Mark Childs

The following are additional pieces of advice on IT for new students at the Faculty of Engineering and Computing

How do I access my university email?
Information about your university email account is at this link
http://www.coventry.ac.uk/cu/its/userinfo/a/9688

Can email be forwarded to another account?
You are expected to use the university email system, both for security reasons and so that you do not miss any important announcements, however, you can create forwarding rules from within your own live@edu mailbox under the ‘rules’ section.

What is the Coventry Thin Client and how do I use it?
There are full instructions for using the Thin Client at
http://www.coventry.ac.uk/cu/content/1/c4/47/61/Thin%20Client%20User%20Guide%20-%20STUDENT%20(2).pdf

What is the University’s Code of Conduct for using the computer services?
It’s important you know what your rights and responsibilities are concerning the use of computers. This is a guide to them called the Code of Conduct
http://www.coventry.ac.uk/cu/external/content/1/c4/19/50/v1251884025/user/Appendix%204%20ICT%20Facilities.pdf

Countdown To Turning off Blackboard

Oh what bimonthly now?? Yeah that’s really not good enough…

OK … visits to other institutions … so far these have been
An online identity workshop (for the Rhizome project)
A visit to a disaster management roleplay gaming event (at a police station in Ashby)
The HE Academy for feedback on their work with JISC
2 days at the EMERGE final event
Trip to Aber for the DIVERSE committee meeting

What’s really neat is that I was asked to attend all of these - yup - people actually want me to go - the downside is that I really felt I was away too much - I’ve already turned down two things for March because it was getting in the way of work. After a while you realise you can’t spend your time networking, you’ve got to do some work to be worth networking with.

Next … writing …
I took a week off to get some writing done and managed to complete two papers a book chapter and most of another book chapter. I also got to go to the SGARG writing retreat and contributed to four of the bids that were being written.I still can’t get over the experience of people actually asking me for advice on their submissions, cool. The bid I’m leading on is a European bid due in at the end of March. Still a while to get it done, but running out of time.

Getting stuff written at weekend or on research days is proving tricky, other stuff just gets in the way. Still, I am managing to get some research done on the PhD - a visit to Middlesbrough College on Monday to record some interviews with students about their experiences of Second Life. I’m not sure how well it went, my questions just seemed to be too vague once I got to ask them. Possibly needs a rethink at some point.

Projects are going OK

The Theatron project is looking really strong now - that’s taking up some of the time I should be dedicating to the PhD, but it’s all to the same goal in the end. The audio feedback project and COWL projects are off the ground, they should start firming up soon. The TheatreBase bid is going in. Anyone who wants to know more about this, please contact me - yeah right like anybody actually reads this.

EC-related stuff
Mad dash around at the last minute to get the CU Online induction sorted, apparently everyone thought everyone else was sorting it. Also done a couple of Open Days, helping out with the clickers. A couple of times though people have seemed to think I’d be there to respond to enquiries whenever they wanted to get in touch. I’m working on training everyone out of that. I’m not here 9 to 5 for tech support, usually I’m out. People seem to associate being in the office with being busy and being out of the office with slacking off. In fact I’d say the truth is the opposite way round. I’m also working out how to integrate Tricaster into the EC range of technology. Well actually I know how to do it, ask Emily in SIGMA to do it all :$

Also helping out with links with Hibernia College, hopefully we can find useful ways to collaborate.

I think that’s a run down of the main things. Rest of the week is bid writing, helping with an HEA consultation and some meetings.

As ever, if any colleagues want to know more about any of this stuff, can think of ways this might help their work or vice versa, or have comments about the direction the work is taking, please get in touch. If I don’t hear from you I’ll assume I’m doing fine and carry on as normal.

So my last piece of work for this year - get my blog entry for December 2008 written.

OK the follow-up to the last blog. The eight sets of voting systems have been tracked down and delivered. Each kit consists of a case, an RF receiver, 40 clickers and some software. However, the delivery came in a box of cases, a box of clickers and then a pack of receivers + software. I had a great hour or so putting them together. I’ve had fun distributing them to people too, I gave one to each of the four departments in EC who responded, gave three out to individuals who asked nicely and kept one for myself for staff development.

I demoed them at a faculty elearning event together with Tim Davis, who did a session on computer aided assessment with CU Online (it does work …. sometimes) and John Goodband who’s actually used audience response systems in teaching, not just played about with them like I have. Unfortunately not many people could come because a couple of other events were scheduled for the same time. I asked around a bit and it sounds like my event was scheduled first, so really everyone else should have backed off a bit. I have another event scheduled for the 25th Feb (my Dad’s 84th birthday!!) when I have Will Stewart from Bolton doing the dissemination from the ASEL project (on using audio to provide feedback for students) so no-one had better schedule anything to clash with that.

The bid with BDSO to Europe is coming together. I’m hoping we can get that off the ground, and I can use the SGI working retreat to put something together.

I’m now not going into the Uni unless I have a meeting - I decided the airconditioning was too intense to endure, and with the very poor network it just makes sense to work at home. I still don’t leave work before 7:00 p.m. if I’m in, but will put off coming in as long as possible. Ideally someone could fix both, but I’m not holding my breath.

The writing commitments have got a bit out of hand. I still haven’t been able to finish off the proceedings, and I now have volunteered to collaborate on five papers. They are on:

identity and second life
teaching theatre studies in second life
creating machinima
mobile learners
cultural attitudes to immersive virtual worlds

There’s also the chapter to the CIPEL book to write, and the PhD. Best not forget that.

I’ve added another wiki - I’m finding wikispaces a great way to post all the information I have in one place for other people to read. The only downside is that, since wikis are normally collaborative spaces other people expect to be able to add to them. Some are, but some are just for compiling my own material. The most recent is http://markchilds.wikispaces.com/ I was surprised recently to find out that at Coventry we can’t update our own staff pages. I have stuff changing all the time and there’s no way I’m going to contact someone else to change my page every other week, so I’ve put the wiki together as a space to direct people for the most up-to-date information, not what I was doing a few months ago. I’m also going to put my CV on there, to deflect all the requests I get for it from the uni.

One thing to add to the staff roles and so on, is that I’m now chair of the educational land use committee for Chilbo, the community I’m part of in Second Life. I’m hoping it will get me a bit more embedded with the muvers and shakers in SL. So far I’ve just been arranging my desk and working out where everything is. If you’re in SL pop by - I’ll add a SLURL to my wiki at some point.

You know sometimes you day something and wonder how far everyone’s current language has deviated from the one we grew up with. “Add a SLURL to my wiki”.

New things for December were:
creating video and machinima - the first of these were for a colleague who is running a course on an introduction to Higher Education - one of the machinima I;ve done was also for the course, the rest were of a pantomime that the slam dram society did at the Open University island. All of these can be seen at https://files.warwick.ac.uk/mchilds1/browse for a limited time only.

Trying to track down various solutions for video capture. I’ve been asking around for something that can do this, and think I’ve got a solution, thanks to Furrkh Aslam and Emily Oliver who’ve been using Tricaster. This is, in the first instance, for a guy in EKM called Nigel Denton who want to tape a visiting lecturer, but long term I think it’s a strategy EKM want to use for a lot of their visiting lecturers. Getting something easy and reliable is the main thing there.

I think I’ve also got a space for EC on the ELTAC project, which is looking at using Echo 360. I had the bright idea of doubling up the functionality of the cameras so we could also use them for webconferencing. Yes it’s a bright idea, but it’s also been part of the plan from the start, so no kudos there.

I went to visit Eduserv (the funders) to talk about the Theatron project, which I’m managing. We also had a face-to-face with most of the project partners and an inworld meeting with half the remainder. It looks like things are really coming together with that - all of the projects are underway and coming up with findings and we now have six theatres in the rezz-on-demand tool (though I still can’t persuade the developers that rezz should have two zeds in it). I’ve also now done some evaluation of learning in Second Life, by surveying the students I did a session on Theatre Design to. That’s the good news. The bad news was from my supervisor, which is that spending twenty minutes in SL is just “tinkering” and I really need to talk to people who’ve spent a decent length of time in there. I’d like to go back and talk to the students to get some interview data from them. I’ve just read Sian Bayne paper in ALT-J on the uncanny in second life. She gets some really rich data through interviews, that I always envy, very open full reflective discourses by people who sometimes sound madder than a box of frogs.

The SL thing has been taking over a bit though this month - I think at one point I had two meetings in a row in there, followed by a few hours test machinimating the pantomime rehearsals, followed by a bit of a chat, followed by an interview the next morning. Something like six hours out of twenty four spent in SL rather than RL. Which results in me spending my time reading books rather than anything else when relaxing, just to be offline for a while (though still not qualifying as the real world though, not when those books are about Hastur, Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth and Shub-Niggurath).

OK - enough for this year. I would conclude with an annual rant against Christmas, but I assume that’s pretty much just echoing what’s going round in your heads.

Till the next one.

Ah, nearly forgot, I am so getting out of the habit of writing these entries - I only remembered this time because of a colleague linking to his blog on his signature.

I do keep up another blog, mainly observations about things I’ve read, sometimes about my research, usually letting off steam about some news item. My latest is on the reporting of creationism in education. Two years in journalism school usually makes me feel entitled to slag off journalists, but who needs justification for that? That blog is at http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/markchilds/

Anyone who’s subscribing to the RSS feed for my connectivism blog, please unsubscribe. It’s embarassing. The blog was set up to reflect on my experience of the connectivism course set up by Siemens and Downes. After about three weeks I stopped engaging with it - as did a lot of the 2000 people on the course. I only managed to get that far due to the efforts of Fleep Tuque, who set up a library in a corner of our town in Second Life, whcih meant I could keep track of the reading.

Being on the course did help with some things, it introduced me to the idea of rhizomatic knowledge, I met one or two interesting people, got to know others better that I’d already got to know through other activities, and I learned some pros and cons of running online courses. Mainly that it’s important to get the balance right between simplicity and complexity.

The connectivism course had multiple ways of engaging with it. There was a daily email (which I went from reading most days, to filing away in a “to read” folder then ploughing through all in one go on one of my research days, to filing away in a “to read” folder and then just deleting it) there was a website, (which I never found my way around) a discussion board (which I did stick with until every thread just seem to degenerate into the same arguments) and an RSS aggregator page (which had some useful bits). But I couldn’t keep up with everything, or find the good stuff quickly enough, or find the good stuff again when I wanted to refer to it. The SL meetings would have been OK, but I found that people were throwing around references to all manner of different readings, often irrelevantly, bandying around lots of metaphors about connectivism (I can’t stand metaphors, either make the effort to work out what you really mean or stfu) and seemed to be making an effort to be erudite but without really listening to each other. That was working for them, but not for me. My way of learning is to make sense of things by applying them to concrete examples, to see how they really work.

One post described the course as a walk in the woods, rather than a set of things to be understood. You wander round picking up things, noticing things, meandering down paths, and learn things serendipitously, not by having a set list of elements to be assimilated. It’s not a problem that you don’t see the wood for the trees, because the trees themselves are fascinating (and I’ve just completely contradicted myself about metaphors - no wait that was an analogy -phew off the hook). Now I get that, and approve of it as a model for learning. I think the problem with the course was that the size, and the variety of ways to interact, meant that the wood was very very large, it was easy to get lost in, and you got the impression that no-one was really hearing you when you spoke. You got lost in the crowd - and that’s not a metaphor or an analogy - I mean that literally - interaction means being able to converse get feedback, exchange ideas, and there wasn’t enough of that because there were too many people or too little structure. Well both. How it could have been made to work was to arrange a walking party with some others through that wood, not necessarily of a like mind, but at least a similar way of learning, so that reflections and observations could have been shared within that group, and so that you had familiar faces to build up a rapport with.

A more effective way of managing it are the JISC online conferences. They are divided more into separate discussions, and there are summaries made every day where the key elements are shared. In those I always feel that my contributions are noted by somebody, and there’s a connection built up between them. Ironic that on a course about connectivism I should feel so disconnected from everyone.

Hhmmm - weekly blog becomes monthly blog - still - at least I got the entry in before the end of the month.

The meetings with BDSO went well. Hopefully we’ll be working on some bids to do with some European funding. I wasn’t involved in any JISC bids this time round, because they’d all been assigned before I got here. I can see the logic, you might as well sort out who’s doing what as soon as possible, but it’s frustrating, since I started after the decisions were made, and so don’t get a chance to submit anything. There’s also a danger with making the decision months in advance, in that the technology moves on so fast that something that may have looked good in July looks old-hat in November. I think we need a better system.

Can I just add here how appalling air conditioning is? I’m sitting here in my office - in a draught - irritating drone in the background - neck aching from being frozen. This must be a health and safety issue but all my complaints are poo-pooed. At 18:20 it switches off, and the return to decent environmental conditions is wonderful. Why put the damn thing on in the first place?

Back to the blog …

The retreat went well too. I can’t really see the point of a retreat just being to lock yourself away and write - you can do that at home - but the chance to be with a group of very smart people for two days, who are working on the same stuff, and can share and advise you at key stages, is invaluable. And the location was incredible. I had a two level room that was close to being the best hotel room I’ve had. I’m looking forward to the next one in February.

Managed to edit the conference proceedings. Just waiting for my co-editor to do her bit and it’s done. Mostly editing is just trying to create a narrative around what’s been submitted so that it doesn’t look like a group of disparate papers. But there’s always one or two papers that require a lot of copy editing. Hopefully the proceedings will be out early next year.

The PhD is coming together. I’ve actually got some teaching to do, which means some user groups to evaluate. I’ve been in contact with a few people at EC and it looks like there may be some more I can do at Coventry. Of course, identifying some user groups meant I finally had to put some evaluation instruments together, so I’ve been spending a lot of time doing that. I could have done it months ago and been prepared …. ha.

Last week was the most excellent ReLIVE08. A Danish friend introduced me to the word hooge (that’s it spelt phonetically, she didn’t spell it for me) which means a sort of homely, familial group feeling. I don;t think there’s an equivalent in English, but you know what I mean. The only conferences I normally feel that at are the DIVERSE conferences, but this one had it too. Helped a lot by knowing a lot of the people there. Five or six times though I’d not recognise someone until I saw their avatar name (which were on our conference badges). Most times I was really surprised by how they looked.

Finally tracked down the audience voting equipment - the supplier and the receiver hadn’t let me know they’d been sent. Now I just need somewhere to store them …

Got the chance to meet two more heads of department in EC, which has prompted lots of ideas for new things to work on. I think I’m going to be very busy in 2009.

The project to provide feedback to students using audio has got off the ground. I’ve been synthesising my project proposal with one submitted by a group of lecturers teaching sound engineering. The idea is to use the platform through which they already deliver the sound files for students to work on and do stuff to as the platform for delivering spoken instructions, students’ observations and evaluation. Neat. There’s a wiki about it at http://digitalfeedback.wikispaces.com/

Yay the aircon has just gone off. Peace.

Other things (wow it’s been a busy few weeks). Went to the PLANET workshop - one of the areas I’m working on is a pattern language for learning. This is a Coventry project that I worked on before I got to Coventry. There’s a flickr stream here - http://flickr.com/photos/yish/sets/72157608488366264/

I like the photos because I think I look quite intelligent in them. That was a good day too, not least because I met two writers who’ve been very influential on my research - Sally Fincher’s work on networks saved my MA and Isabel Falconer’s work on a taxonomy of learning activities is an integral part of my PhD and is something I recommend to everyone http://athena.cs.man.ac.uk/apache2-default/r/LADIE/www.elframework.org/refmodels/ladie/guides/

I was also “at” the JISC Online conference towards the start of the month. This was at the same time as the writing retreat, but I managed to combine the two by doing as much on the conference before and after, and skipping one of the days entirely. This just meant attending Gemixin’s and David White’s Elluminate session by sitting at the PC in the duty manager’s office of the hotel.

My inworld home is Chilbo, and Fleep Tuque, the mayor of that place (not her official title, but it should be) recently blogged about me. I hadn’t realised, but an interview I did with the Times was actually used in one of their articles. Fleep’s blog about me is here: http://www.chilbo.org/blog/2008/11/chilbo-resident-gann-mcgann-in-uks-timesonline/ and the Times article is here: http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article4523668.ece#

I reckon that’s another 30 or 40s towards my 15 minutes of fame.

This week is the first of the learning activities as part of the Theatron project. I’ll be introducing it to the students from inworld. I wonder what sort of impression they’ll get of me based on my avatar. I’m also meeting with Business Development, mainly to let them know the sort of work I’m doing so they can see any potential for bidding and consultancy.

Writing coming up: I’ve done (more or less) the presentation for ReLIVE08 - I still need to do the one for the PREVIEW conference. ReLIVE is over a month away, but I had an idea of how to approach it so thought it was worth getting down while it was still in my head. I also have to write my paper for the DIVERSE proceedings. I wasn’t going to, but there were less papers submitted than there were for 2005/6 so thought I’d work up the student working paper I did last year. There’s also the chapter for the book for CIPEL, I’m still not too sure what to do for that, and they want a draft by the 4th Nov. Hopefully they’ll be happy with an outline. I have three research days before then, plus weekends, so I may come up with something. Then, of course, there’s the methodology chapter for the PhD, which is the next one I had planned to write. And the conference proceedings to edit. That seems like enough to be going on with.

I skipped September as far as blogging was concerned, far, far too hectic. I think in future I won’t even try to find the time, although this only takes about half-an-hour, there were way too many things on my mind to stop and think.

The first week in October was a bit quieter. I’ve now been able to get a response about my enquiries about audience response systems, there’s a plan as far as promoting interactive classrooms across the faculty, and I’ve been trying to get more involved in the curriculum design and the Echo 360 projects. When I came to putting the list together it looked OK. I just need one or more of them to start to come to fruition.

The number of meetings seems to be expanding though. It seems to averaging two a day when you combine the EC and the CSHE ones. Maybe there are more than usual to get things moving at the start of the year, but I hope they start to tail off or there won’t be much time remaining to do the actual work. Most days I’m here till about 7:00 and it’s still mounting up.

The first week in October involved a workshop in successful bidding, which was really useful since it gave us a chance to go through some bids and identify what worked and what didn’t. That was followed immediately by a meeting about looking at creating some bids, which was useful. Note to self: I should follow up some of those ideas to see if a bid could be put forward.

Then a couple of learning committees - there’s something I need to feed back to one of them about ethics of online research. There are issues with online identity and stuff on the internet in addition to websites that I should write something about. Then InHolland University in Haarlem, the Netherlands, invited me over for a meeting about editing the conference proceedings for the DIVERSE conference. We met the publisher which was really useful, finding out that they would do all the formatting was a great relief. A friend and colleague from the University of Southern Maine was also there, and on the second day of the visit we got to talk about a paper we’re writing on the changing nature of identity due to technology.

Today I got to see some of the really interesting learning and teaching that automotive engineering are doing - giving students a series of projects to do rather than lots of lectures. What I really liked was the way the projects introduced an element of competition between the groups, the kudos of winning was more of an incentive than the final marks, it seems.

There’s a pattern emerging with these blogs - one weekly one looking back on the previous week, another looking forward to the next, and an occasional one informing everyone who reads this (both who read this) about something job-related that I’ve come across. These all seem to have had a Ludlumesque syntagm in the title - Definite article - pronoun - noun.

It’s been around since 1995 and I’ve indicated something similar to people drawing in the air where we’re at with attitudes to new learning technologies, but this is even better, they’ve got names for the different bits of the hype. There’s a link to it here http://www.gartner.com/pages/story.php.id.8795.s.8.jsp The hype cycle basically looks at the immediate enthusiasm, the backlash and then people taking things sensibly forward.

What’s also interesting is where they put various different technologies on the cycle and how different it is to where I’d put them. My job’s elearning, the only people I usually get to talk to in work-related places are elearning people, so it’s an accelerated cycle I guess. Not only that, but the technologies go through a couple of cycles often, there’s the “does the technology work?” cycle, then there’s the “does the technology work (or be allowed to work) in my institution?” cycle, then there’s the “does the technology work in learning and teaching?” cycle and then - finally I suppose, “will the technology be incorporated as the normal part of learning and teaching?” hype cycle, although I think the only technologies that have made it that all the way through that cycle are the book and the blackboard (the one you write on with chalk, not the VLE).

The question is though, with immersive virtual worlds, where are we (elearning people) on those various cycles?

Does it work? Slope of enlightenment.
does it work in institutions? Hitting the slough of despond
does it work in learning and teaching? working its way up the peak
will it be incorporated as a normal part of learning and teaching? still awaiting the trigger

A couple more fact-finding meetings, trying to put a plan together for the PhD to get some data in, and a trip up to Newcastle to talk to some partners on the Theatron project. Also I’ve got a trip round Coventry with a friend who’s just had a baby to buy some toys. So possibly not too busy. A chance to plan ahead. Then a week’s leave. Then September, which is already full.