Disqus - Friends of jayjay

Re: Has Blackboard outlived its shelf-life?

AJCann — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 04:54:03 -0000

I don't "care" in a theoretical sense, although it does raise some practical issues. I'm not particularly convinced the "VLE as a hub" metaphor is very accurate, the time-honoured "VLE as a filing cabinet" works better, especially as that's how everyone uses it. For those reasons, I'm headed in the FriendFeed direction.

Paradoxically, I'm getting more email traffic from students this year than for a long time (which is a pain as it's much more labour-intensive to deal with then other channels). However, little of it is coming through the institutional service, it's coming from a plethora of online services. They also expect realtime replies, even when they email me late at night!

Re: Reflective FriendFolios

AJCann — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 05:50:18 -0000

An update is a FF entry, either object-oriented or just typed in. I intend to point them at live FF examples from my FF teaching account. What is reflection? Well, that's the big one, isn't it.

Re: Failure is an option

AJCann — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 04:38:32 -0000

I agree, we all skim read, but I don't think that's the problem here. They've decided that they don't need/want to read the instructions. It's the same problem as getting people to read an instruction manual - they won't do it until after they have failed. Stuff these days is supposed to "just work". Education isn't necessarily like that.

Re: Failure is an option

AJCann — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 08:49:48 -0000

Err, don't know. Disqus knows you are registered but doesn't show your avatar - methinks the new version is a bit flaky.

Re: Failure is an option

AJCann — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 08:48:48 -0000

I'd have hoped so, but the YouTube stats from my embedded Screenr videos say not :-(

Re: Failure is an option

AJCann — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 06:18:46 -0000

Hmm, education as affirmation. I'll need to think about that.

Re: Failure is an option

AJCann — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 05:00:02 -0000

That is related, and that's the type of authentic learning I'm referring to. But what does your experience say about the people who wrote the manual?

Re: Failure is an option

AJCann — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 04:44:41 -0000

I think the difference with online journalism is that readers are presumably visiting those sites because they want to access the content. The majority of students visit our VLE not because they want to (death of intellectual curiosity - it's no longer higher education, it's higher training) but because it's a hoop jumping exercise to pass an assessment. How do we know this? Because if we don't assess an exercise, few participate. How do we solve the problem?

Re: Failure is an option

AJCann — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 04:37:12 -0000

This is undeniably true, but how much information is too much? And if many students are reluctant to read anything except in desperation (lack of intellectual curiosity) does that mean that online teaching (as distinct from online learning) is impossible? And how do I tackle the issues which arise when students complain about me and say "He doesn't teach us anything?"

Re: Failure is an option

AJCann — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 04:11:40 -0000

In many cases, they're not even looking at the notes until they fail to complete the assessment. They're learning backwards, which is maybe not a bad thing for them, but it's inefficient in terms of my time, and then they say that I'm a bad teacher...

Re: Engaging Students Through In-Class Technology

AJCann — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 05:35:24 -0000

Yes, there has been a Disqus upgrade, "Narcissus" - I guess they don't think many bloggers are classical scholars!

Re: Changing the game

AJCann — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 05:52:40 -0000

Yes, I wish Technorati would stop "reinventing" itself so we can just have the wake and move on.

Re: Changing the game

AJCann — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 05:41:16 -0000

I rather like Elluminate. What's the problem?

Re: FriendFolios

AJCann — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 03:53:05 -0000

I can understand why you say that, but I think it's a flawed argument. Use of any technology or pedagogical approach for summative assessment changes the way students interact with it. Therefore the only way we can understand it is through using it. The safeguard for students is to ensure new approaches are introduced gradually so that out the outset they only form a small part of the overall pattern of assessment, and to maintain at all times a varied pattern of assessment formats so thta no students is disadvantaged.

Re: FriendFolios

AJCann — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:22:47 -0000

Hi John. I take your point and agree with it. I used the word antisocial not in pejorative way but as a simple shorthand to contract the individually-motivated approach to networks (which we are hoping to harness) with the groupthink mentality which is normally presented when such sites are discussed.

Re: FriendFolios

AJCann — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 07:40:39 -0000

I'm planning to roll this out next term. I'm not totally convinced Friendfeed is as object-orientated as you keep claiming ;-) The chronologically-ordered nature of status updates should be a good scaffolding for reflection. We'll need to think about assessment criteria next.

Re: FriendFolios

AJCann — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 07:38:12 -0000

At the moment we're looking to simplify the rather complex mix of tools we use on this course because it's blowing many first year students away at present. Whether these tools are good for supporting learning in our course is something we'll be able to answer after we've collected the data, which sadly will have to wait another year now as I only get one bite at this a year.

Re: Not Waving but Drowning

AJCann — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 02:12:53 -0000

In general I agree, it's the price anyone pays for cramming more information into a set space. We've been having terrible problems with the new, "improved" Google Reader this term. Set against that, I think Google may have done a better job than some other companies would, although it's worrying that they are going in the wrong direction. The new interface to Google Docs is an improvement, although perhaps not as big a one as would have been possible. Ultimately, Wave is an alpha at the present time, so we'll have to wait and see where it goes.

Re: Not Waving but Drowning

AJCann — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 02:08:27 -0000

I haven't tried it with Chrome yet, although I plan to. My impressions of Chrome are generally favourable, so I'd expect an improvement.

Re: How I Learned to Love FriendFeed - The Director's Cut

AJCann — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:34:31 -0000

There's an RSS feed for each thread, but I assume you mean all Disqus comments for this blog? It's: http://scienceoftheinvisible.disqus.com/comment...

Re: Leveraging FriendFeed for Science Education

AJCann — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:08:49 -0000

Yes, I'm not a great fan of Ning for precisely that reason: http://tinyurl.com/yf3ytpe

I wish I had had my "road to Damascus" moment four weeks ago!

Re: Leveraging FriendFeed for Science Education

AJCann — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 04:45:50 -0000

"FriendFeed is like Facebook for xxx" is an Open Access slogan, licensed CC BY ;-)

We've always stayed away from interacting with current students on Facebook, mostly so as to leave them a social space where they don't feel like they're being stalked.

Re: Leveraging FriendFeed for Science Education

AJCann — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 01:14:09 -0000

"Very nice model. This is something like what we should be doing on the PG Cert for teachers in HE. Wonder what tools there will be in 10 months' time?"

Good question. There is certainly going to be change in the next year. At least with a model we can look for systems which seem to have appropriate attributes to suit it. However, the differences between sites are so subtle that this won't substitute for having had experience the the service I plan to use. I just hope Friendfeed lives on in some form.

Re: The extraordinary research of the BCA

alun — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 14:43:46 -0000

That has to be comment of the month! Applause!

Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love FriendFeed

AJCann — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 10:24:26 -0000

It's a nice idea, but I'm not entirely sure what I could capture - suggestions welcome if there are aspects you are particularly interested in. Leave it with me for a couple of days and I'll see what I can do...