ccm e-learning fair: 2006 - it went
I have to start with the question we finished on - how do I (we) instill a need in my colleagues to make the effort with e-learning?
I had a really useful session with some great people but as I walked into the venue 2 things struck me - such a big space for so few (yep, it was under subscribed) and how stressed Kevin Carrick looked. He’d given the event a hard sell yet so few of our 100s of teaching staff showed up.
But look what I got out of it! I spent over an hour with some big hitters and hard workers talking Web 2.0 and the future with Moodle. Only slightly embarrassing thing was that everyone seemed keen to get the lowdown on podcasting and I had to admit I was an enthusiastic receiver but I hadn’t moved to the other side and started making them.
There’s something great about blogging - as you type your thoughts and reflections, new ideas come to you and the mush in your head becomes distilled into clarity! And it’s only 6.30!
I held back on blogging as I didn’t understand its value to me. What could I podcast? Now I have an idea; e-learning at CCM - I would interview people like Kevin and Steve Butler and John Goulden and any staff using the stuff. Recorded over Skype, probably as it’s so difficult to get a face to face with campuses spread all over the city.
July 11th, 2006 at 8:01 am
Am I the first commenter? Surprised no-one followed up the link you showed at the ELF. A few ramblings, a few frustrations….
“how do I (we) instill a need in my colleagues to make the effort with e-learning?”:
It’s never going to work at CCM unless the students and staff ask for things like blogging, video, wikis, 1-to-1 laptops, and a million other techie things. Most staff are too busy to investigate what could be good for them and their students and are quite happy to reproduce their old notes and handouts, and hope that the students will attend and complete the course. And maybe pass the course. The techy people like John G and Steve B will always track down the latest developments and say “why won’t anyone use them?”. The colleges and Unis where e-learning works are the ones where it’s tutor- and eudcationally-lead - where the techies ask tutors what they’re doing on their courses and what would extend their lessons and make them more interesting and exciting. No-one seems to have read the OFSTED inspection for Business and Computing at CCM (”boring lessons, no innovation, poor use of ILT.) If that’s not a clue, I don’t know what is. CCM needs an ILT Champion again.
As for the ELF - a good idea, but not promoted properly by the powers-that-be, and most staff who wanted to attend were already in planning meetings. I think the “hard sell” approach never really took off because it was pushed along by the techies who had “x” equipment to show off and non-techy staff were immediately put off and were never going to attend. The non-techies who did show up said that the things they liked were the gimmicky things - like your videos and the the bloke who used audio in his powerpoint slides. No-one advertised that fact that the ELF had an educational purpose and staff weren’t asked what they’d like to see. From what Kevin said the next day, this sort of thing will probably been done for each CDT next time.
Blogging and podcasting could be useful for students and staff who need to use diaries, but how many staff can tell their students how to set up an xml or rss feed? The techies aren’t educationalists, and the tutors aren’t techies. The person who is leading all this is Kevin Carrick, but I think he has his hands tied to a certain extent because the techies are the ones who are shouting louder than anyone else and they control the technology. The tutors are just blinded by science, and intimidated by the technology, and will always go back to something safe that they are in control of.
Rather than talking to Steve and John about their e-learning experiences, you should maybe talk to tutors first - those who don’t really use ILT, and find out if they want to use e-learning in their lessons. After I did my presentation about online resources, a science tutor told me she needed to get hold of photos of biological slides and a dietary exercise and didn’t know where to look apart from Google. It’s that sort of level across most of the college, where staff are frustrated and want a foothold, rather than being told there’s an e-beam at Northenden they can use once a month.
July 11th, 2006 at 12:32 pm
Tim I love you, man, for your free speech. How else would I have understood where you’re coming from than in this environment? Thanks for telling me about your myspace site too. We certainly agree we have a challenge but I’m still keen to champion the cause.
We touched briefly in my discussion at the ELF on staff training (which I feel hasn’t worked well with new technologies) and my suggestion was that it became student and staff training - in the classroom, getting things going. So rather than show teachers how to get a blog going in moodle, or an online assignment, get in the room and do it with them, so there’s something to show for it - and a precedent. Your observations about staff getting a foothold are so true.
I did actually get 1 comment (when my blog was at learnerblogs.org) and it was from a big hitter at Penn State Uni. http://camplesegroup.com/blog/ He’d written a piece about blogs not actually being ‘blogs’ (as in diaries) but content management systems - personal environments. How come I get some interaction from someone halfway across the world, but so little within ccm?