Twitter includes a 140 character limit on each twit. Sounds like an ideal constraint to me. Challenge to students: summarise today’s lesson in one twit. Provide a copy of the blank above to each student…

Paul Constant has written a review of twitter as a series of twitter posts (via daringfireball.net). Now, what I want to get going is a short story told by 5 to 7 twitterers taking turns…

...as anyone who has looked at my twitter page will have guessed, I’m using twitter simply as a way of saying where I am each day. I’ll try a bit of the location specific writing over the holiday. Photos on flickr.

The crux of the problem. Active learning is known to be more effective than receiving information, but we don’t use the active tools in Moodle. Geoff Petty gives out a large number of handouts on the downloads page of his Web site. The pyramid above was found in the Word file called Active Learning Works, which is the first download on the page.

Professor Alan Staley is Head of the Learning Technology Development Unit at BCU. He has introduced Moodle as BCU’s VLE and has used the introduction of a VLE to encourage more active styles of teaching and more focus on pedagogy. I attended a JISC West Midlands Regional Support Centre user group meeting some years ago at which Professor Staley suggested using a simple visual scoring system for teachers to assess the style and degree of interactivity of their Moodle courses. I have cheerfully stolen and adapted this idea for staff development next year.

• Video of Alan Staley talking about Moore’s Chasm as it relates to introducing technology to teachers [ 12 minutes, see graphic below as the video is not clear ]
• Download the PPT that Alan Staley used [ Number 2 on the list, 7Mb ]
• An earlier post on this blog

Diana Laurillard is professor of Learning with Digital Technologies at the London Knowledge Lab. Laurillard wrote a very influential book called Rethinking University Teaching, published by Routledge, second edition with updated examples and a few modifications was released in 2001. Roger Rist has provided a brief summary of the conversational model from which I have taken the graphic above. There is a review of the second edition by Stephen Bostock – I’ve linked to the Google cache version as the original is in RTF.

The slide I intend to use on Wednesday is taken from the PowerPoint presentation that Professor Laurillard used for her inaugural lecture at the LKI. The whole presentation is available and worth looking through.

You can also read or listen to Kevin Donovan interviewing Professor Laurillard. I’d be interested to know if you went for the text or the audio. I went straight for the PDF transcript, a colleague instinctively clicked on the audio button.

Just a way of looking at Moodle courses that Alan Staley described during a Moodle User Group meeting some time ago. I’ll be working this one up for next year’s technology supported learning course.

Blogs, Twitter and wikis are ways of communicating or providing information.

A blog is a Web page where short articles or ‘posts’ can be added so that the most recent addition appears first on the page. Many blog publishing systems allow other people to comment on the article, and some systems exist for automatically finding other blog posts that mention the current post (‘trackbacks’). In this way, ‘full hypertext’ linking is possible and debates can be carried on over several Web sites.

A wiki is a collection of Web pages that can be edited by anyone or a selected group of people. When you edit a page, you can use a special format (often CamelCase) to create the name of a new page. When you save the change to the Wiki page that you edited, you can then edit the new page and add new content. If there is a large community organised around a wiki, then as people develop new ideas and break long pages down into shorter pages, coining new page names, they will produce and define a pattern language about the topic of the Wiki. In many wiki systems, the title of a page acts as a link to a search query that will list all the pages that point to that page.

Twitter is a specific Web site and mobile phone based communication system that allows members to publish short (140 characters) messages or ‘twits’. In the US, you can receive twits from people you follow on your phone or you can visit the Twitter page for that person. You can also send ‘twits’ yourself and these appear on your Twitter page. In the UK, you can send an sms message to a special mobile number and your twit will appear on your twitter page, and your followers will see your twit on their Web page profile. However, publication to phones is only available to Vodaphone customers as yet.

Google Wave is likely to provide new and interesting ways of communicating.

A colleague of mine wanted a forum for his students to ask questions and to ‘talk back’ and Vanilla has the right level of functionality. The big forums like phpBB are just overkill for about 30 people, and I was not looking forward to explaining the administration of a large forum to my colleague. Vanilla has simple administration, and provides ‘linear’ discussions (‘turns taking’), there is no discussion threading. It is a flat model, you have categories which contain discussions. There are no subcategories. You can make the whole forum readable by members only, so my colleagues’ students won’t be overshadowed by worries that all and sundry can read their questions or answers.

Vanilla was coded by Mark O’Sullivan who is hard at work on Vanilla 2.