need* to say. Or, OK so I went down the wrong path, but hey, the view from over here’s not too bad after all.

What have I learned:

  • More!! Making mistakes meant I learned an awful lot more than if things had gone more smoothly.
  • I went for the easy option of a familiar tool, but missed an opportunity to learn a new one.
  • If you’re heading down what might be the wrong track, back up quickly and take a look down the other possible routes. A few moments spent here may just save you time in the long run.
  • If I was going to be using ToonDo with students, I’d want to think carefully how I introduced them to it, building in time for experimentation so they can explore all the features at their convenience. It would be so easy to waste away a lesson changing characters, poses, backgrounds, objects and the like, whilst the real focus should be on the learning activity. Maybe set them a homework ‘taster’ activity so they can come prepared to the lesson, knowing what features they’re going to need to use.

 

Images used in the Toon:

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo by Phil Hawksworth: http://flickr.com/photos/philhawksworth/5114743884/

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo by CraigTaylor1974: http://flickr.com/photos/49333396@N06/4796073717/

Edtechcc Assignment 2: Soundscape January 29, 2012

Posted by ianinsheffield in edtechcc, Tools.
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menin gate

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo by Calotype46: http://flickr.com/photos/calotype46/5883327155/

For almost a dozen years I helped organise a yearly, week-long visit to Belgium with our Year 10s. We invariably stayed near Ieper (or Ypres) and always spent one evening taking in the Menin Gate Ceremony.

I never failed to be moved by the atmosphere generated in this awe-inspiring arch, commemorating those fallen in the local area for whom remains were never recovered. It was to this event I felt drawn when the second assignment was posted:

Sound is a powerful but often forgotten medium. Play sounds at the start of a class and the students’ chatter will fade; they’ll tune in and try to make sense of what they’re hearing.
For this assignment, combine audio effects into a soundscape to represent a place or an event.

Having visited the area so regularly, and having taken in many of the sites significant during the Great War and those which commemorated it afterwards, my idea was to gather a mere few sounds evocative of the period and overlay them on the Last Post – the music played by local buglers, each and every night.

The sound effects were found within two of the recommended sites: Soundbible and Sound FX Now, whilst the last post was taken from a YouTube clip of the actual ceremony. ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ was found on FirstWorldWar.com and the reading came from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s ‘Remember Me‘ site. Finding the right sounds was definitely the most time consuming part of the assignment, but then research often is. Having some familiarity with Audacity, that was my weapon of choice and around an hour’s work pulled all the clips together for uploading to Audioboo – chosen since I already have an account there.

Here then is the finished product:

Although I was already fairly familiar with Audacity and despite only working on a one and a half minute clip, it still represented an hour’s labour. I think this is an important factor to bear in mind when producing edited media of whatever flavour. It will take longer! I guess we have to ask would there be value in spending so long on a similar task with our students? Well I’d argue yes, provided they are not working individually. In discussions during the editing process their learning is enhanced and assuming the task is thoughtfully chosen and introduced , greater meaning and understanding is possible … though I suspect you’ll be unlikely to be able to spare the time to do this in lessons on a regular basis.

What have I learned?

  • How long producing a media file can take!
  • To be aware of the steps I ought to consider for those with hearing impairments, if I’m producing audio output. (Thanks Joan)
  • We rarely focus on our sense of hearing. Working in an audio format encouraged me to think in a different way and consequently exercised my creative and analytical capabilities.
  • That removing the visual input stream occasionally, might help our students to focus in more closely on content and meaning.
  • I’m now even more keenly aware of the time some students give over to preparing video sequences, as alternative presentations for homework.

Attributions:

Edtechcc Assignment 1: Signs & Symbols January 22, 2012

Posted by ianinsheffield in edtechcc, Musings.
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Our first assignment has been released:

Make two signs or symbols using a graphics tool of your choice. The first sign should be for your own department or course, the second sign should be for another educational department or course.

sign

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo by E-nat: http://flickr.com/photos/einat/27945283/

Well OK it was four days ago now, but that delaying my start has helped I think. I wanted to get started straight away and had some initial ideas – I tend to think things through in my head, do some mental processing, decide on a starting point, then begin. So it was interesting and informative to see how others, especially those for whom design is a more integral part of their lives, set about a task like this. The ‘head work’ I do seems to be done on paper, perhaps preceded by research, in order to scope possible routes forward, whilst taking into account the different demands of the brief. So I thought I’d give it a shot.

The first thing I found is that some people distinguish between signs and symbols. Signs tend to be literal representations for which there is a commonly accepted interpretation. Although symbols may do this too, they invariably contain deeper, more complex meanings open to personal interpretation. With that in mind, I started mooching through the Google Image search results for signs & symbols, and blow me, if I didn’t start looking at the images with a far more critical eye. What exactly were these images trying to represent and how much was open to different interpretations … and what influences would these findings have on my design? I started wondering whether what we see when approaching the gents is a sign (yes probably) and about the history of the circle with vertical dash that now represents on/off … and is that a sign or symbol?

Time to get started then. My own ‘department’ isn’t actually an educational subject or faculty; we’re on the non-teaching side. Whether that will affect people’s interpretation of my sign, I’m not sure. I elected to use Aviary Raven. I’ve been aware of Aviary for quite some time, but have only really made use of Talon (screen capture) and Falcon (image markup), so this assignment provided the ideal impetus to get me started. The interface proved simple and crisp, and there were enough features to get the job done to an acceptable standard, but as someone who has used vector-based applications in the past, I felt there were one or two significant omissions. No grid, so no snap to grid (the guidelines didn’t quite make up for that), no capability to ‘group’ objects (that’s pretty much a fundamental!) and you could only delete by right-clickingan object and choosing Remove (the delete keyboard key has no effect). So whilst Raven got the job done, I didn’t find it particularly productive … balanced against that are it’s online and therefore accessible (in theory) from any PC and of course, it’s free!

So here’s my efforts (I suspect you may find the second easier than the first!):

What have I learned?

  • There is a distinction between signs and symbols and that this is a far more complex and interesting area than I first imagined.
  • To look at signs and symbols and what they represent with a far more analytical eye.
  • That there is much more to the design process than I could ever have imagined.
  • A little more facility in the use of Aviary Raven and an awareness of some of its limitations as a vector editor.
  • My analytical muscles are definitely more ‘ripped’ than my creative ones, so edtecchcc will be providing my creative workout sessions.

Educational Technology Creative Collective – Preliminary Task January 8, 2012

Posted by ianinsheffield in edtechcc, Musings.
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This then is the first post in a series of contributions as participation in the Educational Technology Creative Collective. Initiated by Colin Maxwell, this project

is a collaboration of educators investigating and experimenting with digital technologies to enhance education.

einstein quote on creativity

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo by v i p e z: http://flickr.com/photos/vipez/4179099662/

It’s about exploring creativity and sharing those experiences within a community of like-minded educators. That appeals to me in a number of ways. Despite advancing years, I seem to be gaining an increasing thirst for learning and I believe that’s best undertaken socially, within a supportive environment, yet at times and in places to suit the learner. That might be in the evening on the sofa with a glass of light refreshment, in the morning on the bus on the way to work or sitting around a table (in a cafe/pub?) at or after a conference/meeting. Or indeed whilst out cycling! It’s only in recent years that all those opportunities have become fulfilled through the new technologies which have become available.

I’m always scanning for interesting applications which offer new potential as learning tools; a part of my job which I thoroughly enjoy. I guess it’s the seeking and finding, exploring and testing, communicating and sharing. Hopefully Edtechcc will offer the chance to do that with others and therefore enjoy a richer and deeper learning experience as a consequence.

There’s a little more information on the ‘About Me’ and ‘My Digital Tracks’ pages – the LinkedIn account gives a potted history.

Looking forward to enjoying our connections :-)