Business School E-learning Blog

‘Investigations in teaching and learning’

see www.londonmet.ac.uk/capd/ for the online version

In Volume 5, numbers 1-2 2008/09 LMBS staff have contributed articles (some with other University colleagues):

Suzanne Kane, Ronke Shoderu,  Lisa Day, Debbie Holley, Christain Ehrlich, Tom Lunt

Well done to all contributors.

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Reflective journal for fashion:
> http://www.arts.ac.uk/cetl/visual-directions/

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get your students to take notes!  pattern notes, linear notes, cornell notes - see here for the notemaker tool

it is now compatable with youtube….

http://learning.londonmet.ac.uk/TLTC/learnhigher/notemaker/noteTaker_2.html

an RLO-CETL and Learn Higher CETL development. Talk to Sandra Sinfield or Debbie Holley for more information.

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if anyone is interested in keeping track of this great project, here are details - debbie H

Colleagues,
On July 2, 2009 LTRI (London Metropolitan University) hosted the
successful MATURE Workshop on User Centred Requirements Processes for
E-Learning and Knowledge Management – A European-Wide Perspective. I
have provided a summary of  the day:
http://mature-ip.eu/en/node/315

The slides from the day can be found by follwing the link at the bottom
of the page: “Slides are available under
http://mature-ip.eu/en/event/user-centered-requirements-engineering”
All participants seemed to agree that this had been a highly productive
day and the organisers (Andreas Smitt and myself) are planning to hold
follow up activities in order to keep the momentum and intellectual
clarity generated on the day going.

Regards John

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‘Open Courses’ on Weblearn

Dear Colleague,

There are now two new ‘Open Courses’ on Weblearn titled “Quantitative Research Methods” and “SPSS User’s Guide”.  ‘Open Courses’ are available to all staff & students without restriction.  They are accessed via the ‘Open Course List’, which is just below the box where the user types in a Username and Password when logging in to Weblearn.

“Quantitative Research Methods” presently includes material on questionnaire design, consumer price indices, current/real prices, secondary data sources, elementary hypothesis testing and volatility analysis.

At the moment, the “SPSS User’s Guide” consists of seven chapters involving summary statistics, graphics, levels of measurement, hypothesis testing and bivariate regression/correlation.  SPSS data files are also provided so that the user can replicate the methods shown.  The guide relates to SPSS version 17.

Both of these sites will be expanded in the near future.

Please feel free to use these materials in your teaching and research.  Your dissertation students may also find these materials useful.

Professor John Coshall

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Download full report from here:  http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2009/

Technologies to watch:

• Mobiles. Already considered as another component of the network on many campuses, mobiles continue to evolve rapidly. New interfaces, the ability to run third-party applications, and location-awareness have all come to the mobile device in the past year, making it an ever more versatile tool that can be easily adapted to a host of tasks for learning, productivity, and social networking. For many users, broadband mobile devices like the iPhone have already begun to assume many tasks that were once the exclusive province of portable computers.
• Cloud Computing. The emergence of large-scale “data farms” — large clusters of networked servers — is bringing huge quantities of processing power and storage capacity within easy reach. Inexpensive, simple solutions to offsite storage, multi-user application scaling, hosting, and multi-processor computing are opening the door to wholly different ways of thinking about computers, software, and files.
• Geo-Everything. Geocoded data has many applications, but until very recently, it was time- consuming and difficult for non-specialists to determine the physical coordinates of a place or object, and options for using that data were limited. Now, many common devices can automatically determine and record their own precise location and can save that data along with captured media (like photographs) or can transmit it to web-based applications for a host of uses. The full implications of geo-tagging are still unfolding, but the impact in research has already been profound.
• The Personal Web. Springing from the desire to reorganize online content rather than simply viewing it, the personal web is part of a trend that has been fueled by tools to aggregate the flow of content in customizable ways and expanded by an increasing collection of widgets that manage online content. The term personal web was coined to represent a collection of technologies that are used to configure and manage the ways in which one views and uses the Internet. Using a growing set of free and simple tools and applications, it is easy to create a customized, personal web-based environment — a personal web — that explicitly supports one’s social, professional, learning, and other activities.
• Semantic-Aware Applications. New applications are emerging that are bringing the promise of the semantic web into practice without the need to add additional layers of tags, identifiers, or other top-down methods of defining context. Tools that can simply gather the context in which information is couched, and that use that context to extract embedded meaning are providing rich new ways of finding and aggregating content. At the same time, other tools are allowing context to be easily modified, shaped, and redefined as information flows are combined.
• Smart Objects. Sometimes described as the “Internet of things,” smart objects describe a set of technologies that is imbuing ordinary objects with the ability to recognize their physical location and respond appropriately, or to connect with other objects or information. A smart object “knows” something about itself — where and how it was made, what it is for, where it should be, or who owns it, for example — and something about its environment. While the underlying technologies that make this possible — RFID, QR codes, smartcards, touch and motion sensors, and the like — are not new, we are now seeing new forms of sensors, identifiers, and applications with a much more generalizable set of functionalities.

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Social Bookmarking in Plain English watch on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x66lV7GOcNU

See debbie’s blended learning bookmarks:  http://delicious.com/debbieholley

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Reviewing your teaching?  Useful resources

TextAloud

TextAloud uses voice synthesis to convert text into spoken audio. Listen on your PC or create MP3 or WMA files for use on portable devices like iPods, PocketPCs, and CD players.

http://www.nextup.com/index.html and click on free demo. You can also try out the different voices

Tim Cleary has the package at City, Debbie Holley can arrange access to the package at North

Txtools

http://www.txttools.co.uk/preloginjsp/txttools/index.jsp

98% of the UK population have a mobile phone capable of txt messaging

 Ask a question in class – get your students to text the answer – view answers immediately as they come in – great tool for helping generate discussions

Presenting to a conference or large group? Get delegates to text in their questions

Want students to reflect on an issue during the week? Get them to text in their musings ready for the next class

Come and find out more on a one hour demonstration/training course contact Debbie Holley or see the TLTC training timetable

Creating Quizzes in Weblearn

David Hardman (Psychology) has recorded a video that demonstrates how to create a quiz in WebLearn and kindly agreed to circulate: 

http://tinyurl.com/nuo9k4

and another great resource from David:

Screentoaster

http://www.screentoaster.com/watch/stVU5RQkFIR11ZRFhUXF9RU1JQ/online_tools_for_blended_learning

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