QR Codes in education: watch this space
A QR (quick response) code is a two dimensional bar code that can be read on a mobile device, such as a camera phone. Once the device decodes the information then it will enable an action to be undertaken. For instance, this might be accessing a web page, displaying text information or subscribing to an RSS feed. For the learner this offers significant potential as it connects the physical and electronic worlds.
There are several free generators on the web, I use Kaywa. And there are also several free readers available for a variety of mobile phones, currently I’m using i-nigma. Andy Ramsden (University of Bath) is currently undertaking a small piece of work for the JISC Users and Innovation programme to develop a ‘beginners guide’ to using QR codes in education. So watch this space, and we’ll post information when it’s available. If you are already using QR codes in education please post information in the comments box and we’ll try include your details in the guide.
In the meantime, there is a prize of a box of chocolates for the first (UK based) person to contact me and tell me what the QR code is below.
Reflecting on JIF08
This is a bit of an indulgence posting on my part, a few short reflections on the JISC Innovation Forum 2008. The sessions that I attended were excellent, and the diversity on show really made me think hard about what we do as the larger JISC Innovation Group. The really nice thing for me as a Programme Manager was meeting staff from the Users and Innovation projects and eliciting on the spot feedback from them. My favourite was:
“Lawrie, you should get the JISC to do this every six months or so and make it compulsory for all project staff”
My response then, as now, was thanks for the idea, we appreciate your feedback, but are you deliberately trying give us a nervous breakdown. I also hope that the person fills in the feedback form, because if they enjoyed it that much we need to know so we can plan and improve for the next time.
One of the most interesting themes that I picked up from the people I spoke to was the amount of sharing of information going on outside of sessions, and how they intended to take things forward once they left the event. Thinking this through I realised that even though we provide an online forum allowing collaboration in a virtual space, it is difficult to replace the kind of discussion that was occurring in face to face – obvious to some, but important to note. The impact of this on some projects is that they default to a silo position, even though we try and avoid that. This event, with its “wide open spaces” and active encouragement to talk, allows some synthesis from those silos that I hope my U&I projects will carry forward.
Finally, being male and over 35, I love gadgets – so my new gadget was the Flip Video camera. Almost instant boot up and 60 minutes of video – I ran it for the two days capturing 49 videos and never ran out of power. Some of the reflections available include Simon, Mark, Robert and also we have Sarah and Bob talking about their projects.
Guardian Article
There’s a great article in today’s Guardian “Tracking technology in the corridors of learning“, it reports on the use of RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) antennas and tags at the University of Washington’s computer science department. Rather than the Orwellian overtones you might expect, where the ‘evil overseers’ monitor our every move, the system is open to all and everyone can see where you are. It also uses Google Calendar and a Twitter Gadget to update information.
Eliciting Answers using web 2.0 tools.
Linked-In is a tool for maintaining and developing contacts – one of the features is the ability to ask questions of your network of contacts and the ‘public visibility’ of these questions.
I thought it might be interesting to pose a question around web 2.0 and then see what sort of answers we got back.
The Question: Does Web 2.0 facilitate connectivism, circumvent constructivism, or just pollute the knowledge stream with contradictory chatter?
In one week I received 8 ‘public’ responses and 2 private responses. The private ones were from contacts that aren’t involved in this sector, and know me from separate routes - both of them questioned my sobriety at the time of posting the question!
The answers to the question are all below, so now it’s over to you, do they answer usefully? Is it a tool, when used with trusted colleagues, that could help us in our practice?
Jose Roig
Web 2.0 does all of the above… which is kind of a cop-out for an answer. I blogged last week (http://tech-consulting.blogspot.com/) about how some of its functionality has great potential for corporate use. Wiki’s and Blogs are great tools for collaboration and for the publishing/sharing of documentation. Coupled with instant messaging, such tools are transforming the way that geographically dispersed teams work together.
In the public arena, Blogs give everyone a forum for free expression, which carries with it the risk that only the most shocking and confrontational viewpoints get noticed. It also carries the risk of doing nothing but turning up the volume on the noise and clutter. But I believe the potential reward of knowledge sharing is worth the risk.
Marc Aniballi
Web 2.0 connects databases to web interfaces so that you can do custom content generation and personalisation. This includes (obviously) user generated content.
Put any group of 10 people in a room and you’ll get all of your situations above. Online just happens bigger and faster.
David Kernohan
Web 2.0 is a resource like any other, and can be used to facilitate learning based on any theory of pedagogy you fancy. It’s like asking whether a textbook facilitates connectivism, circumvents constructivism…
Just because it is interactive doesn’t mean it is not a learning resource. It’s what you do with it that counts…
Malcolm Murray
I agree with the concept that there isn’t a one to one mapping between any technology and pedagogy - i.e. using Web 2.0 doesn’t make, nor require you to be connectivist.
That said, I think some of the tools really help, if we take connectivism to mean the ability to stay in touch with and lever the collective intelligence of a network of contacts and indeed their network of contacts.
The key issue for me is one of credibility/quality. How does a user know that the information they find is any good. Some of the newer web 2.0 tools (such as this discussion) help by providing information and context about the posters. For other older tools (e.g. wikipedia) although content may be subject to peer review, much of it is not directly (read easily) attributable.
Does this matter? Yes I think it does! Whilst “pollution” may be too strong a term - and I can see the massed ranks of social scientists just waiting to analyse the cultural loading this term implies) the problem for many today can be summed up as “there a shit load of material out there, but loads of it is shit”. To succeed we still need to be selective. That’s where the networking aspect comes in - it gives us help filtering out the dross.
Bruce Mason
I would say that this question veers towards technological determinism. I suspect that a couple of thousand years ago there may have been similar questions about this new-fangled writing business. That’s a somewhat flip response but it gets at the point that these new resources are useful in as much as we make use of them.
I do think that we’re having to acquire competence in web2.0 usage and that also includes those who design SNS sites. For example, I was on the verge of quitting Facebook until, one day, I noticed a little “block this application” link beneath all my notifcations. Now Facebook is positive for me again. Those who run Facebook responded to an emergent phenomenon and the site has been improved.
So, I think what is happening is that we’re acquiring competence in the emergent, communicational affordances of web2.0. Give it a few years and we’ll wonder what all the fuss was about…
James Farnhill
I think my natural first response was that you’ve got to understand the terms before you can couch an answer to this at all. Web 2.0 means very different things to very different people and can be more confusing than it is helpful. Having said that, I’d agree with the other posters that if you’re using social networking tools like Facebook and LinkedIn (and even stuff like Flickr, that might not seem like an obvious choice) and other Web 2.0 ‘most wanted’ apps such as blogs and wikis sensibly then there is a considerable amount of benefit from them. It’s just that some people are using Web 2.0 because it’s there and because it’s a bandwagon, meaning a large volume of rubbish gets generated that doesn’t help connect people or do anything else; for example, I’m getting to the stage where Twitter and tweets are really annoying me as they’re used as buzz words by Nathan Barley noo media types who only use it because it’s ‘cool’! So, I think for the future we need to have Web 2.0 to generate content but we also need Web 2.0 tools and technologies such as some of the stuff being done with Google maps and AJAX to bring the content together in a meaningful way. We can also use text mining tools and some of the more sophisticated tagging to start getting data about data and get some provenance in there. All that’s doing is what any arts and social sciences student could tell you they’ve been doing for ages, which is quality assuring the data they trust by review, meaning large amounts of seemingly contradictory opinions can be distilled into material that makes sense for you. Hope that hasn’t turned into too much of a ramble…
Tony Linde
To me (and I agree that it means different things to different people) Web 2.0 means three things: 1) the ability for users to add content to a website; 2) the use of AJAX to make pages more dynamic; and 3) the exposure of a site’s content via one or more APIs. All of these things existed before the Web 2.0 term but the explosion of websites with all three features did mark a significant shift in the web experience.
It is primarily #3 above which helps ‘facilitate connectivism’: our own experiences, exposed via #1 above are connected by #3 and by the internal workings of the website. Seeing these connections would, I would have thought, aid constructivism rather than circumvent it, in that only simple connections will be forged by data and software: the user of the sites ought to be able to construct knowledge upon a wider base using the connections supplied (needs research though).
The knowledge stream will only ’seem’ polluted by those students who are not able to critically assess what they see. Critical reasoning ought to be the first skill any student is imbued with, from primary school onwards.
Mark Childs
I’m currently conducting a research project (funded by the wonderful people at JISC actually - http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning_pedagogy/elp_blups.aspx) looking at how students use web 2 technologies and whether this has any effect on their learning. The answer is that, yes it does. Because students are more connected now, this gives them more opportunities to share ideas, help each other with their learning and (often underestimated in its importance) exchange information about the course and university procedures. This is sometimes due to them setting up specific groups within Facebook, for example, but it’s mainly because they are communicating so much using web 2.0 tools for social reasons, and it’s natural for them to segue from talking about meeting up to go down the pub to talking about the latest assignment.
Digital footprints
Dotsam. Defined as:
The wasteland of abandoned Web sites, Hotmail accounts, blogs, wikis, MySpace pages, etc., that their creators have ignored for months or years but which remain accessible. The word was coined in imitation of flotsam and jetsam; “flotsam” refers to goods that float in the water without having been thrown there, as after a shipwreck, while “jetsam” has been cast into the sea–jettisoned–usually to lighten a ship’s cargo in an emergency.
I did a quick check on myself and the oldest page I found was from 1997, a learning and teaching resource that shall remain nameless and is also defunct. Not a calamity and certainly nothing I wish I hadn’t written. When I wrote the material back in 97 the ability to publish to the net was not, arguably, easily available to everyone, certainly in universities. I remember filling out forms and visiting the faculty webmaster – “please Neil can I have some space?” the response was less than enthusiastic, and support whilst not grudgingly given was certainly given by someone whose primary concern was that I don’t do anything that will break the server (some mystical thingy which appeared to be something that sat under his desk!). The first webpage I loaded onto the server contained 4 images – each of which had been scanned from 10×8 photos at 600 dpi – the page took a while to load, in fact I think the phone call from the webmaster came through before the page did.
Today anyone can go online sign up for a dozen different tools to publish material online and be ‘live’ in minutes, and so the dotsam grows. Whereas you might have a vague sense of what you have written over the last 10 years, the dotsam created ‘about’ you by other people presents a completely different kind of problem.
Recently The Guardian published a reasonably balanced story about social networking in education. I and two colleagues, Sarah Knight and Philip Pothen, were quoted in it. Whilst looking for personal dotsam for this posting (or at least what I was going to post about) I found another story that quoted me “UK Universities brings web2.0 tools in education”. This piece was a rewrite of The Guardian article, in it they quote me:
Lawrie Phipps, JISC project Manager stated that universities can use web2.0 more sensibly in education. Social -networking sites allows students to create their own groups and academic communities in areas like bio-medicine.
No he didn’t! At least I was fairly sure he didn’t - so I checked in the original. The original quote is:
“We found social networking and instant messaging being used to support researchers working off-campus,” says Jisc’s e-learning programme manager, Sarah Knight. “Social networking was allowing students and researchers to create their own interest groups and academic communities in areas like bio-medicine.”
This is a fairly harmless misrepresentation, at least I think so, Sarah may feel differently. At least in this case Sarah and I were both saying similar things in the article. But what if we had been diametrically opposed and something that was said by one was attributed to the other?
With blogging, and the ability to instantly publish and cross refer works so easily on the net, this kind of incident will no doubt continue to occur. And it is not only things that you deliberately state online, I don’t think I’ve been to an event this year where there isn’t at least one person blogging what is being said by the speaker! A recent workshop I gave at a university was blogged by two delegates and their blogs referred to in a blog of someone who wasn’t actually there – the information was harmless, but the potential for the information to be misreported becomes greater the further from the original it travels.
Instant publishing might be a great idea enabling a lot of people to post thought provoking and interesting material and enabling a debate to be had. But we must be careful about who is saying what and how what we say is being used, The Guardian article mentioned earlier is a good example, several bloggers have used a headline quote from that article:
Lawrie Phipps, explains how the battle lines are being drawn: “Students really do want to keep their lives separate. They don’t want to be always available to their lecturers or bombarded with academic information.”
But they don’t use the line that I said directly afterwards to the reporter (and which admittedly is two further paragraphs away in the report).
“They appear to want to keep their online persona private but when you ask them whether they’d like instant communication with tutors or feedback on essays (via Skype or Facebook) the answer is always yes.”
The price of instant publishing for anyone that may be cited or quoted is constant vigilance!
What’s on your business card?
A colleague from a library in the North East sent me a PDF of his new business card this week. It looked for all intents and purposes like a traditional business card but I noticed that other than just the institution’s website, his email and directline, there were two additions. These included his MSN messenger address and his Skype details. This is a major change for his institution’s Corporate Communications Unit.
The business card is in many ways a physical representation of interoperability. They are normally the same or similar size and carry standard information. The modern business card has its roots in the visiting cards of 17th Century France, presented to servants as a means of introducing visitors, when it would contain at the minimum a name, title and where appropriate a coat of arms or crest. In the 19th Century they were adapted for business use, where a visiting card may have been presented when making a social call, a business card would state what business you were in and the address as a way of saying you had called and expected a bill to be settled. This practice of having a card to represent you in your business became what we now have, an effective means of exchanging simple information about each other’s roles and how to keep in touch. This 19th Century method remained largely unchanged until the advent of the telephone, whereupon the telephone number was also added, in the 80s a fax number, and in the 90s we saw the widespread addition of e-mail being added and the business’ website address.
Perhaps then the business card can be seen as a way of measuring the spread of communication technologies. This year I have attended several conferences, and as always at these things you end up with a fistful of business cards: mine are filed in a large pile on my desk. When my colleague sent me his PDF it prompted me to pick up the pile and see what other information was being added to the cards (disclaimer: this is in no way scientific!)
Out of the 157 cards that I’ve collected (in 18months or so)
- All bar 1 had name, title/role, address (mainly HEIs), telephone and email.
- 93 had a Fax number (59%)
- 81 had a personal/project website (52%)
- 31 had a blog address (20%)
- 24 had a MSN messenger or other IM address (15%)
- 7 had a skype address (4%)
- 1 had a LinkedIn public profile address (had no physical address)
What does this all tell us? Probably not a lot, at the positive end of the spectrum (from my perspective) I wonder if it says we are deviating from the norm and there is acceptance that ‘users’ are taking control of the way in which they are contacted. I also wonder how the demographic changes depending on which conferences you go to, and how it will change over the next 18 months.
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Lawrie is available through Skype
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