In light of all the discussions we’ve had in the team recently about the dangers of technology starting to drive learning, rather than the other way round, Natalie shared a paper with us examing issues of carts and horses (Sankey 2020). It’s a very readable paper, and has lots of things that are very relevant…
Category: Educational
Another week over …
Over the course of the last couple of weeks, I’ve been doing a fair bit of investigation into the ABC model for learning design, something I mentioned last week. We ran 3 workshops last week, trying to get to grips with adapting a face to face activity to an online scenario. This week, the decision…
There’s light at the end of the tunnel …
I’d started the notes for this towards the end of last week, and then forgot to do anything with those notes! Having finally got all the exam modules ready and prepared; found a few issues, fixed them, and then staffed our online support on the Saturday am – no students needed support submitting their 23…
Getting the next generation of bloggers …
Work is fairly busy at this time of year – you think you have the VLE all set up for the new students, then there are the Turnitin Assignments to help people set up, weird glitches that seem to happen unexpectedly … However, one job that should be fun is that I’ve been asked to…
The OLPC renewed?
The new Infinity:One has grown from the OLPC project and from a visual point of view, there’s a definite family resemblance. (Excuse the clutter in that pictures, I hadn’t got a clearer one of just the OLPC; which is currently in a packed away in a box with the Pi) Both also use low cost…
Changes ….
Change is something that has cropped up a lot for me, both personally and from a work point of view. Around this time last year, I decided to leave my job, sell my house and move North (there were personal reasons for that, it wasn’t a wild whim). That involved leaving a job I’d had…
Similarity detection
not plagiarism detection I’m in the process of looking at the role that similarity detection tools (e.g. Turnitin and SafeAssign) can play in helping students improve their writing skills, and detect their own errors. My personal experience is that it’s a valuable tool – as long as you spend enough time explaining to students what…
Raspberry Pi vs ZX 81
My first computer was a ZX 81 – cost £69.95 (assuming Wikipedia’s correct; I can’t remember!) That’s c £236 (This is Money) or 0.3% of an average house (House Price Crash). Came with 1kb of memory (expandable to 16kb) – Operating System & Keyboard inc; monitor required (monochrome output). The Raspberry Pi goes on sale…
What's in a name?
I’ve recently been involved with an email based discussion with other colleagues about aspects of “mobile” learning. There are various things we’ll be looking at, such as capabilities devices that students actually have, technical developments etc., and, the aspect I personally feel is crucial …the pedagogical issues involved when delivering learning material on small form-factor…
Trying to update a Unit!
I’m currently teaching a Unit called “Educational Computing” (warning: server often slow/down) The current unit looks at how to design & create what’s essentially a learning object – for something that is fairly fact based – things like GCSE revision are common choices. The software the students create (currently using Flash or HTML) is designed…