This struck me as odd.

Anyone born between those years would now be between 21 and 31, in five year’s time they’ll be between 26 and 36. So, by the point that our ‘five year plan’ has been realised, the student’s we’re aiming the strategy at will have graduated. Ok, there’s still the 30% of students who are postgraduates, plus those who are mature students (and hence over 21, and old enough to know better). But still, I can’t help but thinking we’ve already missed the boat.

The group we actually need to be focussing on are our digital natives, those born between 1988 and 1998 (and beyond). Looking at our plan, they’re now between 11 and 21, but in five year’s time that’d be 16 and 25. 16 is the age at which you start planning your future education, first with GCSE’s, and then with A-Levels two years later.

On top of this, you have to consider what it means to be a digital native. I was born firmly within the Generation Y era, and my wife is only just outside of it, but we are still left behind in some of today’s digital world (bebo anyone?). We can both remember getting on the internet in the early 90′s, but more importantly the ‘dark ages’ before that, when the idea of a schoolkid having the internet and a mobile phone was up there with moon bases and flying cars.
Someone now born in the era of the digital native, even at it’s lowest ebb of 1988, would have experienced the internet in some form or another by the time they started secondary school in 1999 (gonna party like it’s). And now we’re seeing that over 50% of 10 year olds have a mobile phone, rising to 95% of 16 year olds.

The landscape of the digital native is very different to that of Generation Y, and we should recognise that. We should start to plan for Gernation N.

It’s an event I knew about, it’s an event I’d planned for, it’s an event that I’d added to my calendar. It’s an event I completely forgot about because:

1. I added it to my, and my colleagues’, calendars a day late. Call this a moment of insanity if you will.
2. I forgot to set a reminder.

Anyway, at quarter-past-four, a rather anxious member of a department’s admin staff comes into the office, asking where I’ve been for the past fifteen minutes. Cue a hurried rush downstairs, to see the academic who fired off the original enquiry coming to the end of her introductory slides, and a room full of student’s at computers.

A silence descends on the room. Everyone in the room turns to look at me. No idea why. I’m here purely to see what’s going on. Perhaps I should explain.

We use a fairly well known online assessment package. We’ve been using it for nearly eight years now, and I’m fairly adept with the in’s and out’s of it, having spent my first 12 months of employment developing against it’s API. One of the things we use it for is online examinations, it’s excellent for large multiple choice papers, and its more eco-friendly than the old Optical Mark Reader (OMR) that is still in widespread use. The main bonus of this product over it’s competitors, is that it can lockdown the computer during the assessment; no Wikipedia in the background, no MSN, no email. Although the software has its problems, it’s actually rather good on the whole, and I just managed to talk the establishment round to going site-wide with it’s installation (this will come back to haunt me, you heard it here first).

So, the department in question, boosted by our general murmurings that this was a ‘supported system’, decided to approach a 3rd party company which resold the same online assessment system. There is a method to this madness, the company owned the intellectual property rights to a fairly clever assessment and its questions; so unless we forked out several thousand pounds for use of the IPR, it was vastly cheaper to use their service direct. So, department buys rights to use this software on 100 or so students, and a week before it’s due to happen, the staff member responsible for coordinating it all goes off on long-term sick.

Enter our team, stage left, pursued by bear.

The end result being that I left work about 25 minutes later than usual, and spent just over an hour helping a traumatised department with it’s first forays into the world of online assessment. Overall we did good, although there were one or two moments where my colleague and I exchanged thousand-yard-stares across the melee.

Hopefully the department will send a thankful email tomorrow, they’ll realise the benefits of online assessment, and we’ll have another one on the e-learning bandwagon. On our side of the fence, it was a reassurance that the quality assurance steps we had in place weren’t a simple folly, and actually do help in these situations.Which brings me to the meat in this sandwich. Top-tips for online assessments. In no particular order:

1. Test, test, and test again.
   Academics make mistakes, we (as admins of the system) make mistakes, computers (without question) always make mistakes , everyone makes mistakes.
   1. Give the academics ample time to test, and explain the consequences if they get it wrong.
      In our case, once a mistake has gone ‘live’, we say that it cannot be corrected (for QA reasons), and that the academic has to make any marking corrections themselves. Only make changes on the day of the exam if you are sure its the right thing to do, or there has been a monumental cock-up; always seek a colleague’s advice on this (preferably a sane one).
   2. Ask a colleague when you want to cowboy something, or something simply doesn’t appear to be ‘right’.
      Maybe it’s because it’s a Monday, maybe it’s down to the lack of caffine, maybe it’s the academic whose made a mistake. However it’s always good to get a sane voice on any matter which needs thinking about.
   3. Test the system, test it again, go back and test it a third time to catch it by surprise.
      Computers are evil. We’ve had a situation where a completely unrelated routine update installed over the weekend, has wrecked the way that online assessments handle mathematical equations. We now spot-check six computers in the week leading upto the online exams, and ask the rest of our section to politely not touch anything.
2. Simple is good.
   Despite the option to ‘make it better’, don’t. Do the simplest thing possible and stick to it. See pretty much every other item on this list for an explanation why.
3. Don’t underestimate the onion of stupidity.
   Despite whatever attempts you make to ensure the system is foolproof, people will find imaginative ways to break it all. The best example I can give is a student who managed to “kick the plug out of the wall socket”, thus powering down his computer. Words fail me.
4. Give them a dry run.
   If students have not used the system before, give them the opportunity to try it out. Even if it’s a simple assessment containing questions like “What colour is the sky?”.
   We normally couple this with point 5 and 7 below, and it helps overcome some of the consequences of point 3 above.
5. Write it down for them. With pictures.
   There’s a lot of reasons why students may not follow the instructions you give them, many are valid but some fall under the umbrella of the ‘onion of stupidity’ mentioned above. Writing the instructions down helps everyone:
   1. It helps stagger the start of your assessment, meaning that individual problems don’t all happen at once, and the system gets a bit of a rest. Explain to students that they all have individual timers, so nobody is disadvantaged.
   2. English isn’t everybodies first language, and some students struggle with reading. Simple instructions and diagrams help. Get them down to a single sheet of A4, picture heavy.
   3. If it all goes wrong, you can point to a piece of paper, and walk away.
6. Let everyone know what their role is.
   Myself and my colleagues are not invigilators, we don’t want to be. Equally, most invigilators aren’t technically trained, and don’t really want to explain to a student why their user account has expired (see point 7 below). I’ve even been kicked out of an online examination I was assisting with, as an invigilator mistook me for a student.
   Make sure everyone knows their role prior to the start of the online examination.
7. Make sure you hammer home the rules, and don’t be soft over the exceptions – they have been warned.
   Rules exist for a reason, make sure you have rules and you follow them, else people will loose faith in both you and the system.
   1. Staff need to know the basics of the system. What it does, how it works, where it’s most likely to fail, where students are most likely to have problems (or create them). You’ll find that non-technical staff are happy to deal with the little things if they know about them in advance, and this is invaluable during the first 15 mintues of an online examination.
   2. Students need to know what’s expected of them, and the consequences if they get it wrong.
      Not only are students told that this is like any other examination (eg. mobile phone = evicted from exam), but we tell them three-fold that online examinations are slightly different to the norm. Students are informed verbally by their lecturer, they are informed by email, and they are informed during their dry run (point 4 above). We tell them:
      • It’s the student’s responsibility to be familiar with the system. We’ve given them a dry run which is as close to the real thing as possible, and they have unlimited attempts.
      • It’s the student’s responsibility to make sure their computing account is in order. No changing password 10 minutes before the exam, no turning up and claiming that you’ve ‘forgotten’ your password. No account, no exam.
      • This is an exam, no really it is. Although myself and my colleagues aren’t invigilators, we’ll still give you a hard stare for talking, and we’ll still point you out to someone who has the authority to do something about you.
      • Follow the instructions provided (point 5), to the letter. You should log in, visit the webpage provided, take the online examination, and log out. Visiting Facebook isn’t mentioned on those instructions, we’ve checked. Twice.
8. Always have a ‘Plan B’, even if ‘Plan B’ is ‘run away’.
   There are always going to be situations beyond your control. Power cuts do happen, people do set of fire alarms, workmen to drill through gas pipes in the adjacent room (ok, I made that last one up). Despite all the planning and preparation, you should always have a contingency slot. You’re not going to make any friends if you’re forced to use it, but it’s the elephant in the room should anything go wrong. Saying that, we’ve gone four years now without need of this contingency slot.
9. It will be hectic in the first 15 minutes.
   Ok, not a rule exactly, but a piece of advice. The first 15 minutes will go something like your worst ‘disaster recovery’ scenarios. You’ll get used to it. Honest.

So, yeah. That’s about 1,500 words on why online examinations need a level of quality assurance. It’s also my first work related post on my blog. So once I’m comfortable with this new format, expect some more offerings. I’m off now, as Cat #3 is mewing desperately and looking for a cuddle.

I may be missing the point completely… But it just appears to be that they’re using staff development via a VLE.

Aim: to capture case-based information about change:
Cases > Knowledgebase > ReferenceModel/Strategy

People store HE innovations in the knowledgebase, and allows others to search it.

Anyway, I don’t know if it was the extra bacon for breakfast, but I’m really not following this talk. Go to http://www.academicamour.com/ for more info.

Wiimote uses bluetooth. It also has infrared recognition, so it should be aware of its position in 3D space (although there are 3rd party add-ons which give the wiimote full 3D relational positioning via gyroscopes). This relies upon the handset determining its position in relation to a fixed light source.

However, you can do the reverse. You can fix the handset and move the ligthsource. The wiimote can track four lightsources by default, but can be modified to track more. You can fix the wiimote to a tripod, and move a lightsource which can be tracked (in this case the UoS guy has modified a Dr Who Sonic Screwdriver to use an infrared LED).

Using Wii mouse drivers you can treat an LED light source as a mouse. The lightsource is calibrated against the screen, then used as a traditional mouse. Although I’ve no idea how he’s hacked his Sonic Screwdriver to represent mouseclicks. Even a laserpointer can be used.

Interwrite Office Mode (?), a whiteboard application traditionally used with their handheld virtual whiteboard hardware, can be used with the wiimote setup to draw on the slides and save their contents. It even has basic text recognition.

Essentially any surface can emulate a interactive whiteboard.

Don’t work with childen, animals, whiteboard, or gaffa tape.

[Just did a quick Google, and mouse-clicks are emulated by the LED momentarily being turned off.]

Now that is cool. Nokia only though :(

Data is becoming cheaper. £100/Gb 5 years ago, to £5/Gb now. In non-3G areas, the phone will cache uploaded video and upload it once you are in a 3G location. Competitors include stickam (although this is webcam only).

Major question raised, what are the legal implication of doing this? Then again, people taking photos on Flickr can also be a breach of privacy. Students using Web2.0 technologies, may have their information exported to other countries, how does that fit in with the Data Protection Act? Do you have to have Terms and Conditions for taking a course, and do you have to allow students the option to ‘opt out’ of using Web2.0 technologies, is this discriminatory? My partner in this exercise has just shown me a very legal-ese looking document, which basically says “It’s up to the user to read the T&C’s for external sites”.

Anyway, on to potential benefits, uses, and legal pitfalls…

• All the legal pitfalls and concerns above have to be taken into account
• Very useful for media courses, or journalism courses

Note to self: Don’t video myself driving down the M5.

Jaiku is an alternative…

• No limit on characters
• More of a social networking site
• Can accept MMS as well as SMS
• Can follow/be followed in Jaiku
• Can link into Last.FM, etc
• Can syndicate feeds

Anyway, uses for e-learning?

• Instant feedback
• Syndicating feeds, giving people an idea of useful content
• Alternative to instant messaging? Especially across different campuses
• Useful for courses where short/concise messages are ideal. eg. Journalism, literature, etc.

Whoops, we just broke Jaiku!

• Using copyright free images in teaching (http://flickrcc.bluemountains.net)
• Media courses
• Building communities in a multi-campus universities
• Research (phone based pictures could be used for reasearch)
• Engineering, Architecture, Art, etc. courses. Especially with GPS tagging in phones
• Portfolios (Art, not CPD or PDP)*
• Portfolios (CPD, PDP)*

*Flickr’s access restrictions could come in useful for portfolio based work.

[flickr]tag:altc2008[/flickr]

Having seen seesmic, we’ve just been asked to think of examples where it could be useful.

So, here goes:

• Peer review
• Feedback
• Reflective diary/PDP
• Media courses (Journalism, fism making, etc.)
• Where an event may not be repeatable, due to environment, location, etc.
• Where face-to-face communication is important (Language, acting, etc).
• Research (eg, videoing locations, etc.)

This is really my first time in using a laptop ‘in anger’ whilst on the move. In the past I’ve normally carried the laptop to friends houses for the weekend, or off on conferences, but used it as a desktop replacement once there. Being able to type out this blog entry without the use of a thumb pad or stylus (as with my TyTn II) is a welcome break. Albeit a welcome break with my man-parts being slowly roasted.

I really should look at getting my own laptop, rather than steal my wife’s every time I leave the house.