Friday 3rd February 2012 1-2pm

Online via Blackboard Collaborate

Presenters: Professor Peter Chatterton (Daedalus e-World Ltd) and Professor Gunter Saunders (University of Westminster)

The objective of Making Assessment Count is primarily to help students engage more closely with the assessment process, either at the stage where they are addressing an assignment or at the stage when they receive feedback on a completed assignment. In addition an underlying theme of MAC is to use technology to help connect student reflections on their assessment with their tutors. To facilitate the reflection aspect of MAC a web based tool called e-Reflect is often used. This tool enables the authoring of self-review questionnaires by tutors for students. On completion of an e-Reflect questionnaire a report is generated for the student containing responses that are linked to the options the student selected on the questionnaire.

The session will provide an overview of MAC and highlight some of the variant MAC processes that are being developed by six different universities, as well as drawing out strengths and weaknesses of MAC. There will be a demonstration of how the e-Reflect tool works but the presenters will also show how MAC can work without that tool.  Participants will be engaged by seeking their views on the affordances offered by MAC as well as their input into identifying barriers and enablers in applying MAC in their own institutional and subject contexts.

The webinar is free to attend.

The Webinar

Joined about 20 minutes into the event after teaching ‘Social Media for Job Hunting‘. Thanks to @sarahknight for sending me the login details which hadn’t arrived! 

MACE: https://sites.google.com/a/staff.westminster.ac.uk/mace/home

Immediate reaction from staff is that the workload is likely to be high re learning journals, but find that a few comments actually doesn’t take that long, especially in comparison to the improvement demonstrated from students.

Offers the opportunity for small, but detailed, positive feedback suggesting actions… rather than “So..?” as a typical written comment on an assignment.

What should the balance be between e & f2f feedback:

My comment:

I’m interested to see how coaching practice, etc. is impacting upon how things work. With manipulating-media.co.uk we give them ‘consultancy sessions’ as a group as feedforward, before they submit their assignments, and they write reflective blog post every week. They tend to use FB to connect with each other. Agree that we should look at the e, but ultimately it’s about ensuring that it meets the needs of the course.

Some chat comments:

• The record of what everyone says is increasingly important, a big advantage of ‘e’.
• Is dialogue about scaffolding or about generating cognitive conflict? different processes and different models of dialogue; is all dialogue equally productive?
• Awarding micro grades for demonstrating action on feedback

Further links:

• http://www.textwall.co.uk/
• http://jiscdesignstudio.pbworks.com/w/page/27533889/ESCAPE%20-%20Effectiveness%20versus%20Efficiency

A fascinating video (which makes sense even if you don’t speak French) – how fast technology changes:

Another video, for the American market:

A really inspiring video which echoes much of what I end up saying (wonder if I could sneak this into my Soc Med for Scared courses… makes a chance from ‘Guess the date of the quote’ – which usually sounds like something people say about social media, but was about e.g. the printing press or the telephone!):

Inspiring stuff from Duke University, where they issued all first-year students with iPods, with no particular idea of what they were going to do with them pedagogically:

Well, not so fast. I believe strongly in the importance of education addressing the urgencies of the moment, but I also oppose “techno-determinism”: the tendency to think that a technology in and of itself promotes systemic change. The point of our experiment was not that an expensive technology can reform institutional practice. Rather, we were trying to orchestrate an exercise in calculated disruption – seeking to reorder some of the terms and consequences of learning in higher education. I am against the mere technologising of higher education. But I am an ardent proponent of calculated disruption of the pedagogical status quo with the aim of reshaping education for the Broadcast Yourself era of the interactive, digital age. That’s a mouthful. Let me explain.

In 2003, there was not a single known educational use for the iPod. When Apple approached Duke about giving out some technology to students as part of an Apple Digital Campus initiative, it was thinking more about laptops or multimedia suites. We went with iPods for two reasons. First, students loved them. Second, we were interested in what learning applications students might come up with if challenged to think about pedagogical uses of a technology that was already part of their everyday life. This is the opposite of the usual educational pedagogy based on the “cod liver oil” approach, where you force students to do what is “good for them” no matter how distasteful.

She finishes:

These components of pedagogical participation are essential. We can’t just drop some new electronic device into education and think our job is done. Quite the contrary, new technology is merely a catalyst for a serious rethinking of higher education for the Information Age.

Encouraged by this story demonstrating that academics are taking hold of technology potential to influence the world’s news:

When news broke that Osama bin Laden had been killed by US special forces, who was best placed to assess the global political impact: a rushed general reporter in a short-staffed newsroom, or an academic expert on the Middle East, terrorism and international relations?

After bin Laden’s assassination, hundreds of ill-prepared reporters around the world must have hammered the phones searching for an academic expert in international relations to comment while simultaneously trying to swot up on the subject by scanning a jumble of press cuttings.

As they scrambled around, an Australia-based experiment in online journalism that had begun just months earlier came into its own.

Putting their faith in the university experts, the founders of The Conversation website created a virtual newsroom of academics and offered them the chance to communicate their research to the public without fear of misrepresentation.

When its editors heard the news about bin Laden, they contacted one of their writers, Mat Hardy, a lecturer in Middle East studies at Deakin University. Within two hours, his expert analysis of the event’s ramifications was online.

For Andrew Jaspan, editor and co-founder of the project, this is a powerful example of how the site can not only provide specialist analysis on almost any subject, but also do so within the 24/7 news cycle – and possibly even faster than traditional media.

Read full story.

We live in a connected global environment, Graeme Harper says, so why does the sector act like it’s 1911, not 2011?

A really interesting post, which identifies with the paper that John Naughton gave at ALTC2011. Is the HE sector in danger of making itself redundant?

In higher education, you would think this would often determine our activities and institutions’ formal policies regarding teaching and research. Given that the sector is meant to be the site of educated leadership, that would make perfect, appropriate sense. However, in so many instances this turns out not to be the case. What we find instead are outmoded, outdated, inward-looking policies that suggest not a higher purpose to what we are doing, but rather a determination to support systems of nation-state education and exchange that do not match the world we are living in and that deny the interconnected daily exchanges with which most of us are now so familiar.

Such a statement is, of course, a generalisation: undeniably there are instances of higher education institutions embracing the 21st-century global. But why then do we continue to deliver so much university education as if much of the world were not linkable 24/7 by contemporary technology? Why have we built entire campuses in other parts of the world to export what are largely national attitudes to higher education? Is this purely market opportunism, or do the imperialist overtones hide something more altruistic, more humanly valuable? Regardless, is any of this the best we can do to lead the world in delivering the most advanced forms of education?

Worth reading the full story.

With students expected to become increasingly consumerist after the hike in tuition fees, universities may start to view campus wi-fi as a strong selling point.

But plans at De Montfort University may give students pause for thought about the virtues of an ever-present internet connection: the institution is considering using its network to monitor attendance via electronic chips in students’ ID cards.

Other universities have introduced electronic attendance monitoring, but an automated system using wi-fi would be unusual, and the National Union of Students warned that members would “baulk at the prospect of being treated like inmates under surveillance”.

The plan is outlined in minutes from a meeting of De Montfort’s executive board, which say that it would be “the most foolproof way of monitoring attendance”.

Read the full story.

Always interesting to see how technology is perceived by academics (I recognise many of these complaints)… and this is just the tech section!

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1309469

Describing a recent lecture, another diarist writes: “The room is quite small, claustrophobic and very hot. It didn’t start well – the room was locked when I arrived and it took 10 minutes for someone from customer services to come and unlock it.

“Then the data projector took five minutes to load and then the semi-automated lighting dimmer switch decided to play games.”

The tyranny of technology is a recurring theme. One academic recounts the arrival of a new computer, allocated as part of a “five-year rolling plan”.

“It is nice and fast. It also removes the word “I” from every email I send. Not sure if I should ask for it to be fixed, or if that will take another five years,” the diarist says.

Others express their dissatisfaction with technology used to deliver online courses (“you can’t have two windows open at the same time – come on, it’s not 1995!”), and the discovery that video equipment in a classroom had no sound (“although our brilliant learning technology service always records videos with subtitles for those with hearing difficulties, I didn’t expect the whole group to have to rely on them”).

One of the most common gripes, however, is about dealing with emails. “Tried to clear some of my email backlog – when it gets to triple figures, I know things are starting to fall apart,” says one. “On holiday for once. In Ireland – very nice. Still doing emails,” says another.

Read full story.

UUK president-elect foresees IT benefits among the coalition carnage. Hannah Fearn reports

Universities that are forced to get by on dwindling budgets will drive a revolution in information technology, the next president of Universities UK has predicted.

Eric Thomas, vice-chancellor of the University of Bristol, opened the Jisc annual conference in Liverpool this week by arguing that funding shortages would help to improve the use of IT within the academy.

He warned that state funding for universities would decrease faster than rises in tuition-fee income, but said this would encourage the sector to “do more with less” when it came to the use and development of new technology.

“This may well lead to important step changes in technology as we race to be even more effective,” he said.

Speaking to Times Higher Education in advance of the conference, which took place on 14 and 15 March, Professor Thomas said that universities had been the “driving force” behind advancements in IT in the past, and today’s challenges would herald a new era of innovation, particularly in technology used to facilitate academic research.

“Information technology will remain a key enabler in research, allowing us, for example, to carry out mammoth calculations in split seconds,” he said.

“We are now very firmly in a knowledge economy and that is based on the ability to interpret and manipulate information. This is now reaching another tipping point as the connecting ‘mash-up’ of information from various and multiple disciplines and sources gives rise to new applications and discoveries – many of which might not be driven by the originator of the initial data.”

Read full story.

Journalists: need new media knowledge!

Aspiring and seasoned US journalists alike are looking to tech-savvy graduate schools to help them survive and thrive in a new multimedia environment. Jon Marcus reports

Jennifer Hellum’s first semester as a graduate student in journalism school taught her, among other things, how to function with almost no sleep.

That experience came courtesy of the “boot camp” for new students at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, covering news reporting, writing, radio and television journalism, online media and other topics, four days a week, beginning at 7.45am, for 16 weeks.

Even for Hellum, who already had an undergraduate degree in journalism, “boot camp was exhausting in a way I had never known”. But by the end of it, she says, she and her fellow students “were competent multimedia journalists”.

The Cronkite School – part of Arihttp://digital-fingerprint.co.uk/wp-admin/post-new.phpzona State University, and named after the broadcast journalist – is among 113 US journalism schools working to prepare students for an industry in dramatic upheaval.

More than a quarter of US newspaper jobs have disappeared in the past decade as circulations nosedived by an average of one-third, according to the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism. Some newspaper companies have lost as much as three-quarters of their value. Several are in bankruptcy or have closed. Advertising revenue has dropped by 43 per cent in the past three years.

Yet students continue to come to journalism schools. Overall enrolment fell by half of 1 per cent last year, the first decline since 1993, but the number of first- and second-year students rose slightly, suggesting that the numbers will at least remain level.