Professional highlights - looking back

Highlights of some of the things that I have done at Coventry University. These are of international, national and University-wide impact.

Accessibility in online learning and resources

Presented nationally and internationally on inclusion - accessibility and IT issues. I presented in the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London in TechShare. My poster presented at ITiCSE in Dundee won outstanding poster prize.

I presented a paper in Anchorage on work (Create interactive accessible e-learning) that I completed for CIPEL.

Asked to edit the Teaching Disabled Students guidelines.

The Naked Lecturer my blog won a University award.

I created Coventry University's guidelines on Inclusive e-Learning.

e-TALIA

Asked by Rosario Kane-Iturrioz to join the e-TALIA project which enabled me to work with European partners in their countries and to present results at conferences. The 2012 Universal Learning Design conference in Austria where I also chaired a session, had a gala dinner and I sat next to Evelyn Glennie.

studies have highlighted the need for enhancing language skills and intercultural awareness training of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) ...
The e-TALIA project seeks a greater understanding through transnational cooperation of the specific language and cultural awareness needs as well as of the learning culture of SMEs in the Hospitality and Leisure sectors. 

Canada 

I was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada for three months. Having kept contact with colleagues there and hosted a reciprocal visit from Alan Wright, Vice-Provost, there are also links being forged between some UWin students and Coventry University students of Forensic and Investigative Studies.

CUOnline

Student guides for the University's virtual learning environment - there's an archive for 2000 - 2008 of the guides that I wrote In subsequent years, guides went to single pages. I also wrote tutor guides.

I wrote and updated a Mahara e-portfolio guide for tutors and students.

Resources

In view of my imminent departure from Coventry University (I'm retiring!)...

Colleagues at Coventry University will be able to access my Mahara resources via the Mahara Group named Anne Dickinson's Group.

YouTube movies are in my channel.

There are many CUBA blogs but some are out of date. The Naked Lecturer has been reclothed and is in the Acdev site, but to date is still there for reference.

Other resources are in the Acdev site: http://www.coventry.ac.uk/acdev

Don't forget THIS BLOG!

Curve

The items that are in Curve digital repository (University Collection) are available for people in Coventry University to find.

Some examples:

Teaching Disabled Students (Edited. Open Collection)

Mahara e-portfolio at Coventry University - an introductory guide

Inclusive e-learning

Spring 2014 Technology Enhanced Learning courses

Other items are scattered to the cloud

Just one or two examples:

It's not about the Technology from Goanimate (Pirates no longer available)

Homework not handed in from Goanimate

PowerPoint Alternatives - using Spicynodes. Beautiful rendering of a mindmap.

Cricket Season from my Audioboo list.

Robert and Marvin - I rescued an example, modified it and it's in YouTube.

Thank you, USask

Dear GMCTE U of S:

I really enjoyed the TOOC "Introduction to Learning Technologies"...

listen to ‘Personal feedback for the TOOC 2014’ on Audioboo

It's not about the technology

Using an analogy of painting materials. Well I do use technology rather a lot but I'm beginning to realise that this is my favourite way of producing a blog. First, here are the items that I refer to in my message:
GMCTE UofS video that I use as a starting point
It's not about the technology - using the pirates in goanimate - by Yohohoho (me)
C4LPT Tools for technology in learning - a great resource

More images (Painting Materials and Painting Time) are below.

Here's my message - as an Audioboo

Here's the original message... handwritten and photographed using my phone

Painting materials

A young artist..."Painting time"

Mahara pages: formatting (in short: don't)

Formatting – students were asking re formatting ie font size spacing etc    I wonder if there is any guidance generally re creating pages/ blogs etc that we could share with students as guidance?

I received this question by email from a colleague and there were many others who were copied into it. It was in the context of creating Mahara pages and in particular, adding text entries such as Journal entries. So I thought that it would be of interest to more people than just those copied into the email. Here's my response... 

I'm looking at this from an accessibility perspective... 

The specific style that Mahara gives is there for a reason! For example, have you looked at a Mahara page using a mobile phone? Try narrowing the width of your browser showing the examples. Also, you should be able to enlarge the text yourself, as a reader, by holding down ctrl and typing + (ctrl and 0 will bring it back to normal size).

I would suggest that you say to your students: 

• Consider your readers and don't stop them from being able to make their own adjustments. 
• Concentrate on the content of the pages and don't be diverted into changing the appearance of text. 
• Don't change the size of the font to a fixed size because it may prevent your readers from changing it for their own preferences. 
• If you want to use headings in their text, use the heading styles that are built in the editor. This is helpful in signposting the meanings of the following paragraphs to the readers. 

Examples of Mahara e-portfolios 

(try viewing these in a narrowed browser window and larger text size)

http://mahara.ulcc.ac.uk/view/view.php?id=1 

http://mahara.solent.ac.uk/view/view.php?id=55 

http://mahara.ulcc.ac.uk/view/view.php?id=8 

http://mahara.tdm.info/view/view.php?id=4 

TechDis Accessibility

Note this is for printed (Word) documents, but is an excellent resource: http://www.jisctechdis.ac.uk/techdis/resources/word

Hope this helps!

Asking the question

I was preparing to share the delivery of a workshop entitled "Ask the audience". This has given me the opportunity to explore some different types of personal response systems that are available.

I decided to create one question and then see how it looked within each application.

This post is a discussion about the question that I used, what made it a good question and some limitations with the question.

The question

I created a map that included some of Europe. On that I placed arrows pointing to specific places with ABCD or E indicating the different places. One of the places that an arrow pointed to was Sochi in Russia. The question was: Where is Sochi?

What's a good question?

Let's take the Sochi example … what makes it good? Here are some points...

• The text is short
• It offers precise visual options
• The question can be used in other contexts as the arrows on it all pointed to real places, for example Moscow, Minsk
• It's current: I could add a prefix to that as "The Winter Olympics 2014"
• It doesn't offer too many options for response

What are the limitations of the question?

• Visual issue: I might need to explain where the pointers were without giving it away, for example, is it by the Black Sea? Is it as far north as Latvia? Is it in Belarus? And so on.
• Fortunately all of the response systems used images. However, one of them produced an image that was pretty small. In this case, I might present the image alone beforehand.
• It assumes that you know it's in Russia or thereabouts. I could have presented a map of the world and stood back to see where the answers went.

Response systems

Some response systems enable you to point to the location so I didn't even need to have put the letters A to E there. Others didn't enable the image to be resized; one in particular produced an image that took up less than a quarter of the screen.

Presenting - note!

Unless you wanted them to go to the Internet and to do a quick search the Sochi then and non-Internet system would be best to this.

Finally

The question that I delivered: where is Sochi is one that is a recall type of question, that is, one that tests knowledge. What I could have done was to ask people to apply the knowledge. Something that might ascertain their conceptual understanding or even a question that would test their knowledge and understanding. I could have asked them: if you were holding the Winter Olympics where would be the best location out of the 5 suggested?

I await comments from the workshop group….

(By the way, there follows a Creative Commons map that shows Sochi... it's one of the locations that is marked with a black dot!)

Why blog?

I think I should answer this question by speaking about why I create blog messages. 

I've used different types of blogs over the years. The ones which are the most successful for me are those that are easily accessible and where I can remember the password! If I don't remember the password, at least there should be a way of getting it quickly. I tend to think better onto paper, using pen and paper and (according to my old  school friend) this puts me into a certain age group!

Having said that, what I'm doing this occasion is using DragonDictate. This is the first time that I've used DragonDictate to create blog messages. But if I close my eyes,  hopefully the text isn't going to make too many mistakes. I've recently found that this software is better in recognising my voice than it used to be. 

I found that I need to close my eyes when I'm speaking, so that I'm not distracted by  the recognised text and all the text that starts to flow. Have you ever been in the situation where you've had an online conversation with somebody and you can hear your own voice on the system a fraction of a second after you have spoken? Well I think that it's very much like that. So closing my eyes helps with the flow of my thoughts.

listen to ‘Firemen, time difference, toaster technology’ on Audioboo

So I would suggest the first way that I recognise is the way that I can capture my thoughts quickly. so, in 2012, when I went over to Canada I had a little notebook that I wrote diary entries in and I felt again that things are better when I use a diary entry in writing. Then I had a little notebook with all these diary entries. Unfortunately my typing skills are such that I would not enjoy transcribing the information. Neither would I want just to take photographs of my diary entries because that's not very accessible. So I found Audioboo which was wonderful; it's like a voice version of Twitter. It's not taken off  so much as Twitter, and I would suggest that because of its ease of usage as well as the fact that people probably don't like listening to their recorded voices. So why aren't I using audio at this moment? One of the reasons is that I can adjust the paragraphs around having spoken into DragonDictate and is working with the text. Editing recorded speech is not the easiest thing to do. And I'm not typing at the moment very much because I want to give my shoulder a rest having damaged it recently. 

So… Going back to why I have created blogs in the past: where there has been a fixed amount of time in which to produce blogs for example enforced being in a certain location or as part of a course. In addition, I've used Twitter best during a conference, especially when I had been able to text for tweeting. However repeated texting by me who was not used to texting caused injury! 

I have also found that I've been successful when I've focused on the certain areas for my blogs. I don't intend my blogs to be read by hundreds of thousands of people, but there are very useful place to put things like my thoughts and also I've used them for responses to questions that I been asked, with the thought that I might be asked that question again and can refer people to that blog posting. 

I've also used a blog posting for putting resources for workshops or demonstrations that I have presented University-wide.

So, in conclusion, I would suggest the following:

How do you capture your thoughts the best? Dictate? Type? Pencil or pen?

Have you got an overall arching topic that you want to use for your blog posts? It helps if you do otherwise there's no aim!

And finally what's your own voice? If it's a blog it can be personal, so… it's your own voice! How do you speak? How do you explain something over a telephone to somebody in a telephone conversation? Your blogs can be as formal or as informal as you wish! 

It's up to you…

(And this is informal. I just thought of this out of my own head! So there aren't any references.)