When Twitter began - or soon after - it was quite a dull place to be unless you had an interest in the fantasies of teenagers in California or Korea ... or indeed were a teenager in California or Korea.
In the intervening months, we've been getting our heads around using networking sites for learning - and there are all sorts of questions that aren't answered by the inevitable enthusiasms of the the zealots.
On the one hand, it seems pretty clear that Twitter is a good tool for following a conference or lecture or whatever - here's an experiment at the Oxford Media Convention earlier this year. It's also good for link alerts and shares ... probably slightly better than dedicated link sharing tools because of the 'here/now' side of it. So we're giving that a go with a College of Journalism account and a hashtag to pull together tweets from other accounts that college users might want to share.
On the other: how do you measure whether this is a learning success?
Monday, 2 February 2009
Wednesday, 21 January 2009
Tufts wikisyllabus for digital democracy
This is really, really interesting ... and will be great to follow over the coming months.
It's a syllabus/wiki combo of Tufts University's new digital democracy course.
I'm looking forward to the way in which a reasonably traditional looking course structure will be realised on the wiki. I might even follow the course in real time - doing the reading, linking, thinking on the days the 'real' students will be focusing on them.
Intrigued how much of a learning experience it could be ... and how different from a more informal link/browse/link/browse learning as grazing experience.
It's a syllabus/wiki combo of Tufts University's new digital democracy course.
I'm looking forward to the way in which a reasonably traditional looking course structure will be realised on the wiki. I might even follow the course in real time - doing the reading, linking, thinking on the days the 'real' students will be focusing on them.
Intrigued how much of a learning experience it could be ... and how different from a more informal link/browse/link/browse learning as grazing experience.
Monday, 19 January 2009
We've officially started .. really
I've been hesitating before writing on this blog.
As Web Manager for the BBC's College of Journalism website I have the responsibility of turning editor Kevin Marsh's vision of a public facing learning facility for BBC journalists and journalists across the world into a reality.
In practise that means getting the designers in with their pots of paint and chaining a handful of technical staff to their desks. Their goal is simple. Make us a website.
Simple, isn't it? Come up with some page designs and code them up for us. We'll put them into Movable Type and we'll (magically) do the rest.
That's what all good producers and project managers do, you see. We simplify things so that we can handle the idea better. Large scale projects with multiple stakeholders and a ridiculously large budget are always made easier to consider in the early hours of the morning if they're reduced to bite-sized chunks (although I might add that this project doesn't have either). Sometimes we simplify things so very much we're left wondering whether there's any work to do at all.
In truth, there are relatively straightforward elements to making the College website public. The site is already rich with content, content crafted by people who have enormous amounts of knowledge and experience gained over many years in the journalism trade.
Such is the amount of experience and knowledge to be shared, the site currently residing on the BBC's internal network is vast. It's grown larger than the original scope of the project and thus it is, in places, a little unwieldly.
Consequently, what feels like the majority of the intensive work required in making the site public has already been completed. Over the past couple of weeks, Kevin, myself and Information Architect Rachel have locked ourselves away in a meeting room with nothing more than large pieces of paper, big fat marker pens and post-it notes. We've discussed, debated, postulated and pontificated. From time to time we've stood around the circular table in the middle of the room as though we're planning an invasion.
The output (those of us with a project manager background love 'inputs' and 'outputs') has been impressive: a revised architecture, a strict set of mandatory tags, a stripped down set of categories and an all important set of rules for when we publish publically.
It was the results of our discussions we offered up to our designers and coders this afternoon for their consideration. During that meeting I saw a great deal of note-taking, not to mention a great deal of "So, just to confirm .. you want it to do this?" Such things are encouraging and reassuring.
Websites get launched every single day, an increasing number of them utilising Movable Type as the publishing platform. Still it excites me to think that we are now underway.
This ship has set sail. And it shouldn't be long before it docks in port.
As Web Manager for the BBC's College of Journalism website I have the responsibility of turning editor Kevin Marsh's vision of a public facing learning facility for BBC journalists and journalists across the world into a reality.
In practise that means getting the designers in with their pots of paint and chaining a handful of technical staff to their desks. Their goal is simple. Make us a website.
Simple, isn't it? Come up with some page designs and code them up for us. We'll put them into Movable Type and we'll (magically) do the rest.
That's what all good producers and project managers do, you see. We simplify things so that we can handle the idea better. Large scale projects with multiple stakeholders and a ridiculously large budget are always made easier to consider in the early hours of the morning if they're reduced to bite-sized chunks (although I might add that this project doesn't have either). Sometimes we simplify things so very much we're left wondering whether there's any work to do at all.
In truth, there are relatively straightforward elements to making the College website public. The site is already rich with content, content crafted by people who have enormous amounts of knowledge and experience gained over many years in the journalism trade.
Such is the amount of experience and knowledge to be shared, the site currently residing on the BBC's internal network is vast. It's grown larger than the original scope of the project and thus it is, in places, a little unwieldly.
Consequently, what feels like the majority of the intensive work required in making the site public has already been completed. Over the past couple of weeks, Kevin, myself and Information Architect Rachel have locked ourselves away in a meeting room with nothing more than large pieces of paper, big fat marker pens and post-it notes. We've discussed, debated, postulated and pontificated. From time to time we've stood around the circular table in the middle of the room as though we're planning an invasion.
The output (those of us with a project manager background love 'inputs' and 'outputs') has been impressive: a revised architecture, a strict set of mandatory tags, a stripped down set of categories and an all important set of rules for when we publish publically.
It was the results of our discussions we offered up to our designers and coders this afternoon for their consideration. During that meeting I saw a great deal of note-taking, not to mention a great deal of "So, just to confirm .. you want it to do this?" Such things are encouraging and reassuring.
Websites get launched every single day, an increasing number of them utilising Movable Type as the publishing platform. Still it excites me to think that we are now underway.
This ship has set sail. And it shouldn't be long before it docks in port.
Tuesday, 13 January 2009
So what's a lecture anyhow?
Interested by this article at the New York Times - 'At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard'. Which means, I guess, the bin.
The negative attitude - of both experts and learners - to 'lectures' (or indeed anything that looks and feels like formal learning) is one of the parameters we have to deal with at CoJo. It's true, that even the most formal looking sessions (which, though formal, stop a long way short of what I recognise by the word 'lecture') tend win learners over in the end ... all the same, the idea of something 'formal' is an initial barrier. And while a college with full-time students might just about get away with it (but shouldn't), the last thing we can afford to offer time-poor, stressed, in-career potential learners is something that they think will mean a lot of listening.
MIT's change to "smaller classes that emphasize hands-on, interactive, collaborative learning" for its introduction isn't exactly an educational revolution nor is the insight that "most students learn fundamental concepts more successfully, and are better able to apply them, through interactive, collaborative, student-centered learning." But it's interesting that even within a context where you might expect a formal approach ... it's now judged less effective than the alternative.
The negative attitude - of both experts and learners - to 'lectures' (or indeed anything that looks and feels like formal learning) is one of the parameters we have to deal with at CoJo. It's true, that even the most formal looking sessions (which, though formal, stop a long way short of what I recognise by the word 'lecture') tend win learners over in the end ... all the same, the idea of something 'formal' is an initial barrier. And while a college with full-time students might just about get away with it (but shouldn't), the last thing we can afford to offer time-poor, stressed, in-career potential learners is something that they think will mean a lot of listening.
MIT's change to "smaller classes that emphasize hands-on, interactive, collaborative learning" for its introduction isn't exactly an educational revolution nor is the insight that "most students learn fundamental concepts more successfully, and are better able to apply them, through interactive, collaborative, student-centered learning." But it's interesting that even within a context where you might expect a formal approach ... it's now judged less effective than the alternative.
Wholly trinity
When we talk about making 'the CoJo website' public, it's slightly misleading - mostly because it won't be a single site.
We'll be using Movable Type as our content production and management system. It'll be used to produce both blogs (though we won't call them that ... I know, I know) and stuff that is recognisbly online learning. Alongside that content, though, we'll use third party networking tools.
For the learner, it will feel to the user like a single site ... but it'll be three 'entities' each of which will have fuzzy edges.
Why are we doing it this way?
Well partly because we're starting from where we are and with the ambition that we have ... and somehow we have to weave the two together. Actually, this is more opportunity than challenge. A few years ago, we'd have built a couple of dozen interactive 'howto' modules in Flash with a 'how have you done?' test at the end and bingo. Everybody happy. No evidence, of course, that any of the learning would have made the slightest difference to anyone ... but learners would have done it, a box would have a tick in it etc etc. Now we know different - we know more about how career journalists learn and how they want to learn; we know the value of informal learning and networking. Ideally, we'd start from there - using powerful informal learning tools. But that's not how organisations work. For understandable reasons, organisations - especially publicly accountable ones - like tangible stuff, auditable stuff, stuff that shows compliance.
So, the answer we've come up with is a trinitarian one which offers learners different routes to that learning but which, crucially, allows shared informal learning from blogs and networking to develop more built learning. A bit like this:
We'll be using Movable Type as our content production and management system. It'll be used to produce both blogs (though we won't call them that ... I know, I know) and stuff that is recognisbly online learning. Alongside that content, though, we'll use third party networking tools.
For the learner, it will feel to the user like a single site ... but it'll be three 'entities' each of which will have fuzzy edges.
Why are we doing it this way?
Well partly because we're starting from where we are and with the ambition that we have ... and somehow we have to weave the two together. Actually, this is more opportunity than challenge. A few years ago, we'd have built a couple of dozen interactive 'howto' modules in Flash with a 'how have you done?' test at the end and bingo. Everybody happy. No evidence, of course, that any of the learning would have made the slightest difference to anyone ... but learners would have done it, a box would have a tick in it etc etc. Now we know different - we know more about how career journalists learn and how they want to learn; we know the value of informal learning and networking. Ideally, we'd start from there - using powerful informal learning tools. But that's not how organisations work. For understandable reasons, organisations - especially publicly accountable ones - like tangible stuff, auditable stuff, stuff that shows compliance.
So, the answer we've come up with is a trinitarian one which offers learners different routes to that learning but which, crucially, allows shared informal learning from blogs and networking to develop more built learning. A bit like this:
Monday, 12 January 2009
The languages of journalism
We're expecting to make the CoJo (BBC College of Journalism) website visible this spring - however, some of our work is already available on BBC World Service sites.
The BBC World Service broadcasts in 33 languages, including English and over the past year, CoJo has been producing basic guides to journalistic language in each of these - language that reflects the BBC journalistic values of Truth and Accuracy, Impartiality, Independence, Public Interest and Accountability. They're aimed at all journalists who speak, write in, broadcast in those languages ... and in many cases there's been nothing of this kind before.
Check out the eleven so far completed here:
French for Africa
Swahili
Arabic
Azeri
Kyrgyz
Uzbek
Indonesian
Pashto
Russian
Urdu
Chinese
Next, the south Asians, Spanish and Portuguese - by April, all 32 languages (excliding English) will have CoJo language content.
The BBC World Service broadcasts in 33 languages, including English and over the past year, CoJo has been producing basic guides to journalistic language in each of these - language that reflects the BBC journalistic values of Truth and Accuracy, Impartiality, Independence, Public Interest and Accountability. They're aimed at all journalists who speak, write in, broadcast in those languages ... and in many cases there's been nothing of this kind before.
Check out the eleven so far completed here:
French for Africa
Swahili
Arabic
Azeri
Kyrgyz
Uzbek
Indonesian
Pashto
Russian
Urdu
Chinese
Next, the south Asians, Spanish and Portuguese - by April, all 32 languages (excliding English) will have CoJo language content.
Saturday, 10 January 2009
Learning styles
I missed this turn of the year post first time round. It's on consultant and writer Clark Quinn's 'Learnlets' blog.
Extract:
Extract:
"if, instead of fixed characteristics, we think of a suite of malleable learning competencies as a way in which our learners can differ, we gain two things. First, we find ways we can support learners who have weaknesses in particular learning competencies (dealing with visual data representations, for example), and second, we can develop them in those competencies as well ... It’s also a tangible investment in organizational competency, and potentially the only real leverage an organization can have, going forward. Think: learning skills instead of learning styles, and develop your learners accordingly!"
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
