E1n1verse

Levelling Lifelong Learning: Annual Progress Review

I have my annual Ph.D. review meeting tomorrow afternoon. As usual, I'm more than a bit nervous, especially as I made the big step this academic year of completely dropping my former Ph.D. work and starting a brand new topic that intersects the boundaries of my three main interests: communities, learning and teaching, and Internet-enabled technologies. As part of the review process, we're asked to produce a 4-page report that explains what we've done since the last report. In your first year, this report ought to focus on your thesis proposal, although many students won't yet have one. I do have some ideas about what I want to do and how I am going to go about it. I've made an online version so that it will be indexed and easily findable by others interested in World of Warcraft and e-learning.

The 30-second summary: Examine how metaphors and game design of World of Warcraft motivate people to learn and to work, with an eye to transferring motivation, social knowledge building, and persistence to online higher education practices, like community building for lifelong learning.

Click the "More" link below to continue reading the online version of the proposal and progress report. A downloadable PDF version is also available.

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What Am I Doing? The Two-Sentence Summary

For the last several months, I've been engaged in various activities all with the same intended goal: generate a concrete idea about what specifically I want to look at in Michelle 2.0, my new Ph.D. I've been mind mapping, writing permutation programs, brainstorming, discussing, writing essays, and writing thesis proposal plans. The most successful thing was probably having to sum up what I'm doing briefly for a visitor to the research lab's weekly meeting this morning. While it answers the Twitter question "What are you doing?", it's too long to fit in 140 characters but it does fit into 40 words.

Q: What are you doing?

A: Looking at how metaphors and game design of World of Warcraft motivate people to learn and to work, with an eye to transferring motivation, social knowledge building, and persistence to online distance education practices, like teaching and community building.

There you go. Now we all know!

I'd just like to point out, though, that my ability to verbalize it so coherently and concisely is a result of all the other writing and thinking I've been doing. If I hadn't written the essay in November and the extremely rough paper outline for a thesis proposal on Sunday, the idea would not have coalesced so concretely. Time, background cogitation and serendipity seem to be strong features of my new Ph.D. For me, not knowing exactly what I wanted to do, has been sharply focussed by talking, reading, writing, and going to seminars. It doesn't matter what the seminars were or how relevant. It's amazing how much I've drawn out of the motivational reading group I was participating in when I didn't even know I was interested in motivation. Connections appear where you least expect them. The important thing is to take the leap and do.

7 Degrees of Ein (That You Probably Never Knew)

Credit EduGlu-y JosieFraser for this posting on the seven degrees of Ein or things you probably never knew (and perhaps could have lived without) based on the Twitter meme currently making the rounds. If you'd like to participate and haven't been tagged, the rules are quoted below:

Kind of like high 5, but not. Thank you Mark Hawker for memeing me, & posting the rules (although feeling a bit Déjà vu on this one, wondering if black holes are really just meme collisions):

* Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
* Share seven facts about yourself in the post - some random, some weird.
* Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
* Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

[From SocialTech: Random 7]

Now, on to the 7º of Ein!

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What Do I Know? A Reflection on Influences

For the first time in years, I'm taking a postgraduate course myself: H812: Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice, which I'm doing both for personal development and to provide theoretical groundwork in educational pedagogy for my Ph.D. work in educational technology.

A recent activity asked us to reflect on influences on our teaching practices, considering: practices arising from personal experiences as a student; practices from our departments; and practices we can attribute to other sources. In addition, we were asked to consider aspects of our workplace that favoured or hindered good practice. I starting making notes on the 14th of October. I did not post them to my group because I felt this was a really important activity. If you don't know where you've come from, it can be difficult to move ahead in a purposeful fashion. I wanted this activity to serve as a good baseline, so I invested a substantial amount of effort into thinking about it and writing it up in a coherent, cohesive fashion.

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The Times They Are A-Changin'

Sometimes you have to be smart enough to realize that the battle you're fighting isn't one you are going to win or even sometimes one you want to win. I walked into my supervisor's office in September and told him I was throwing away all my document similarity and agents work from the last twelve years.

I took the leap.

I landed in a new Ph.D. project in the same research group at the University of Sussex but in a completely different area. Good bye, information retrieval. Hello, educational technology.

Not only do you have to be smart enough to realize you can't win at some things, you have to be smart enough to realize that you should be doing what you're already good at and have been doing. My seemingly impetuous decision is not as foolish as it might sound. I have been working in online distance education using educational technology at the Open University since 2000. I am based in a group at the University of Sussex studying how technology can be used to scaffold learning. I am in daily contact with other educational technologists, practitioners and researchers, via Twitter and other social networks on a daily basis. I belong to that community. It's time to trust my instincts and do what I am.

Welcome to Michelle 2.0.

The 2008 H810 Interview Presentation

These are my slides for my August 19th interview presentation. I was given the remit of presenting a five- to ten-minute presentation on the "Challenges Affecting Disabled in E-Learning". The interview was for an associate lecturer position on the new H810: Accessible online learning: supporting disabled students postgraduate course, part of the M.A. in online distance education. Each slide has been annotated based on my presentation preparation notes. A downloadable version is available. Click the "More" link below to continue viewing the online version.

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Using OmniDazzle in Apple Keynote Presentations

I was recently recording a narrated Keynote presentation for display on the web and found myself wanting to use the OmniGroup's very cool OmniDazzle screen effects program in conjunction with Apple's Keynote presentation package. Unfortunately, by default, Keynote doesn't play well with other applications, as it intercepts all the keyboard commands. You can, however, convince it to play nicely very easily. Here's what you need to do.

1. Open the Keynote preferences. This is in the program menu (or Apple/Cmd ,).

2. Go to the "Slideshow" tab.

3. Ensure that "Allow Exposé, Dashboard and others to use screen" is enabled with a checkmark beside it.

That's it! Now you can use OmniDazzle in your Keynote presentations.

In progress!