New channels for student support

What's already clear about the online teaching developments I've got planned for the next year is that things will go wrong, there will be unanticipated consequences and that I'll have to think on my feet. For these reasons, new communications channels for talking to students and colleagues are required alongside all of the traditional ones.

The first thing I've done is to set up a dedicated Twitter account (DrCann) for student support. For this to work, the professional student support channel is going to have to be kept clear from the rest of my lifestream on Twitter as most students won't be able to cope with the signal to noise ratio. Similarly, I've set up a dedicated Seesmic account (drcann) for the same reasons. In both cases, these accounts are linked to my University email account, and of course, all of this is in addition to the existing support channels such as email, Blackboard and face to face. I'm also considering the possibility of setting up a FriendFeed room, but I haven't really grokked that yet.

Near synchronous channels such as Twitter and Seesmic create an expectation of instantaneous 24/7 response, and that's not going to happen. I can also think of plenty of other ways frisky students could break this model, so reluctantly, there will have to be a few rules. (If we didn't have rules, where would we be? :-)

Students will be told:

• Twitter and Seesmic are external services. The University of Leicester is not responsible for the content of external web sites, and does not endorse any content, opinions, advertisements or any other services provided at those sites.
• To use these optional services, you must set up a free account at Twitter and/or Seesmic using your University of Leicester username so that I can verify that you are a student on a course I am currently teaching. You can have multiple Twitter/Seesmic accounts and may wish to set up one for University use and one for private use. If on registering you find that your UoL username is already taken, contact me and I will assign you a username.
  
• If you send me a message via Twitter or Seesmic, I will do my best to respond as quickly as possible, but if I am not in my office, it might take time for me to reply.
• Read the Twitter/Seesmic help material and make sure you understand the difference between public and private messages. I advise you to use these services for advice only and not for any private issues. (Contact me by email or speak to me in person if you want to discuss something privately)
  
• In the event of abuse (e.g. sending content likely to cause offence), I will block your account so that you cannot send me any more messages. To avoid sabotage (!), keep your passwords private and do not leave public access computers while logged in!
  

How am I going to persuade students to use these services? I'm not. It's a choice they can make if they wish. The demand will come by viral marketing, e.g. showing them how to pull the feeds into Facebook.

So why are you doing this?
As an experiment, I can't say what the outcomes will be, but the hypothesis that I'm testing is that in the long run (not including learning how to do it), it might provide a better service, save me some time, and both the students and I will be happier. And along the way, we may just do some viral professional development too.

Life after Mars

On July 5th 1997 I gave a presentation called "Online interactive computer assisted learning" at the 3rd International Conference on Computer Based Learning in Science at De Montfort University in Leicester. (Is anyone who was at that meeting reading this I wonder?)

The talk was based on a series of online hypertext tutorials I had developed over the previous few years, so I decided not to use PowerPoint (or glass slides as most of the presenters still did) but instead to present my talk live using Mosaic. To make the point that what I was talking about could not be achieved in any other medium, I included a picture from the surface of Mars in the corner of each slide, taken by the NASA Mars Pathfinder mission which had touched down the previous evening and just started beaming back pictures that morning.

The tactic worked like a charm, except for one thing. When it came to the questions, the first one was "What's the URL for the pictures from Mars?" (this was a year before Google was founded). When I put it on the screen, the room cleared and everyone rushed off to the computer room the organizers had made available to look at the pictures. There were no other questions.

This morning, I'm sitting here looking at the pictures coming back from the NASA Phoenix mission, tuning into the Twitter stream and discussing the news with people on Seesmic. Some days, 11 years feels like a lifetime, but it doesn't seem like such a long time to me today.

Good, bad and indifferent

Excuse me while I ponder on a few thoughts which are going round inside my head.

In the beginning was the Blog. The Blog was the Word. And the Web looked upon the Blog and saw that it was good.
Except that most of the celebrity-obsessed idiots in our culture can't string two words together, but at least the Blog allows indexing and searching for serendipitous discovery. Much more importantly, blogging writing is hard work. Not many people keep up a blog for any length of time, which severely limits participation.

Then came Twitter, and word-stringing became less important. There's a limited amount of damage you can do to the language in 140 characters or less. And as Twitter is text-based, it still allows indexing and searching for serendipitous discovery.
Except that Twitter was chronically unstable and the Twitter-elves admitted that they didn't know how to fix the problem. So the Twitterati started muttering about jumping ship.

Twitter was followed by FriendFeed, which was like Twitter, except that it worked.
Except that FriendFeed isn't like Twitter. Twitter itself is hard for people to grok, but they get there eventually. FriendFeed is an order of magnitude harder to understand. This technologically superior service will not compete with Twitter once Twitter gets it's act together. It was VHS versus Betamax all over again.
Are there any Thwirl-like applications for FriendFeed? Doh! Twhirl *is* a FriendFeed client!


Most recently we have Seesmic. Seesmic might solve the participation problem because even an idiot can click, talk and click.
Unfortunately, idiots tend to talk rubbish, at great length, once the entry barrier of writing is gone. And Seesmic video does not allow indexing and searching for serendipitous discovery. So Seesmic needs automatic tagging, some sort of resource discovery mechanism and a 90 second time limit like a Flickr long photo.


So how do I resolve all these thoughts in my head?
By blogging about them. Because unlike the others, blogging is reflective and helps me think.

Stop yer whining

Andrew Baron - FriendFeed via kwout

Understanding the Backchannel

Ruminate » Blog Archive » Understanding the Backchannel via kwout

Leicester Social Media Smartmob Followup

Yesterday, we used Seesmic to organize a smartmob to talk about social media. It was a huge success and the UoL campus was jammed to bursting point(ish). We eyeballed each other and confirmed that no-one is using a ringer to record their seesmic videos, consumed some beverages and chatted for a while.

Then we got round to talking about how we're going to promote social media usage locally. And I think we're all agreed (?) locally is one of the key words here, the other one being grassroots.

We could just tag everything FAO the local network using a specific cross-site tag (leicnet?), and then simply aggregate the tag feed from all the different sites (although we didn't decide on how to do this - Friendfeed? Tumblr? Mixx.com?). The snag with this is that any spammer could use the tag to drop nasties into the feed, which could potentially be very bad PR with colleagues we are trying to influence.

The alternative is to create an account on one of the above services (group or shared details) and aggregate "approved" feeds. This has the advantage that we can add contributors who may not feel or know they would be "elligible" for the network, but the downside is that it would be closed network that people would have to "apply" to join, and it creates admin for someone to do.

So on balance, I think I'm in favour of the open approach, and we'll just deal with the spammers when they arrive (we need some way to moderate the aggregator).

So which aggregator shall we use? All of them?

Lovely Leafy Leicester

University of Leicester Learning and Teaching in the Sciences conference, 2008.

http://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/ssds/slc/events/lts2008

Why Seesmic changes the game

If you've been around for the past week, you may have spotted that I'm excited by Seesmic.com. Launched in October 2007 and still very much under development, Seesmic is best thought of as the video equivalent of Twitter.

So why the fuss about this fledgling, yet-another-video-sharing service? Because Seesmic changes the game as far as online video is concerned. One way or another, there are few people who don't have the capacity to record video, but it's surprising the number of people who never use the webcam built into their computer. More usually, making even the shortest video means hunting down the video camera, charging the battery, recording yourself, finding the cable, capturing the video to the computer, editing, uploading to a sharing website, waiting for file conversion to be completed and the video to become available online and then sharing the URL. For all but the most dedicated geeks, this just isn't going to happen, any more than blogging would have happened if it involved making the ink and the paper, plucking the quills, writing your post in Latin or Greek, waiting for it to dry, popping it in a bottle and throwing it into the sea.

Seesmic changes the game because it brings the entire video process into realtime. Record, send, done. And like Twitter, the shorter the better - you're not David Attenborough. No waiting for video capture or conversion. Not only does this lower the barrier to participation, it makes conversation possible. And the architecture of conversation is inherent in Seesmic, as you quickly realize when you use the site and get your first comments back. Typing? forget it, it's so last month, man. I've been critical of the fact that most of the user generated video online consists of talking heads, and that's exactly what you get on Seesmic. But Seesmic is different because these videos are part of a conversation, where people talk to each other face to face.

I'm enormously excited about the possibilities that Seesmic (and the clones which will follow it) offer for communicating with students, such as the possibilities for student feedback (in both directions):

I've read your essay and...

Dr Cann, can you show me how to...

In fact, I'm so interested in Seesmic that I've changed my plans. Now I can't see me buying a 3G iPhone next month, unless it has a built in video camera and runs Flash. I'm even prepared to forgo the drooling Apple shinyness to get a lumpier device which can access Seesmic (are you listening Steve?). Seesmic presently calls itself an alpha release, and openly acknowledges that it has rough edges (while asking contributors to the site to help fix them). The interface is coded in Flash, which creates accessibility issues for some disabled users. So does that mean that we can't use Seesmic for students? We can if we follow Brian Kelly's advice about Accessibility 2.0 and risk management of outsourced IT provision.

So stop whining, buy yourself a 20 quid webcam and join the conversation. And for once, please don't leave me a comment below ;-)
Go to Seesmic and sign up, then send me your comment face to face (and add the URL to the comments thread below so the cavemen can see how much fun we're having).

Time to wake up

It's now an established fact that newspapers are dying, or at least, contracting into a niche market - how can bits of tree compete against social media when it comes to filtering and transmitting information?

I've also written here before about the impending death of broadcast television, and that has just been confirmed by the latest figures from the USA, with the networks down by 10% from last year in total viewers and down 17% in the 18- to 49-year-old demographic.

These numbers don't mean that the ugly box in the corner of your room is going to go away, as we will all still continue to watch goggle-eyed, but broadcasting in the TV1.0, take-what-you're-given-and-like-it sense is doomed. We'll get our video fix from on-demand viewing and social sources like Seesmic, where we'll not only watch but also reply. I wonder when the first TV with a built in camera will appear - oh wait, I'm using one now!

I've also hinted before that now that higher education is a form of entertainment rather than being undertaken for vocational reasons, we are not immune to the same pressures faced by the rest of the media. If we continue to hand out education to students on stone tablets, we'll be in as much trouble as the rest of the media within a decade.

What you gain on the personalization and scalability swings you lose on the relationships and brand loyalty roundabouts. Alma mater? Google say it doesn't matter. I don't believe that new technologies or social media have any inherent overall educational benefit over traditional methods. I believe that we have no choice.

What the Faulks?

RSS subscribers click here to view video

Seesmic for student feedback

If you're interested, please contribute to the discussion thread on seesmic.

Testing, testing

I enjoy teaching but dislike giving examinations and grading. Is there something wrong with this picture? I became a college teacher to educate students, not to spend time deciding whether an essay answer is worth a B or a B- or whether average exam grades of 87.3 are B+ or A-. For me personally, grades are a secondary and derivative issue at best, an anguished responsibility at worst. My dislike of grades has led me to search for ways to separate them from my teaching. I don’t say “everybody’s teaching” — only from mine. If other instructors enjoy testing and grading, I won’t try to take away their fun.

Bob Sommer, Inside Higher Ed

Regular tests narrow curriculum