Moodle Quirks

ARRFF MOOCspawn rocks

Steve — Wed, 09 May 2012 11:04:16 +0000

I first saw the ARRFF learning model here… http://change.mooc.ca/how.htm and I thought it was quite neat, moderately useful: (1) Aggregate (2) Remix (3) Repurpose (4) Feed Forward. But the more I’ve worked with it, the more it grows on me. If you’re familiar with the COLLES survey (built-in in Moodle) then you’ll understand me when I say I choose “Almost always” to question 5, “I think critically about how I learn”. I decide to have a period of Aggregation and I don’t even attempt to move on to Remix. This phase could last three days or three months. Then one day I’ll take two index cards I’ve scribbled notes on and push them together, and I know I’ve moved into Remix. Like some people go into rehab, but I go into remix. Re-purpose may follow swiftly, or it may be a long time in gestation. At some point much further downstream there’ll be an article, or a blog post, and I’ll have Fed Forward. Some people I talk to see it as being a bit like spiral development; but for me it’s pretty linear more like the weather map… it’s kind of nebulous (pun intended), and it may trend north or south, but it marches resolutely from west to east. As the last idea exits right, a new system is building in the Tasman. Although I work with a lot of other models for clients, MOOC’s ARRFF seems to entirely cover my own lifelong learning meta-needs.

Black Arts

Steve — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 10:23:06 +0000

We heard a lot about Generation Y today. It made me flick through the pages of Peter Sheahan’s book again, reminding myself of his various insights. On page 96 he quotes Linda Botter: “What Generation Y want to know are the intangibles. How are you going to develop me?” Translating that into my speak… they want to be given ownership of the process. They want to plug and play. So I think it may be time that teachers revealed the secrets of their black arts, their pedagogies. I certainly have no problem with that… here are mine… Park 4 Types, Vectors, CLD, MOOC, and of course a test for VARK. It all fits on a side of A4 and can be grasped by a novice in about 10 minutes. Given the process, and encouraged in model thinking, and in critical thinking, and if STEM then in the scientific method, all that is left is to release them into the problem domain. They will find their own way. It’s not so much about what we do, as what we are prepared to relinquish; to not do.

Involvement vs Engagement

Steve — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 08:44:11 +0000

I hear a lot from managers about how iPads and video engage the students. Bring on the iPads! Make more videos! I don’t think we should con ourselves into believing that iPads or videos create engagement. I prefer to say, and I freely acknowledge, that they create involvement. Especially if it is the students making the videos, and not the tutor. Engagement is what happens at the start of a rugby scrum when people put their shoulders to the hard task ahead.

Hidden Assignment

Steve — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 07:03:32 +0000

Hidden Assignment is a design pattern that may help tutors who have non-Moodle assignments that they would like to include in the Moodle Grades.

Hidden Assignment

The hidden assignment activity “Practical 1″ shown above is of the type ‘Online text’. The student can’t see it, only the tutor can. The student does the practical assignment offline — perhaps a procedure, or an apprentice piece — observed by the tutor. Later, the tutor clicks on the assignment and grades the assignment in the usual way. There is no need for any input from the student, it is possible to grade an empty assignment. The tutor may want to use the assignment text area to make notes. It’s available under Grades.

As described in the paragraph above, the student can’t see the hidden assignment. If you want the student to be able to see the assignment and the grade there is a nifty workaround. Here’s the procedure:

Make an extra topic (if there are 5 topics, make 6)
Drag the hidden assignment to the extra topic
Unhide it
Remove the extra topic (in settings put it back to 5)

The assignments in the now missing topic are still there, you just can’t see them. But they appear as unhidden in both the tutor and the student view of Grades.

I think I was first shown this by Julian Ridden at Moodlemoot 2011.

Tested in Moodle 2.2

Three generations

Steve — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 21:52:37 +0000

Anderson and Dron describe three generations of distance learning: cognitive-behaviourism; constructivism; connectivism. They note that other researchers have described these “three generations” in terms of the technologies that were used to deliver them: postal service; broadcast – television, radio, podcast, web page; and social media – blogs, wikis, facebook, twitter. It strikes me their model is useful, and their paper worth a read.

Anderson and Dron three generations summary

Terry Anderson and Jon Dron (2011). Three Generations of Distance Education Pedagogy. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning Vol. 12.3 March – 2011
www.irrodl.org… article

Mobile uses: lecture capture

Steve — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 21:00:26 +0000

Mobile uses: lecture capture

Who can take in stuff like this on the first pass? Not me. But if I can go and sit in the shade and run through it again in my own time… A wee trick: photographing off a laptop screen you can get a nasty moiré (interference pattern). Rotate the camera about 10° left or right before you press the button.

Anomaly detection

Steve — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 20:10:40 +0000

Week 9 of the ML-Class and I’m full of excitement over this week’s topic: Anomaly detection. I spend hundreds of hours studying stuff (AI, AL, ML) that’s cool, but I can’t see how I personally will ever get to use it. I mean, I’m never going to build a diesel-engined robotic dog that can carry a 250kg payload while autonomously avoiding or negotiating obstacles and programmed to gain its objective or self-destruct. But I can see how I would use anomaly detection in student user modeling to authenticate online examination candidates.

Privacy Issues

Steve — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 20:02:24 +0000

“I so try to encourage tutors to confine their online exchanges with students to Moodle’s forums and messaging. I explain that should a complaint ever be made against them by a student it will be so much in their interest to have access to a record of those exchanges. However, many continue to communicate in unaudited channels like personal email, facebook, twitter… do you know I’m probably just old-fashioned, suspicious… even paranoid.” This was my comment, reflecting on some “Important questions to ask…” in a recent posting by Matt Bury on LinkedIn

Causality paradox

Steve — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 10:26:45 +0000

I’m trying to introduce the idea that we make (at least some of) our eLearning offerings free-and-open to showcase our mainstream programmes. This essentially is what Stanford have done with their ML-Class and their AI-Class that have attracted huge numbers, in what must be the biggest online learning experiment ever. Back to us… it’s one thing to be obsessed by making money (not to be hugely profitable, simply to survive), but it’s something of a leap of faith to think first of creating value and trusting that it will convert. I haven’t seen it better put than on John Langford’s blog Machine Learning (Theory): “The hard nosed will want to know how to make money, which is always a concern. But, a decent expectation is that if you first figure out how to create value, you’ll find some way to make money. And, if you first wait until it’s clear how to make money, you won’t make any. ”

I’d welcome any ideas for good arguments in favour of free (no fees) and open (no enrolment). Please do leave your comments.

Blended in real time

Steve — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 22:36:18 +0000

I was privileged to sit in on JF’s NZ Dip Bus Contract Law class, and it was a bit of an eye-opener. This is blended learning in real time: delivered across two campuses mediated by video conferencing; Moodle lesson activity references the big text book the students all have; JF works through the lesson clarifying key points, answering questions, flagging up hazards. After the class there’s an asynchronous component: JF encourages students to share solutions in their Moodle blogs, and she posts model answers. This is really turbo-charged revision, as the students prepare for their final assessment.

Jottings: blended in real time

The whole class runs like a dream (these are highly motivated students). I realise the camera has zoomed in on me, so I introduce myself. Voices are clear, though for the rest of the session the camera remains zoomed out and rather static (a tutor assistant/camera operator would be a great asset here). Is the session suitable for recording for later replay? Possibly not… though it works very well indeed in this synchronous phase of the delivery. The lesson activity is a step through, with a review question in there somewhere. Maybe it would benefit from a review question for each section, but one must be realistic about preparation time for these things… JF reckons she is already full time + 30%. The students voice their approval of the Moodle component. Why don’t other tutors make more use of this, they ask. Self-effacing, JF replies that some subjects lend themselves to it better than others. From the institution’s perspective it makes the small cohort at the remote campus viable. One can see an opportunity — where the subject matter is sufficiently generic — to deliver a course like this to students across several campuses simultaneously.

Jottings: Moodle lesson references the standard text

The Moodle lesson references the course’s standard text, and also references some govt. websites. Could this be a real world application for the QR-Code bookmarking? One can see also an application for the electronic Smart Board here, with the tutor’s notes going straight down to Moodle.