Anne

Howard

Me [more, twitter, website]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikeblogs/tags/idea11/

Panel chair Heather Watson asked me to spend 10minutes saying something inspirational then share some practical examples. My plan was to play with the title, making reference to the diminishing timeframes reflected in my old school motto “sieze the day” mutating into “seize the moment”. This makes me think of the need for AGILITY at the learner, teacher & institutional levels. My examples would be a comparison of my own and my daughter’s first year Uni study habits, those ‘rogue’ teachers who just started blogging & podcasting because they could & the iPad ELFS project at the University of Adelaide.

Reactions:

Discussions:

After the pane l I was delighted by the enthusiasm of a few young librarians and an ex Maitland Area School (the small country town on Yorke Peninsula where I was ‘educated’)  principal.

Links:

In various discussions, I mentioned interesting things & promised links. Here they are:

Cluetrain

Open Access Citation Advantage (OACA) literature review

Pop & sign YouTube

iPad E.L.F.S. at the University of Adelaide

http://sciences.adelaide.edu.au/aspire/

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=10bigquestions

http://www.sciences.adelaide.edu.au/future/elfs/elfs.html

John travers iPad apps blogs

My new P2PU course on walking

OER SlideShare

MESH – mobile phones without towers

Ramona Pierson – Promethian http://bit.ly/uEIJ2H

End

Enjoy

Fang – Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

UPDATE:

If you are on the University of Adelaide campus during the conference there are two more excellent WiFi options:

EDUROAM: Login using your credentials from your own institution ( <userid>@wherever.edu.blah ) anywhere on campus.

BCODEOL: Free conference WiFi around Bonython hall and a few adjacent areas. Password is announced at the start of most sessions and quite possibly on whiteboards in session rooms.

- – -

• AMAYSIM: for a total outlay of $12 you can grab a sim card & credit voucher at any retail outlet. This will give you 1GB of data on the optus 3G network that is good for one month. Chuck the sim card into your iPhone (or other smartphone) and away you go! Can also make reasonably priced phone calls (but you will have a new number to distribute to your friends). Got an iPad or other micro-sim device, no problem – just bust the tabs holding the micro-sim inside the sim and away you go. Extra bonus: works fine in most USB modems & battery powered wifi routers. (Hint: APN is ‘internet’, no username or password)
• INTERNODE: local #adelaide ISP internode provide lots of free public wifi hotspots. Settle into any location with coverage, look for INTERNODE in your list of available wifi networks then open a new page in your web browser. Hit the guest button and you are good to go.
• TELSTRA: much as I hate them, NextG does perform better and they do have better coverage outside capital cities & main roads. For under $100 you can buy a decent battery powered wifi router with 5GB prepaid included. This will serve you and up to five of your friends, just turn it on and you will create a new wifi network that can be joined from any wifi capable device (like your laptop, phone, ipad other tablet etc). Just be prepared for extortion style rates if you need to buy extra – and be very careful of going over limits on postpaid.

If you need any extra geeky support tips try here or here – or just google your question (the whirlpool forums generally have the answers).

Hope this helps you – if so, tell yer friends & gimme a tweet at twitter.com/fang.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

It was great to meet Trent Anderson who presented on a ‘sister project’ – the Trinity College iPad pilot. They have an excellent blog for the project and have just published their evaluation report.

I was particularly taken by a visionary prototype workflow in which Podcast Producer was used to assemble rich multi-media content and publish it to iTunes: (If you squint a bit you will catch a glimpse of the future of ‘curriculum content’ post the demise of dead-tree publishers, in-house lecture and learning management systems and a few other sacred cows).

There were a number of presentations that showed several years worth of evolution of online assesment tools, the best of which promoted peer assessment in an extremely scaleable way.

More details and my own personal notes follow:

Trinity College iPad Pilot
Trent Anderson
Trinity College, Univeristy of Melbourne

The presentation will cover:
How the idea came about
Deployment and management of iPads
How the students found the iPads
How the staff found the iPads
Results from surveys
Effect on the IT department and IT infrastructure including wireless networks
Integration with existing systems
Where to from here

Interesting ideas:

Workflow podcast producer – iTunesu (*all LMS style content to ePub (text, image, audio, video)… Think laterally about future of “curriculum content” – textbooks & LMS)

Mobile Podcast Producer Paul Cowan, University of Waikato & William McGrath, Univeristy of Auckland This feature presentation will be showcasing use cases on utilizing Podcast Producer in OS X Server and its XML workflow based programability to provide atypical solutions to common IT problems, and enhancing the accessibility of PCP from a mobile context. We will briefly describing the internal structure of a podcast workflow to illustrate the potential power available to podcast workflows via XGrid, then assemble a customized podcast workflow from various components and do a live demonstration of sending a bundle of Word Docs containing class notes, PDF’s containing powerpoint slides and videos of lectures to the PCP machine. The server will quickly return submitted content as a University of Waikato branded ePub hosted in Podcast Library, which would be demonstrated on an iPad. Podcast Producer will have converted the Word docs, PDF’s and videos into a single ePub which can then be hosted via iTunes or placed into iTunesU
Assessment tools
*of particular interest to our faculty for next year

“assessi” – Grant Baxter, University of Otago
Interesting idea, in use at design studies.

Assessi Grant Baxter, University of Otago In 2005 the Assessi assessment prototype was presented at the “Evolution of the Species” AUC general conference in Hobart. Since then, the project has evolved and expanded into a piece of server based software that is used extensively within the Department of Design Studies at the University of Otago. Assessi is an advanced student assessment and manage-ment tool that allows teachers and students to create shared understandings of assessment and marking criteria. From being a small, unproven prototype, it has become a core piece of software that all staff have become dependent on. This presentation will focus on a description of the software itself, development process and issues, issues of user “buy-in” and resistance to “new technology” (especially around such a sensitive issue as assessment), and a discussion of how a piece of software that staff were initially suspicious of has become a core piece of departmental technology.

Peer assessment supported.
Very v1.0 & one man band.

Using FileMaker Go
Alistair Campbell, Edith Cowan University

Problem = paper, solution = iPad2 + FileMaker go.
Funded by research grants.
Started with three laptops, now iPads / ‘cloud’ server / USB runtimes for mac & PC
Can include video recordings (student drama performances etc) which are used both for marking and sent back to students.

These applications improve the the assessment process for both students and staff, and could enhance student engagement in the learning process. They removed the administra-tive and busy work involved in marking, no more adding up or creating lists of marks) and improves usability of student information (student information can be imported or exported directly from/to csv or excel documents); student photos can be added, emails can be sent directly from these applications, can be used to record notes on students etc. All this on the iPad is possible now using FileMaker GO.

People to chase up:
Jen Walbank (ex Apple, now UTS)
Matthew Tilney (ANU/laptop desks)
Trent Anderson (Trinity college iPads) ipadpilot.wordpress.com
Daniel Conway (U Newcastle)
William McGrath (podcast producer – PDF workflow)

Fang - Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

Mid 2011 observations

1. The iPad has proven to be a very good choice of device. It is robust (out of about 700 given out to date, one did not work when unpacked and one has failed since). It is also clear that students are bringing the iPad in to University and they are actively using it in and out of classes. ITS surveys of mobile device traffic on the university wireless network also indicate a large increase wireless traffic in 2011 over previous years.

2. There was a significant increase in First Year enrolments in Sciences in 2011, beyond our modestly aggressive targets.

3. The appointment of First Year Directors and 50% level A teaching staff has led to a great deal of shared information and streamlining of processes within First Year. It has also provided a great deal of continuity to students.

4. Staff involvement in the project has been very positive. First year lecturing staff are loaned an iPad if they do not already have one. Uptake and use by staff has been very good. All lecture material is tested for use with an iPad, and is loaded on MyUni two to four weeks in advance of the lecture time. The 10 Big Questions have been used effectively to anchor our first year courses to our research excellence.

5. A reduction of paper for lecture notes and other course materials.

6. Only 24 iPads were returned. The returned iPads were used for loan to first year teaching staff.

9. We are beginning to see an uptake of the 10 Big Questions in South Australian Secondary Schools. As a result we have instigated a project to provide much more supporting material around these questions and around our first year Sciences programs. This has great potential as a way to market University of Adelaide Sciences to both teachers and students.

10. Support from ITS was excellent, with all venues working well beyond expectation for wireless capacity and ITS staff willing to assist at every opportunity.

11. We had a significant improvement in our pastoral care of First Year students. All students were allocated to mentor groups, each assigned to an academic staff member and this ran very well. We also ran several voluntary sessions for students in the first term, with a variety of themes. The hand out of iPads brought some interesting issues to light. A surprising number of students were not confident about how they well they could use any electronic device. This led to unexpected and increased workload for staff in the early part of the semester, but also allowed many other issues to be addressed that we would not normally have known about. These include assumptions we make about student use of email, Access Adelaide, and computers in general for data processing and data presentation.

12. The tender process for the iPads was very effective. Datacom provided high level of onsite technical support during distribution and post-distribution support for both staff and students.

13. Support from T-Life (Rundle Mall) was also to our advantage as they provided a special deal for 3G connection for students and staff. Their data deal was a $30 Pre-Paid Micro-Sim Starter Pack, which included 3GB data, for $20.

The Future

If this project proceeds in to the future then it offers some significant challenges. The most important of these are:

1. It facilitates a significant shift to on-line learning, but this will require a major commitment of resources over a long period of time. The potential of this is very high in terms of taking more of our undergraduate instruction to external mode. The iPad could be a very important part of the package for remote students.

2. In light of point 1, there is a major challenge for our approach to face-to-face learning. We remain committed to this, but the way we do it must change significantly. We will have to move quickly to self-directed learning if we are to remain competitive in the 21st century.

3. A major issue remains a change to our methods of assessment. This is not directly related to this project, but was raised in the ThincBeyond sessions, and is seen as a major impediment to students in its current form.

4. Partnering secondary (and possibly primary) schools presents a major opportunity arising from this project. That partnering and better engagement has commenced, but has enormous potential for the future in terms of making the University of Adelaide a destination of choice for any South Australian student interested in studying science.

*caveat: any figures, data presented here should not be compared with any prior-year ‘equivalents’ because all prior-year data would be for a full calendar year which includes the second semester intake, further attrition & lengthly processing of manual evaluation process such as s.e.l.t.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

Descriptive, explanatory, expressive.

Peer review of Literature review (at last).

And finally…
:-)
That’s all folks!

Fang – Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

Not a lot of iPad inspired action today.

Class discussion on assessment criteria & timeline for remaining few weeks. Repeat of previous assignment process which requires time for turnitin to complete, peer review and correction.

p.s.
I spoke with Simon Pyke about the possibility of trialling iPad based ‘S.E.L.T.’ evaluations. Turns out that it is important to have parity across all students (not just those doing science1100) and this is best achieved if everybody uses the same (paper based) instrument.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

Administration: handout of some old hand written assignments (all of which have been scanned). Individual student question / answer time.

Quote of the day “go and do your essay”.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

After a brief introductory talk on reflective writing we engaged in a little reflection based on two ‘survey’ questions:

Two questions in the context of preparing the Literature Review:

1. Five words that describe what you have learned about communicating science.

2. Five words that describe what you have learned about yourself.

Here is how it went:

And some video on the live responses coming into the google spreadsheet:

live google spreadsheet updates during #science1100 word cloud

Fang – Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

After the fairly dismal turnout on Tueseday let’s see how attendance for the in-class ‘Peer Review of Literature Review’ group exercise goes.

Tuesday class iPad network connections:

(note: we had 81 responses to an in-class survey with maximum client count of 61 on the ‘Horace Lamb’ WiFi network.)

Today:

The plan for class today is for students to bring their latest draft of the first major assignment for “peer review” by class members. I’m guessing there were not many more than 80 students in class today (and the WiFi connection figures will be low due to the nature of the class). Prior to class Prof Pyke confirmed that about 40 students have submitted their assignment to turnitin.com which is one step of the assignment process.

Today’s class was divided into back (the 50 ish students with assignments to be reviewed) and front (the 20 ish students in class without assignment at least in draft). Those at the rear of the class got on with a curious blend of paper and iPad, reading & reviewing a class-mate’s literature review. Balancing all the pieces on small lecture-theatre ‘tables’ was a challenge!

At the front of class, Simon ran a clinic to help people plan their work between now and next week’s assessment deadline.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

Literature Review assignment

Today’s class will be a ‘Peer Review’ session in which students review each other’s assignments using the principles learned in earlier classes on the process of writing and reviewing scientific literature. Well, that was the plan! Here’s what happened:

• Survey: should we change strategy for assessment of this class. Done in class using iPad to LMS – 49 say NO, 31 say YES.
• Handout paper sheets to guide peer review process (checklist/proforma + tips on how to approach reviewing somebody else’s work)
• Very few students have their literature review assignment ready for peer review by classmates.
• Low attendance – down to eighty something out of 145 enrolled. Need big class (full of students with at least draft assignments) next Thursday for the in class peer review session.

Quote of the day “use you social networks to get people along to Thursday’s class (with at least a draft of the assignment)”.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

AIM:

Bring completed assignments for ‘peer review’.
Activate ‘turnitin’ account.

METHOD:

Discuss the process of Academic writing.
Point out some helpful resources on CLPD website.

Each student goes to turnitin.com to create account

*Simon will create ‘test’ assignment in turnitin.com for first time users to experiment.

More discussion on peer review process.
Instructions on class task “peer review” each other’s written assignments. Reviewers to remain anonymous to prevent “stalk n stab” behavior. Be nice. Be honest. Be brutal (politely).

RESULT:

No problems accessing turnitin.com for instructor/class from iPad in class. Several students already have accounts & experience, simply need to attach to class.

Hardcopy assignments & review forms circulated in class. (try not to pick up assignment from somebody you know).

Five students did not have printed versions of their assignment. Simon asked for five volunteer reviewers to put their e/mail address on the board. Five soft copy assignments were e/mailed for these reviewers to read on their iPad.

There were more reviewers present than completed assignments so some lucky punters had their assignment reviewed twice.

Fang - Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

Focus today is on ‘how to ask good questions’. No daring feats of iPad trickery planned for this last class before semester break (but let’s see what happens.

METHOD:

Students seated in groups, in class. Introductory talk on the progression from annotated bibliography -> literature review -> essay (as required for assignment).

RESULT:

In our lecture theatre flanked by blackboards filled with math equations I thought I heard Simon writing with chalk! (false alarm, turned out to be a whiteboard :-). The introductory talk explained the process for the major assignment (& how it mimics the peer review process). The essays will be ‘peer reviewed’ by class members next semester.

Class dismissed after 25 min. Many students stayed & continued assignment discussion & work in groups. Spotted several iPads in use (and a couple of laptops!). I could not resist asking the student with the shiny new ‘MacBook air’ what was going on. Turns out that it is easier & quicker for both typing & finding information. More screen real estate & better task switching were mentioned. Now the iPad is mainly used for games and stuff. Class has now been dismissed for over half an hour and there is still a lot of work going on in the room (and a queue of students waiting to speak with Simon). I just overheard the phrase “I’m enjoying the he’ll out of myself” (which I assume is a good thing).

Fang - Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

Complete group exercise on “annotated bibliography & literature review” then select groups to report back in class. We plan to use the ‘you spin’ application to make group selection more interesting.

METHOD:

Students seated in groups, finish topic selection phase of first major assignment. Assign group names to custom ‘roulette wheel’ in you spin application & use it to select which group(s) report back in class.

RESULT:

Keyboard failure on front of class computer (chalk dust perhaps?). Waiting on replacement before we can begin Introductory talk on the “Annotated bibliography & literature review” exercise that was set as pre-work for this class. While waiting for replacement keyboard, ‘you spin’ was used to select a group to report back to class on their findings in pre-work. Worked extremely well, especially in the case of public humiliation for groups who had not done the work!

Topics covered:

Chain of evidence, figuring out who to cite.
Annotated bibliography.

Fang - Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

• slideshare.net version of my introductory powerpoint slides
• blogpost & slidecast (with audio) of the ‘supercharge your science‘ talks I gave in Cairns / Townsville. Excellent background & motivation.
• basic resources on getting started with wordpress.com and using the visual editor to craft great looking blog posts with pictures, hyperlinks and formatting.

Thanks to James (of “Disease of the Week” fame) for compiling this list of our brand new sciency, communicatorary blogs!
Other Side of Science
Heathers Sciencey Stuff
Bilbies Rule
Turk Thrust
Monianneo
Team Placenta
Senojh
Tropidoderus

oops, and:

heliorich

p.s. I am writing this post from the Environment Institute at the University of Adelaide. If you write about environmental science, why not put something on your new blog and see if you can get it featured on by the Environment Institute.

Fang - Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

Finish the ‘strategies for search’ exercise from last class then brainstorm topics for the first major assignment which will involve research, a literature review and an essay.

METHOD:

Sit in groups, show of hands who is having problems with mywritinglab. Introduce today’s quiz / survey. Explain major assignment.
UPDATE: podcast reflecting on visit to this class by special guest Michael Coghlan.

RESULT:

Seems our mywritinglab issue is iPad / browser related for many students. Survey completed quickly. Found a new issue when entering large amounts of text on iPad – some windows won’t scroll beyond top / bottom edge. After appealing to help on twitter I discovered the ‘two finger swipe’ method of scrolling (and was pointed to information that suggests this is described in the ‘iPad manual‘).

LEARNINGS:

• two finger scroll (thanks twitter) to scroll beyond text box ends. http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/1653
• Next class the assignment.

Fang - Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang