unconference was unboring

lts2009

In a change to previous years, the learning and teaching in the sciences annual conference was organised as an unconference this year. It was an experiment and Stuart Johnson took his reputation in his hands to organise it. He needn’t have worried, we all managed to talk for two hours and eat the sandwiches, even though it was set up with only 10 days notice. We used a tag (#uollts) and several people from our various twitter networks joined in the discussion. We had twitterfall on the dataprojector and this did add to the discussion as well as providing a useful archive following the meeting (which I’m sure Alan or Stu will add to their blogs).

I thought we had a good discussion to say there were only around 20 people in the room and the very loose theme of ‘assessment’ to go at. I gave an impromptu demonstration of grademark (from Turnitin). I would have liked to hear more about the project in Geology experimenting with ‘keyboard’ examinations, so I am hoping that someone will capture a link for that and share it later.

This was my first experience of an unconference, and I rather liked it. When’s the next one Stuart?!

Yet another plagiarism project

Yesterday, at our Pedagogic Research Group meeting, we were delighted to welcome Janette Ryan as our guest speaker. She spoke to us about international students and changing learning contexts which was thought provoking and kept us talking for nearly two hours. One part of the discussion was around the myth that international students plagiarise at a higher rate than home students. This is perhaps now being borne out by a rise in complaints by international students to the OIA.

There is still a need for education of students and academics alike in the use and abuse of electronic detection and I am delighted to say that Jon Scott and I have been awarded some funding from the HEA for a synthesis on the evidence of the effectiveness, use and implementation of plagiarism detection by electronic means ‘Dealing with plagiarism in the digital age’. We will use citeulike to support the project by tagging the references we use in the synthesis (example using tag ‘plagiarism‘). The feed from this tag will be public and I am hoping that the plagiarism research community will join us and suggest and tag resources and papers too. The synthesis will become part of the HEA’s evidencenet.

Easy Peasy eeepc

credit: flickr nDevilTV

I do love my little eeepc (asus e701) and I’ve had it for almost a year now. I use it mostly in conference season, and as that is fast approaching I thought the eeepc deserved a little love and attention, so I have installed easy peasy 1.0 (ubuntu 8.01). Whilst it sits and upgrades to ubuntu 9.04 (anything from 3 hours 48 mins to 1 hr 52 mins remaining, your guess is as good as my wifi connection!) I have a few first impressions.

• the system makes lovely use of the limited screen real estate on little eeepc without looking teeny tiny. The layout is clear and (dare I say it) easy to navigate.
• joining our home wireless network took one click and a password.

I am hoping to get a dongle for mobile internet browsing to work with the eeepc so I am hoping I can it working with easy peasy (with a little help from Liam no doubt!).

Effective customer service via twitter?

credit:Paul Rj Muller "CaffiNation" flickr

As twitter becomes mainstream in terms of recognition by the great masses, it has inevitably become a target for marketeers and spammers alike. When I first started using twitter, one of the most impressive things about it was the real time responses you could receive to support your use of web 2 technologies. Tweet ‘why is adobe buzzword making all my fonts look wierd’ and within minutes you would get an @reply from adobe offering help. This intelligent use of searches on keywords by companies for support is a great use of twitter. It felt personal.

More recently this seems to have been superseded by a network response, for example I just tweeted about posting something to the wrong blog in wordpress and I got two @replies from people in my network followed by a retweet from the wordpress hash account (#wp). I wondered if companies have found this model unsustainable since the twitter user base has grown so rapidly in the last couple of months.

At the beginning of this academic year, we tried supporting undergraduate students on twitter. There was a handful of students who used twitter and joined in our conversation. It was manageable and I would like think we provided personal, meaningful responses. I wonder what will happen when the new academic year comes around? Will we be able to replicate this support system if every student is twittering? Would we want to? Just as I hate being followed by random people just because I used a particular keyword, will students resent being followed by university staff?