TELic: A blog about Technology Enhanced Learning

Six months later…

It is exactly six months since I wrote my first (and only) post since I moved to Aston, so an update is long overdue. I’m settling into my role here and starting to work on some larger projects:

• Using Aston Replay (Panopto) to record student presentations. The current method is based on rather aged video cameras and involves a lot of manual work to copy and transcode the recordings. There is also the problem of where to archive those recordings so external examiners can view them if required. The new method will use webcams to record directly to Panopto, and I have purchased 8 sets of Logitech C920 cameras, tripods and 5m USB extension cables to facilitate this.
• Using TEAMMATES to enable peer feedback in group projects. I was very impressed by the speed and efficiency of Aston’s legal services in reviewing and approving this system for use, given the new GDPR requirements. I’ll be working with a couple of academics in the Aston Business School on pilot projects.
• Supporting the use of video in Languages and Social Sciences. I have cleared out the small storeroom that forms part of my office and turned it into a video podcast studio. It will provide a quiet ready-to-use space for academic staff who wish to create videos, and I’ll provide the technical support and training they may need.
• Promoting the use of student response systems. The new School of Medicine will be using the excellent TopHat system and are providing their students with iPads so they can take full advantage of that. I’ve been using Meetoo with my PGCert module ‘Becoming a Research Led Innovator in Higher Education’. This has around 100 new academic staff, many of whom have now expressed an interest in using Meetoo.
• Making use of the ABC Learning Design method. I’ve made this one of the core activities of my PGCert module, so again 100 academics have now experienced first-hand what an effective ‘thinking tool’ this storyboarding technique provides. One of my CLIPP colleagues is also piloting this with the Business School.

I had some great news last week when I learned that my colleague Dr Denise Baden from Southampton had been awarded the ESRC Celebrating Impact Prize 2018 for Outstanding Impact in Business and Enterprise. My contribution to this was the virtual hair salon online training (much discussed in this blog last year) which has now been used by around 1000 trainee hairdressers, and featured in the video created for the award ceremony. It was a fantastic project to be involved with, and many congratulations to Denise!

Finally, it looks likely that I’ll be moving house to Worcester in August, completing a process that began just over a year ago, the same week I celebrated 30 years at Southampton University, when I saw the advert for my new post here at Aston. Cheers!

Room at the top

It is now nearly the end of my second week at Aston University, where I am now the Teaching Fellow for Technology Enhanced Learning in the School of Languages and Social Sciences (LSS). I am also part of the institutional Centre for Learning Innovation and Professional Practice (CLIPP) which in many ways is similar to how ILIaD was at Southampton. So I’m part of a central unit but based in a school (faculty).

My office is on the top 10th floor of the North wing of the main building, with panoramic views to the West of Birmingham. This was originally the College of Advanced Technology, opened by the Queen in 1955 and at the time was the second-largest brick building in the world, after Battersea Power Station. I found this architect’s impression in the lobby:

The North and South wings were added in the early 1960’s and have little to recommend them; they make finding your way around difficult and the floors don’t line up, so you can walk down a corridor from the 9th floor of the North wing to the 7th floor of the main building. I’m spending more time in lifts that I have ever done before…

This shows the South wing’s subtle addition to the original design, as well as the Blue and red SkyLifts. There is also a Paternoster (up-and-over) lift, sadly no longer in operation.

The students are busy taking exams and the academics marking them, so during this liminal time I’m easing into my tasks and responsibilities here and learning how the systems work and who are the key people to make contact with.

I’ll finish with that view:

Epilogue

The final day. After 30 years and 5 months I’ve reached the end of my time at Southampton and my attention turns towards Aston. And yes, it does feel very odd, but today has been a good final day.

It started with a couple of ServiceLine tickets about iSurvey; the first wanted to know if people could save their responses and return later to complete a survey. The answer was ‘yes’, but the online help wasn’t helpful so I corrected that. The other wanted to know if a survey could politely direct people who didn’t match specific requirements to the exit, and I politely pointed them to the relevant help page. I then helped my colleague Julie Reeves configure her new WordPress site that aims to help support Researcher Development and we talked about ways and means of attracting readers to her work. I love this combination of hands-on geekiness, just-in-time user training and consideration of the wider issues. Then it was on to a meeting with my long-time colleague and TEL pioneer, John Woollard from the Education School. We were meeting some of his PhD students for an informal chat about learning technologies, reflecting on the drivers and barriers to effective use of TEL in the classroom, especially in developing nations.

After lunch there was a Yule-log party with my friends Matt, Sam and Graham (amongst others) in the iSolutions ‘Managed learning Environment’ team. We’ve been two sides of the TEL-support coin since the turn of the century, and are a good example of the blurred lines between ‘learning technologist’ and ‘learning technologist‘. There was plenty of cake and a good deal of talk about learning to drive and cars we have known. Finally, I worked on an update to the Sustainable Hairdressing resource that I developed for Denis Baden as part of an ESRC project. There were a few minor edits, but the key activity was to automate the process by which learners gain their Sustainable Stylist certificate. The project funding has nearly run out, so they will no longer be gathering data via iSurvey and emailing certificates manually. I used a link from the final screen to a Google Form to gather the name and email address of people who completed the training, and then Form Publisher to use those details with a Google Slides template to generate a personalised PDF certificate which is automatically emailed to the learner. Magic!

So Long and Thanks for all the fish!

Back in July I wrote a post ‘30‘ which marked my thirtieth anniversary working at the University of Southampton. At the end of that week I applied for a job as a Teaching Fellow in Technology Enabled Learning at Aston University in Birmingham, and I’m pleased and excited to say that I was successful! So after three decades I’m leaving Southampton to make a fresh start in the Midlands…

I thought I ought to give a farewell lecture, looking back at all the units and projects I’ve worked for, and the colleagues I’ve worked with. I’m an inveterate hoarder, so I also had quite a few objects from those far-off days – from the first user guide I created in 1987 (for the Wordwise word processor on the BBC-B) to the ultra-thin 1.4kg Sony Vaio N505 laptop I bought for a project in 1999 (nearly a decade before the 1.36kg Macbook Air).

After some thought (inconveniently in the middle of the night) I came up with the perfect theme – ALIBABA or A Life in Buzzwords and Bad Acronyms – which pretty much sums up my career. Looking back through my file archives it is amazing how many buzzwords and acronyms I have worked with, so my talk goes from DTP to BYOD, via HTML and a couple of dozen others.

If you have 35 minutes to spare, I made a recording of the talk for posterity. My next post will be in the New Year, from my new job. Merry Yule and best wishes for the coming year.

So Long and Thanks for all the Fish – image by Mathiole – which you can get as a T-Shirt. Cool!

30

This week, it has been 30 years since I joined the University as the Desktop Publishing specialist in Computing Services. Back in 1987, a massive IBM 3090 mainframe provided most of the University’s computing power, supplemented by BBC B Micros and a wide variety of other early micro-computers. I was one of the lucky few to have an IBM XT 286 with a 6MHz 80286 processor, 640kB of RAM, a 20MB hard drive and a 13″ colour screen with VGA graphics showing 16 colours from a 256-colour palette at a resolution of 640×480 pixels. I used it with Ventura Publisher and the only HP LaserJet on campus to create user guides, posters and newsletters. This was pre-Windows; Ventura had its own graphical user interface (GUI) that used a mouse.

Today, I’m still lucky enough to have a state-of-the-art device; I’m typing this on a Microsoft Surface Pro 4 with a 2.2GHz Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD and a 12″ screen showing 16 million colours at a resolution of 2736×1824 pixels. OK, the screen is a bit smaller, but it is fully touch-enabled with pen input… and I have a lovely 27″ display plugged in to it. Today I’ve mainly been using it to author an interactive guide using Articulate Storyline.

And of course it has this thing called ‘The Internet’ that was still in its infancy when I started… Do I feel old? Not really, just experienced.