E1n1verse

One of my jobs at The Open University is chairing TT381, the course on Open Source philosophies and PHP development.  T381 is the fifth of the Web Apps Development (WAD) courses.  I’ve been involved with the presentation and development of the course since its launch.

Although TT381 doesn’t start again until February, I’m forced to remember that the brilliant Keith Evetts has resigned as the Student Café moderator.  I need to make some recommendations for a replacement.  I’m therefore soliciting expressions of interest from former students for the paid position of Café moderator.  In theory, the Café moderator is responsible for overseeing the social forum, which means making the atmosphere fun and inviting.  He or she should also work together with the course team to deal with any issues that are raised in the Café.   Keith Evetts, of course, went far beyond this.  He also actively participated in all of the course forums and ran a series of optional coding exercises where you can never have too many parrots.  He’s set the bar high!

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I joined the Open University (OU) as an Associate Lecturer (AL) back in May 2000 to teach the university’s T171: You, Your Computer and the Net course, the university’s first large-scale foray into online teaching. As one of hundreds of new ALs, I was thrown into the world of FirstClass, the university’s chosen platform for collaboration and discussion in its courses, and among its students and associate lecturers. If you haven’t already heard, the death knell for FirstClass has been sounded. I believe the transition away from FirstClass for courses is expected to be complete by October 2010. As part of that transition, our e-mail accounts need to go somewhere, but where?

If you’re a student, you may already be using your own personal, non-OU e-mail address at the university. If you’re an associate lecturer or other academic/support staff, having a .open.ac.uk e-mail address is an important part of your professional identity. According to David Wilson, director of strategic planning in LTS, a choice is being considered between Google Apps Education Edition and Microsoft Live@edu and should be made shortly (in Snowball 36 – November 2009). It will definitely be put into place for students, but it may extend further than that. The decision has not yet been made, so we have a very small window of opportunity to provide some input as to our preferences. I’ve constructed a very small, unofficial survey at SurveyMonkey to do that.

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Martin Weller gave a 30-minute presentation last week for George Siemens’s CCK09 course on an idea he called “the pedagogy of abundance.” The key idea was that teaching in the past had been based on a scarcity model. I interpreted this as meaning knowledge was scarce (or closely guarded) and educators (the “talent”) were the scarce high priests on high–classic sage on the stage. He likened it to the music industry, which doesn’t strike me as too far off-base.

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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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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.

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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.

If I don’t finish my marking very soon, they’re going to kill me. The phone calls are increasing. With the ADD, though, I just have this overwhelming sense of guilt, failure, and frustration. More about that later. Something must be done.
Anyway, I have a plan. My Sweetie is helping me do some of the grunt administrative work that’s required (filling out the forms, uploading some of the files to each project directory to help check the functionality, checking for missing/incorrect project directories, etc.). While Sweetie’s doing that, I’ll put in a big push to finish assessing the remaining reports (22). Then, to take a break, I’ll fill in the scanning sheets for all the report-related marks for each student, and then have a go for a bit at assessing the coding parts of the projects.
The coding part is cognitively easier to assess for me as it’s definitely more black and white (it works/it doesn’t work; it’s written well/it’s written poorly). It still takes time to do, though, because you have to check through all the functionality for various points and write up the notes.
With luck, proper use of my ADD medication, and SweetieSupport, I hope to get it all in tomorrow evening’s post. I’ll let you know how I make out.