Frank Phillips's Blog

Technical skills self-assessment

frankphillips — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:59:50 +0000

I have reviewed my technical skills and it is clear that I will have to explore the following to participate fully in the H808 course and develop as an elearning professional:

Twitter
RSS Reader Tools inc Google Reader
Zotero
Mahara
Google Docs
Blogs
Elluminate

I suspect many more useful and interesting tools will be revealed as we progress. Fortunately I already have experience of the OU’s VLE including forums and wikis.

What is a Moodle?

frankphillips — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 21:35:24 +0000

I was attending my first OU conference in Milton Keynes last summer when I overheard a conversation about the “Moodle”. I must admit that initially I thought the reference was to a breed of dog but I soon realised that the Moodle was the central software system of the grandly titled Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) that includes OU course websites and discussion forums.

Since that day I have been itching to learn a bit more about the mighty Moodle and this week I was very pleased to find that TurnkeyLinux have produced a free Linux appliance that can be used to create a working Moodle system in minutes. When I get five of them [minutes] I will explore the Moodle to find out why it is such a dominant player in the world of Course Management Systems.

Making Flash videos

frankphillips — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 21:14:02 +0000

I experimented with creating Flash videos for my eportfolio this week and it was surprisingly easy thanks to Apple’s iMovie which has a great selection of templates and music jingles. I was able to successfully insert both external YouTube videos and embedded “swf” videos into my Mahara eportfolio. However, I have yet to find a way to include the player controls with the embedded video clips.

I think I will try to produce a simple video welcome message for the students on my next course which I just found out is starting next week!

Twitter

frankphillips — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 16:03:22 +0000

I have just spent a couple of hours exploring Twitter and it was fun. I had to jump through several hoops to create the account, activate my phone and install browser plug-in to support Twitter but I am beginning to see why it is so popular. Fortunately my phone service Vodafone provides free Twitter SMS messages (limited to 500 messages per month) from the people I am following .

Like so many people I started following Stephen Fry and immediately he directed me to an interesting piece he had just completed for C4 news. I am now following several of my fellow H808 students and in addition exchanging gems of practical information there is a lot of general “banter” of the sort that makes up normal f2f social interaction. I was so pleased to gain a follower within a hour – thanks Sharon. However, I have noticed several additional unwanted followers have appeared so I busy blocking these.

I have added an RSS feed for my tweets to my Mahara profile page and I think I will see if I can do the same for this blog page.

Reflecting on our first collaboration

frankphillips — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 22:33:12 +0000

I joined fellow students on a collaboration to identify Factors driving personal development planning in the UK, Europe, USA and elsewhere and our ideas were presented in a wiki. We communicated using the OU’s Moodle tutor group forum and using Etherpad. Looking back at the experience I have to admit that I was not able to participate as early or a fully as I would have liked. However, I did manage to make a limited contribution to the Etherpad meeting.

In terms of the H808 Framework of personal and professional development shown below I gained skills in Technology-related and Communication-related competencies because I was introduced to a new form of synchronous text based communication namely Etherpad. I was also able to demonstrate proactivity in Research-related competencies to a very small degree because I went beyond the core text to find a current geographical example of a “driver” i.e. Careers Wales.

The whole exercise and my part in it did not appear to generate any significant reflection or critique and this is perhaps not surprising given that the group is newly formed and we have yet to overcome barriers or to establish high levels of trust. The group’s communications were cordial and supportive and I did post a silly image of me as tortoise to inject a little humour in the hope that it may assist the team building by further encouraging everyone to relax.

	Skills	Reflection	Critique	Proactivity
Practice-related competencies
Communications-related competencies	X
Technology-related competencies	X
Research-related competencies				X

My repository of evidence

frankphillips — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 19:40:48 +0000

I mentioned earlier that I intended to use Mahara as my eportfolio system to store and present my repository of evidence as required in Supplementary Activity 1.6. Fortunately I also chose to save all of my artefacts separately in a directory on my local RAID storage just in case. This week I had cause to fall back on my back up copies because while experimenting with Mahara 1.2beta I managed to corrupt the data file containing my artefacts stored in Mahara 1.1. To the credit of the Mahara design team it is very easy to repopulate another Mahara repository and to build presentational views of the items.

First impressions

frankphillips — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 19:18:05 +0000

Activity 1.4 in H808 asked for a short reflective account of my first impressions of the course. Here goes…

As soon as the course website became available I scanned the links to the core and supplementary texts and I was concerned about how I would find the time to properly digest the content.

I also looked into the tutor groups and it was clear that some students are very experienced in the field of elearning so I had to overcome a sense of inferiority by choosing to believe that there must be other students who are like me and will be exploring uncharted territory.

Next, I looked at the calendar of events and the course guide that emphasised how students need to keep to a schedule of activity to facilitate collaborative working. I know that I will find this particularly challenging because I have many demands on my time and it would be difficult work through periods when I have limited time available for study.

Finally I should mention that I felt excited and privileged to have the opportunity to explore elearning on the course with a group of students and tutors who have obvious enthusiasm for this area of study and practice.

Zotero

frankphillips — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 21:26:30 +0000

I found a great new tool to manage citations and references. Zotero (v2beta) is a Firefox browser plug-in that can store my data on a server so I can access it from any internet connected Firefox browser with the plug-in installed. Unfortunately Zotero does not support my current favourite bowser Safari.

The elearning professional

frankphillips — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 20:58:20 +0000

The first activity of H808 involved listening to an mp3 recording (H808 introductory audio recording) of several established elearning academics from the OU discussing what it is to be an elearning professional. The contributors acknowledged that the field of elearning in terms of research and practice is still very young and that its scope is broad. For example, some people have particular experience and qualifications in the technical aspects of elearning while others emphasise the pedagogical aspects. Reference was made to the Higher Education Academy but there is currently no national recognised body to represent or control access to the status of elearning professional.

Given the fast moving and global nature of developments in elearning the model of traditional national based professional bodies may never be appropriate. I believe that it is possible to be an “elearning professional” merely by demonstrating appropriate competencies and ethical standards, however, the emergence of a respected regulatory body if properly constituted could contribute to the professionalisation of elearning.

Although, as an Associate Lecturer with the Open University, I do deliver elearning I have to concede that I have some way to go before I reach the level of competence to justify claiming the label of elearning professional.

Mahara

frankphillips — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 16:11:23 +0000

During my research into eportfolio systems that could support elearning I came across the highly acclaimed Mahara. I was so impressed that I have established a simple home server at http://llysderi.homeftp.net to explore and test it in detail. Also, I have included a link to the Planet Mahara RSS feed on this blog so I can easily keep up to date with activity in the Mahara community.

In addition to providing the core functionality of storing artefacts that can be presented in views, Mahara, includes tools to create blogs and interactive social networks. These secondary features are well integrated but are clearly ancillary so are not as fully developed as the leading specialized alternatives.