Innovative learning – using a wiki

Coming up in February, the University will have the first “innovative learning week”. The idea is to have a week when students can find out new ways of learning across the university. What I thought was interesting to note was that it has been decided to use a wiki to get the information out. I suspect that one of the main reasons for this is that it is really quick and easy to update a wiki page, whereas a webpage is more static and has to take more effort and understanding of how webpages work.

What do you think of the way the wiki for Innovative learning is being used?

https://www.wiki.ed.ac.uk/display/InnovLearning/Home

 

Ideas for blog posts – your “literacy history”

You are currently studying at the University of Edinburgh, which is possible for a small percentage of the total population. How did you get to be here? Think about your development from childhood up to now, and what the influences and changes have been. Write a blog post about one of these:

• was there a person in your life when you were younger, who really encouraged you? Perhaps this was a grandparent, or a teacher? Write about this person – describe him / her and some of the events you remember fondly from your early years
• did you make a big decision for a career in your teens? What brought you to that decision – was it something that happened? Did you have a choice, and you still wonder if you made the right choice? Write a story about the event.
• do you have a favourite book or books? What was it about the book that made it so magical, and makes it continue to be your favourite? Write about how you feel when you think about the book.
• have you moved around, either within the same country or to different countries? Have you had to learn different languages or accents or dialects? What do you think about them? Do you have a favourite language / dialect / accent? How did you discover that you felt like this about speaking/listening? Write about your thoughts and feelings about languages and accents.

Thinking about blogs

To get an idea of how you use blogs, please choose:

So far, here are the poll results:

What is your experience of using blogs?

Answer	Votes	Percent
I read blogs by other people	4	36%
I have my own blog	2	18%
Other (see below)	2	18%
I’ve had a blog for a year or more	1	9%
I’ve never had a blog before starting this course	1	9%
I like getting ideas from blog posts by other teachers	1	9%
I’ve heard of blogs but never read any	0	0%

Other Answer	Votes
I think blogs are a great way to encourage writing	1
I used it, deleted it, started another one, and deleted it..Now it’s a new one	1

Blogs from 2010-11 course members

Here are the blogs that were created by course participants on the 2010-11 OLL course:

Andy http://eslimaginarium.wordpress.com/ and http://www.andylikes.blogspot.com/

Fei http://sunshineinmyeyes.wordpress.com/

Helen http://languagelearningonline.wordpress.com/

Kiky http://ollexploration.wordpress.com/

Lusa http://lusapeng.wordpress.com/

Suzie http://esl4word.wordpress.com/ and http://bendibenri.wordpress.com/

Wei http://mynameiswwwei.wordpress.com/

Xeixin http://starrynightxiexin.wordpress.com/

 

Keeping track of articles and papers

A couple of years ago I wrote about Mendeley, a software programme that you can download and use to save and organise your pdf files. I’ve used it regularly since then, and have seen it go through a number of changes. It’s much more stable now, and they’ve introduced new ways to make groups and share titles. You can see my profile on Mendeley here. On my profile you can see a public group – the one about corpus language studies. I’ve just joined a group about Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL)

I find that when I’m in a mood for reading, I come across papers in articles that look quite interesting but are not directly relevant to what I’m doing right now. It’s good to be able to keep a copy with a few clicks, so that I can come back to it later.

I’ve also now discovered that there’s an iPad app that links to Mendeley, and that means you can have your library on the iPad – even offline (I think you have to make sure you’ve already clicked on and so downloaded the papers, though). I’m not sure how much space it’s taking up on my iPad, but at the moment I’ve not used half of the full capactiy yet, so I’m not starting to worry.

ways to use wikis

An interesting set of ideas for using wikis in schools:

http://www.techlearning.com/article/22064

videos on blogs

Ever thought about doing a video to post on a blog? It was quite trendy a few years ago to creat “podcasts” – regular audio clips about a topic. There are still some good ones out there (I have a look every so often at Stephen Fry )

Here’s a You-Tube video made by Scott Thornbury. It’s part of his alphabet of EFL idea – focussing on the letter “p” he has decided to talk about the PPP model. I think it’s really interesting to see someone like Scott and have him talking directly about a topic, although I wonder if he could have varied his approach or maybe added a different background at some point?

If you want to embed a video from YouTube in a blog post, here’s the way to do it in WordPress (it will be similar in other blog hosting sites):

• first, get the URL (the web address) from the YouTube site; copy it onto the clipboard (highlight the whole address; on a PC hold the Ctrl + C keys)
• start a new blog post in your blog
• make sure the cursor (the mouse on the screen) is at the place in the blog post where you want to post the video
• click the small icon in the editing screen next to upload/insert – choos the one for “video”
• you will get a window with instructions; follow the link for embedding a Youtube video
• finish editing your post and save – the video will not appear in the editing screen but will appear when you look at the saved blog post in the blog

Starting to use blogs

With a new course, we are starting to use blogs – although for the first year qutie a few people have already got blogs up and running and have been using them for some time. It will be interesting to see what they use them for, and why they would decide to create a new one (or not).

Once you’ve created a blog, the next difficult bit is deciding what to write in your blog. Before doing that, it’s probably quite good to have a browse and see what other people are doing. Then when you find a blog you like, you can keep a note of it on your own blog so that you can visit it again easily. That’s what I’m doing now with the new blogs you are creating.

To do this, you need to open the dashboard or admin area of your blog. There should be a link to “links”; click on that. Then you will see a new page on which you can type the name of the link (you can do whatever you want) then paste the URL. On this blog, I also created a new category to help to keep the blog in order. I called this “blogroll 2010-11”. In the new link for someone’s blog on my blog, I made it fit the category “blogroll 2010-11” by clicking on that category name.

Are these instructions clear? Please leave a comment …

OLL 2009-10

This is my annual tidy-up of the blog! Here are the links to blogs set up by students on the OLL course in 2009-10:

Abdurrazzag

Andrew

Ayman

Cynthia

Gillian

Gomaa

Hossam

Ibrahim

Joanna

Jolanta

Juan

Kadry

Khaled

Lana

Medhat

Ragab

Salem

Shabaan

usability and students

I’ve just been pointed to the results of a study (Thanks, Marshall, via Neil Allison) about how students at university use websites. It’s an interesting study, covering students from quite a few different higehr education institutes in Australia, Germany, the UK, and the USA. The conclusions pointed to various things about designing and using websites in a university, but of particular interest to me at the moment (as I’m preparing web pages for next semester’s work) are the three myths that are debunked:

• Myth 1: Students Are Technology Wizards

• Myth 2: Students Crave Multimedia and Fancy Design

• Myth 3: Students Are Enraptured by Social Networking

You can read the summary of these here

and the full report is available (follow the link at the end of the page) but as it costs a hefty amount I won’t be studying that!