Mentorship 2009

Right well it's been inevitable, like the fact that sooner or later your once full can of coke is eventually going to finish. Mentorship Update 2009, the previous years update was the first project I undertook in my current job. So am slightly ever so slightly nostalgic (spelling) about this task.

The plan this year was to start the task a lot earlier, (initial talks started early April) compared to last years start of June/July for a deadline in Mid September. Happily this year the project is being transferred into the familiar grounds of html and is aimed to be accessed online. Which is nice so if there is something wrong with it it can be changed in a matter of minutes and at no extra cost compared to weeks and £500 for the CD version... you live and learn!

The final platform is yet to be decided, but I'm hoping and pushing for it to be placed onto a Tulip site and with the hopefully (fingers crossed and all that jazz) that it'll be able to be viewed by non UOP staff via the new External view of Tulip due to be initiated in September 2009. I really hope this works out well as this should hopefully be one of the projects I go check this out I made it. Rather than yeah sorry about that one! Another possibility is to have it to lay on the new ARC system which is essentially a tool designed specifically for Placements, and seeing as this is an update for the Placement Development Teams it could fit on there, but it is also a learning resource so it could go onto SharePoint ooh the possibilities.

Well either way I shall keep this updated as and when anything interesting happens. The direct link can be found here: http://study.plymouth.ac.uk/Module/HEAB370%20AYAU%2007/MentoshipResource/default.aspx (UOP login required).

Initial designs are following my standard background swirls design, however as this is such a big project I'm going to try to tweak this design a bit here are some initial tweaking:

Plymouth E-Learning conference...

Last week was Plymouth E-Learning conference which I quite enjoyed well done Steve and everyone else evolved in putting on the event..

First thing's first I went there to present my E-Portfolio project which sadly I felt I missed the point of presenting at such a conference, I'd prepared a presentation which would have been fitting had it been in a room full of people within Plymouth University wanting to know more about how flexible Share Point can be (with a little bit of hacking). And to know some of my struggles with both Share Point and Pebble Pad to be able to learn from these issues in their own work... However this conference was more about how this tool was effective not how we made it. So I had to slightly adapt my presentation on the fly and feel as a result I missed both points completely. Obviously managed to get some points across but had I done some ground work before it could have gone down a little bit better. Still least I can put it on my CV that I've presented at such an event! If you would like to know more about this E-Portfolio project please see a prior post.

Publish Post

Next thing with the conference was to check out what other people have been up to and developed.



Turning Point
Both Bath University and our own Medical/Dentistry school own a load of these Audience Response hardware. Basically its Who Wants to be a Millionaire... or a unique ability to allow your lecture hall/class to flock together.

Our Medical School has used them to see how the ability of the class as a whole has progressed or if they know certain areas of the subject already they can move on or learn more about that area if the classes knowledge is low. I thought it was an amazing tool as it means you get a response of the whole class a joint body not just individual marks and was interested if James Surowiecki theory that the joint body will get the complex answers correct or not. This was the case on simple questions but on more complex questions it seemed they as a whole wouldn't get it right. However this doesn't disprove James's theory it actually proves it... slightly since the crowd has to be of a mixed ability and knowledge, a crowed in a specific lecture asking questions about that said specific lecture means the crowed is of equal knowledge and interests therefor not fulfilling James's theory. However it is still interesting!

This technology seems really exciting as lectures can teach their mob exactly what they want to know not what the lecturer has planned but what the mob needs to know to bump up their areas of less knowledge simply by asking them a couple of questions. BONUS!

Rumour has it that EDALT might be purchasing a simular setup so might be able to implement simular things with my Faculty... SCORE!

CSS in any SharePoint sites? (Tulip & Mysites)

One of the things which frustrates me about SharePoint is that you have these potentially very powerful sites which are just used as notice boards to contain Word Documents or PowerPoint’s. However if an Academic is wanting to produce something a little bit more like a standard website (web 1.0) they have to create HTML pages which lay in a document library, a student clicks on the documents and is escorted away from the SharePoint interface, (same can be said for Videos and Flash).

Since taking up my role and working with SharePoint, it’s been my constant mission to integrate all these cool learning resources within the pages of the Tulip sites (as in to maintain the left hand menu). This task has been helped with certain web parts which can handle WMV files or Flash files. However these are usually just stand alone web parts and lack any context for the information, and you can very easily end up with a messy page full of random web parts:



However one very handy web part is the MOSS editor, which is probably my favourite web part… if I had to rank it it would get an 8.4 (on a scale of 1-10, 10 being high)...

The MOSS editor is simply a html editor which allows you to use hyperlinks and objects etc without stripping them out, so you can embed a video into your Tulip or MySite and have some explanation text to give it context. This seemed all fine and dandy till it occurred to me… these sites are lacking any styles (which is obviously the most important thing with anything in E-Learning it has to look nice). A quick play with the editor it appeared there was no way to attach your own style sheets and any CSS added inline with the html would be stripped (obviously as it wouldn’t be W3C compliant but if the hack worked I wouldn’t be complaining). I initially gave up and figured I’d just have to kick it old school and use Tables, which as we all know are both a pain and are highly un-accessible.

I then discovered this nifty programme called SharePoint designer, (don’t be put off by the huge made by Microsoft stickers on it). Within SharePoint designer you can open any programme, module or Mysite as shown in the following images (click images to enlarge):









Once your site is open you should be greeted with something similar to what's attached below (I’ve switched to design mode), for this example all we really need to be concerned about is the “Attach Style Sheet” button as highlighted. You might want to look through this page and look at the code as I’m sure many other nifty hacks can be done.



Attach your desired Style Sheet which you’ve pre uploaded. Once you’ve done this you can then go back to your Moss editor web part and include class and id tags which call the CSS… bingo.

My general method of doing this is to create a folder or a document library called HTML making sure not to include it in the left hand menu and within it have all images and CSS used for the design... well hope this is of some use, feel free to comment/email if you need anything a bit clearer.

Webcast fluster!

Quite randomly last week had to edit together and upload a number of Webcasts to Tulip. I did this by my classic method of CSS styles HTML web parts, but it could equally have been done by using the Windows Media Video web part (however would have lacked my custom background shapes).

Pages can be viewed (UOP login required)



Using Web casts as part of your general teaching can enhance your teaching on many levels. I shall attempt to offer some reasoning behind this but fear Ray Jones might be reading and don't want to embarrass myself here! Right well here we go:

One of the main benifits of any form of Electronic learning is that users are able to access it where ever and whenever in the world. Students can log into your Teaching and Learning sites (Tulip or Emily) and access the resources you've put on-line and learn from these resources in a comfortable and unintimidating environment, at any time during the day. However normally they are then forced to come onto campus (sometimes travelling a far distance) to see an hours worth of lecturing only to return home again and read up on what was said in the lecutre.

What if students could witness these Lectures wherever they are in the world. This is the barrier Web casts break down. Students can take part in these lectures (watch or contribute) in their own spaces. Although this doesn't eradicate the time based problem it does mean for an hour lecture only an hour of the student (and lecturers) time is taken up since it only takes a couple of seconds to log in as opposed the time it takes to get ready to leave the house, then to travel to the lecture and back again.

Another benifit of using the Webcasts are the ability to have faceless discussions, students can log in as their own names or an Avatar (made up name or their online name) and take part in the discussions, these discussions work far better than in real life since, when all poeple are talking the discussion gets shown on the screen in a linear format, where's when people are talking in the real world all at once its just a mess of sound!

The last benefit of using Web casts is that they can be recorded, and the whole thing can be used as a resource on your Teaching and Learning site, so it then unlocks all the time benefits of students being able to watch a full length lecture where ever and whenever... just like the bbc Iplayer!