Many of Megan’s ideas are come from the new book by executive coach and author Debra Benton – the Virtual Executive. Debra Benton introduces the idea of ‘props’ – i.e. the stuff you have lying around your desk and in your room that can be seen in video conferences and Skype chats.
The idea made me chuckle. My own favourite mug sports a “I’d rather be in bed” message and although I now sit in a part of the lounge, my old ‘office’ used to be our spare bedroom and was the dumping ground for all tat that had no home.
One of the 10 mistakes is:
You look like a terrorist on Skype. In video, Benton says a huge mistake is the casualness of your presentation, but she’s especially emphatic about backdrop. In other words, booting up Skype or Face Time without first considering whether there’s a plant growing out the top of your head is a bad idea.” Take a look around, she says: is there a bra on your chair? Is there smoking paraphernalia in the room that shouldn’t be there?
To follow it up Megan adds:
And your props are terrible. Even an innocent slip can get you in trouble on-camera. One executive Benton worked with decided he wanted a glass of water on hand during a video conference, which seemed innocuous enough. “But the glass he chose was a beer mug!” she says. When the man lifted the glass to drink and his colleagues saw him through grainy web video, it appeared he was drinking on the job. Rule of thumb: choose your glasses wisely.
So have you had a look at what’s lying on your desk today?
To be honest I tend to avoid using Web Cams these days, I usually claim it’s a broad band issue, in reality it’s a “bad hair and messy room” issue!
I began the #ioe12 open assessment module by watching the Badges for Lifelong Learning: An Open Conversation YouTube video. The video is a snappy introduction to the concept of open badges with endorsement for them from a number of senior educationalists/academics and CEOs.
“Digital badges will make the accomplishments and experiences of individuals, in online and offline spaces, visible to anyone and everyone, including potential employers, educators and communities.”
OK, sounds good…but what exactly are open badges?? And what do they have to do with open assessment?
When people talk about open badges they are usually referring to the Mozilla Open Badges project. The project is 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. Badges can be issued by anyone (educational institution, work place, online learning organisations) to anyone. These badges can then be displayed publicly on a digital (or non-digital) space (blog, Web site, Facebook, email signature, CV etc).
In the Launch of HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation DML Competition 4: Badges for Lifelong Learning YouTube Mark Surman from Mozilla talks about how they are building an open badge infrastructure system. The first building block is a backpack system where users can store badges (a set of APIs for users). There is also the DML badge competition.
One example from the ioe12 resources is the Mozilla run School of Webcraft in which you can obtain badges. This is through the Peer 2 Peer University, a grassroots open education project that “creates a model for lifelong learning alongside traditional formal higher education”. They leverage the internet and educational materials openly available online and so enables “high-quality low-cost education opportunities“.
On closer examination there do seem to be other badging systems, such as the Global Kids system within the Hive Networks system in the US. Their paper Six Ways to Look at Badging Systems Designed for Learning gives an overview of how they badging system works:
Badges as an alternative assessment – This is the idea that assessment can take the form of ‘validated accomplishments’ instead of tests
Gamifying education with badges – The games based achievement system has it’s origins in the Xbox 360 game score system – qualifications filtered through achievements.
Badges as Learning Scaffolding – Badges, as a form of scaffolded learning, reveal multiple pathways that youth may follow and make visible the paths youth eventually take.
Badges to Develop Lifelong Learning Skills – By offering names for their new competencies and supporting communities.
Badges as DML Driver – Badges support digital, media and learning practices.
Badges to Democratize Learning – Some badges change who does the assessment and allow learners to shape the content of their badging system and perhaps even the structure itself.
It’s a really interesting area, and seems to be very much ‘taking assessment to where the students are’. New and different approaches always face challenges and I didn’t feel there was enough on this in the ioe12 module. I expect some of the key problems are around validation of badges, the ease with which badges can be created and standards. Also by focusing on badges I think other ideas around open assessment (such as e-assessment, portfolios/diaries, PLEs, self-evaluation, learner created content) were sadly missed.
The Open Teaching module is a strange one in that it reflects on the process of open teaching (and learning) – something that I am participating in by taking part in this MOOC and writing this post. It starts out with a Keynote given by David Wiley at 2009 Penn State Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology. Wiley starts off with a story that highlights the challenges posed by the move to teaching and learning online (comparing water polo and horse riding polo). There are different tactics and challenges for each, caused in part by the rate of change.
The six key changes are:
Analog > digital
Tethered > mobile
Isolated > connected
Generic > personal
Consuming > creating
Closed > open
Wiley introduces the idea of book-ification of TV, originally coined by Lawrence Lessig, basically TV on demand. This can obviously be applied to our on campus courses – “why do I have to be in a room at 10am to hear you give that lecture” (see my recent post on flipping lectures). All this applies to education because the historic monopoly institutions have had is being challenged on almost every front. Students can now go to other places for their content: Opencourseware, Wikipedia, Public Library of Science, Arxiv.org, Google Scholar, Flat World Knowledge etc. and for their support services: ChaCha, Yahoo Answers, RateMyProfessor, email, IM, Twitter etc. and for their social life: Facebook etc. However institutions believe they are the only place students can get degrees, but what about technical credentials – MCSE, RHCE, CCNA?
It seems that everything that a University provides is being offered by someone else. Institutions aren’t even cheaper. Institutions have to innovate and change. E-learning is not enough – it may be digital and mobile but isn’t necessarily connected, personal, creating or open. Openness underpins many of the values that e-learning is missing, need to be able to access courses and be able to modify them, you need to be able to be creative. Wiley goes on to advocate MIT Open Courseware and other open projects he’s been involved with (such as getting students to write on blogs). He explains that there is a role for OER in the classroom. By being open you hope certain things will happen but in reality different things happen that you don’t even expect. Wiley is making moves to be even more open and this course ‘Introduction to Open Education’ is one example of this. He talks about the self-management process of getting students to comment on each other’s writing. [Personally I haven’t found that that has happened much but I’ll talk more about that when I reassess the course at the end]. He also mentions that students were keen to get certificates at the end (which led to a newspaper writing that “professors print their own diplomas, who needs Universities”!). Wiley has also explored using gaming in teaching
The keynote was given in 2009 so a little dated but Wiley sees the future as being disaggregation, while people will consider what is the value of integration (through institutions). HE needs to move away from using policy to defend tradition (as the music industry are doing) and to change. “Don’t innovate to avoid the Doomsday scenario, do it for the students”. It still seems a pertinent warning given the current climate in HE here in the UK.
Other notable resources on the module are Wiley’s article Open Teaching Multiplies the Benefit but Not the Effort which looks at practices like encouraging student blogs and their effect on the quality of outputs. The article concludes with an interesting question, one that may split the academic community
Do we professors, who live rather privileged lives relative to the vast majority of the planet’s population, have a moral obligation to make our teaching efforts as broadly impactful as possible, reaching out to bless the lives of as many people as we can? Especially when participatory technologies make it so inexpensive (almost free) for us to do so?
I believe the answer is yes. —David Wiley
The MOOC model takes a look at research gaps and future directions explaining that the model is so new that it has been subjected to little research so far. oherent research agenda would help assess both the overall viability of the model and the conditions under which it might achieve its potential. Some specific pedagogical issues and questions given are:
How can a MOOC support deep enquiry and the creation of sophisticated knowledge;
What is the breadth versus the depth of participation;
Can participation extend beyond those with broadband access and sophisticated social networking skills;
What are the processes and practices that might encourage lurkers, or “legitimate pe ripheral participants”, to take on more active and central roles;
What is the impact or value of even peripheral participation, specifically the extent to which it might contribute to participation in the digital economy in extra-MOOC practices;
What strategies can maximize the effective contribution of facilitators in particular and more advanced participants in general;
Is there a role for accreditation, if any, and how it might be implemented.
I’d like to reflect on these questions more after I’ve finished the course.
Last week I tuned in to JISC/HEA Video in Teaching and Learning Webinar series for an Adobe Connect session on Flipping the lecture. I’ve mentioned the flipping lecture idea before and was keen to hear more. The webinar was presented by Carl Gombrich, a lecturer at UCL. Carl, a self proclaimed ‘late started’ when it comes to technology talked about the Echo 360 lecturecast ‘Five Steps to Successful Flipping’ he gave at the HEA assessment event in UCL. The lecture cast and notes is available from his blog.
Carl Gombrich webinar
Carl basically used a Web cam and Echo 360 http://echo360.com/, a Leader in blended learning and lecture Capture Solution, to present a lecture. Carl also invested in a Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet which allows the lecturer to draw on ppts, write mathematics formula etc.
Carl approach is to record the lecture in advance then ask students to view the lecture before the time table slot. Getting them to do this can be problematic but he encourages them to watch it by asking them to write 3 questions relating to the lecture. They also need to jot down when in the lecture (the timeslot) the questions arise. Doing this not only ensures students watch but reflection on the questions is a learning process. As Carl explains “one of the most important things in learning is asking the right questions”. The questions are then uploaded to a community space (wiki, VLE etc.) and then there is a poll allowing students to select their top 10 questions. These questions are addressed in the face-to-face timetabled lecture slot.
Working in this way not only allows more reflection and engagement but it also helps teaching get back to more personal relationships.
Carl then shared some thoughts on the good things about working in this way: students get their questions answered, there is better engagement, submitting questions is part of the formative assessment, time is freed up. And the bad things: there is always a worry that the kit won’t work, some lecturers are self conscious, it takes extra time (but don’t we owe it to them – they pay for teaching – later on you can reuse sessions).
It was really refreshing to hear someone who “just doesn’t care about the technology” but cares about the reaching talk about how the flipping lecture idea could work in reality. Over 60 people attended and the moderator declared it the highest attended JISC/HEA Video in Teaching and Learning webinar to date.
There were a few technologies mentioned in the chat of the session that I intend to follow up including Presentations2go, which lets students write comments on the timeline directly, then discuss them.
I enjoyed reading the MSNBC article on 10 mistakes everyone makes working from home by Meghan Casserly.
