Rip Mix Learners (RMLers) celebrates achievement in learning
Tue, 25 Nov 2008 13:04:44 +0200

On October 16th, a function was held at UWC to celebrate the conclusion of the first phase of the Rip Mix Learners project. According to Philipp Schmidt of ICS, who initiated the project, it was moving to see the excitement and enthusiasm of all the students who had worked so hard during the past year. The project was run by Nondumiso Sinyenyeko-Sayo,  who has just left UWC to join the University of Johannesburg.

The concept of rip, mix and learn originates from the popular youth music culture of ripping, mixing and burning music, and was at one time used by Apple in an advertising campaign for the iPod.  Apple withdrew the campaign because it was being associated with the negative connotations of copyright infringements. Ripping entails copying bits and pieces  from various songs (called samples or sampling) and remixing them with others to create a new song. Rip, mix and learn looks at the possibilities of how these concepts can be applied in the educational arena.

Rip Mix Learners is a student-run Free and Open Courseware project that is aligned to UWC's free and Open Courseware Strategy. Students make audio recordings of lectures, and compile class notes with other materials and share them with their peers online. The site is publicly accessible, but the main audience of the project is the students themselves.

The project has been running on a shoe-string budget for the last year, with a little support from the German GTZ to purchase audio recorders for the students, and a bit of staff time paid for by the Shuttleworth Foundation.

“After listening to the students share their stories yesterday, I must say, our smallest project turned out to be the most inspiring one,” said Schmidt.

The project has also had some unintended positive consequences. “When a lecturer spilt coffee over his computer and lost all of his data, the students provide him with a backup of his lecture notes, which they had stored online. I can just imagine how the students loved it,” said Philipp Schmidt in his blog.

The RipMixLearners of 2008 were successful in the gathering (ripping) of content resources and aggregating them on the Freecourseware site.  The group of 12 students performed some of the following activities:

 

• scanning of documents into PDF format
• audio recording of classroom lectures
• editing of audio-recordings using audacity
• gathering of old exam papers
• uploading of class-notes
• taking of pictures
• digital storytelling
• videocamera work

For two of them, the latter also involved a trip to Johannesburg to webcast an international conference live over the Internet. Technical support for these activities was provided by the eLearning’s Digital Media unit and Igor Lesko, all of ICS.

The project will continue in 2009, continuing the exciting work that students began during 2008 with the view of extending the ripping of content into mixing thereby holding the potential of creating new knowledge. In order to provide better support for the students activities it was decided to move the site to the new KEWL3 based eLearning site. The existing site will be phased out while content will be migrated to their new home. All Digital Media student assistants will be required to be ripmixlearners and recruitment for the 2009 phase commenced during the final week of October, and training and mentoring will be project-based

RMLers from Phase 1, who continues during 2009, will assist in the mentoring and training of the newcomers. All new RMLers will have to identify a class/es or lecturer/s which they will focus on gathering information for. Permission to do so will have to be negotiated with lecturers with the support of the eLearning Division.

For more information or technical support on RipMixLearn and podcasting projects, contact the DMS team by email  at dms@uwc.ac.za  or call ext 2676 and ask for Bradley Knight or Andre Daniels. For information on any other eLearning projects please call ext 3200.

Podcasting in eLearning at UWC
Mon, 24 Nov 2008 13:01:18 +0200

Podcasting is a Web 2.0 technology that enables audio (and in some cases video) files to be posted online in a way that they can be subscribed to and automatically loaded to devices such as MP3 players and cellphones. You can think of it as an audio recording that is uploaded to the internet for people to listen to at their convenience.

Podcasts can be a valuable eLearning tool at UWC because they are easy to make, both the old and new versions of our eLearning platform support their use and distribution, and many of our students already possess devices capable of playing podcast MP3 audio files. Several projects are currently underway at UWC to use podcasting to enhance teaching-and-learning. In this article, we look at the nursing podcast project.

Nursing Podcast Project

In April 2008, Lorraine Fakude, a lecturer from the Nursing Department and a group of 90 second year nursing students were selected to participate in an eLearning Podcast Project. The  pilot served two purposes, one instructivist in focus and the other more constructivist. Both approaches have their uses. In the first case, there was a desire to explore the pedagogical value of having lecturers record aspects of their course for students to access afterwards for repeat revision and exam preparation purposes. In the second case, students constructed and submitted podcast assignments, which lecturers would then assess, to determine their “nurse-to-patient” interviewing skills and level of participation in group activities.

After many planning meetings, six nursing lecturers were trained in the use of the Free Software audio editing software,  Audacity, which was then used for recording and editing the podcast files. These training sessions were conducted in the Nursing Computer Lab, and taken at the lecturers’ pace, until they became comfortable with the technology.

Once trained in using this tool, lecturers were encouraged to create their own audio recordings (lectures, announcements, exam tips), in so doing modeling the behavior expected from the students in their podcast assignments. These podcasts were then uploaded to the Learning Management System, where students could access them at any time or place they had a connection, or synchronize them to their players.

The Nursing students also underwent Audacity software training in the BoE Lab and Nursing Lab, and were also issued with MP3 players that have recording capability on loan from the University, which they used for recording interviews on location. Once trained in how to record and edit their interviews, they were shown how to upload their podcast interview to the eLearning platform, where the lecturer would then access and download the content for assessment purposes.

The Nursing students were very keen throughout the process, and were enthused at the prospect of learning how to use these new technologies, even though many only had basic computer knowledge. We also supplemented their training with “take home” CD-ROMs, which contained manuals, presentations and simulations of all their training, and the eLearning team was available for post-training support.

Lecturers were now placed in a position to get a far more accurate reflection of the students’ interviewing skills, by listening to the audio recordings prepared by the students. This was also supplemented with conventional documentation, as the eLearning team supports a blended learning approach.

Once the pilot is complete, the eLearning and Nursing team will conduct research, and share the findings, so watch this space for further information later! The Nursing Department were the ideal participant for this project, which can now be scaled up and used by other departments. This is just one way in which the eLearning Development and Support Unit of ICS are exploring the academic advantages of harnessing this technology to compliment teaching-and-learning at UWC.

 

The UWC Portal project
Wed, 19 Nov 2008 13:45:06 +0200

When UWC decided to create an easy to maintain website, a university portal, it formed a team from the Office of Development and Public Affairs and Information(ODPA) and Information and Communication Services (ICS) to deliver a solution that would consolidate information contributed by multiple departments into a single point of access. The portal enables faculties, units and centres to use a convenient intentions-based approach to accessing pages of unique online content.

Business Challenge

Developing a university Portal enables various departments to manage and maintain their own content. The university wishes to consolidate information contributed by all departments into one single point of access and also enable these departments to manage their own content, a move that will save on costs and create a more streamlined and efficient electronic presence—and help significantly improve its delivery of services and information to students (prospective and current), alumni and the community at large.

To bring this vision to life, the Information and Communication Services (ICS) utilised the Chisimba framework to build the content management system. Working with ICS’s Project Office —and in a matter of months—ICS helped to deliver the UWC Portal that now enables the departments to manage and maintain their own content. The Project team’s hard work enabled the quick delivery. Now, via a single gateway (www.uwc.ac.za), departments, centres and schools are able to manage their content online.

Portal Team

The Portal Team has been formed to co-ordinate and support the departments in maintaining their content online. The Portal Team is formed by various departments’ content authors and co-ordinated by the Portal Manager. The Portal Team will provide the following services:

Content Management
Now departments can appoint Content Authors to join the Portal Team and manage the departmental websites

Design and development
Any department can now  be easily assisted in designing a website if it does not exist

Training
Content Authors can easily be trained to manage their own content

Technical Support
Technical support is available to provide support for any system related problems

Support
Each department is supposed to have a Content author who will provide support when the need arises.

High Performance Delivered

Launched in May this year http://www.uwc.ac.za  enables UWC departments to manage their own content. Currently a number of faculties through their content authors are in the process of improving the quality of their own content. This process has proven to be very convenient for the departments who have fully moved into their new virtual home.

Next steps

The next steps are to continue building the content, as well as to implement some new technologies in the portal itself. Chief among these is what is often referred to friendly URL mapping, which will allow us to get rid of long, ugly URLs in our sites. The project will continue in 2009, and will deliver a personalised portal that individuals can customize to meet their own requirements, as well as integrate with other services within the campus, such as the new student administration applications.

Engaging the project

To engage with the portal project, please contact the ICS Service Desk, servicedesk@uwc.ac.za or dial x2000.
 

Chisimba
Fri, 12 Sep 2008 11:08:32 +0200

Pictures from our visit to Open Source Lab at OSU
Mon, 21 Jul 2008 00:55:51 +0200

Just before OSCON2008, six of use went to Oregon State University to visit the Open Source Lab. Present were Derek Keats, Madiny Darries, Anver Natha, Ernie Smart, Paul Scott and David Wafula. Here are some pictures from Flickr that are tagged with this visit.

Good to Great: refocusing ICS
Wed, 28 May 2008 22:42:06 +0200

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't is a management book by James C. Collins that aims to describe how companies transition from being average companies to great companies and how companies can fail to make the transition.

"Greatness" is defined as financial performance several multiples better than the market average over a sustained period of time. Collins finds the main factor for achieving the transition to be a narrow focusing of the company’s resources on their field of competence. This is the hedgehog concept, which can also be applied to the social sector - as he inticated in his second book - including higher education.

I have been using it to try to focus energies on redesigning  Information and Communication Services, to get over a slight backward slip of the past year or so, and reposition us on a path to great for the next 5 years. Below is the presentation I used today with all staff members. There is also a podcast of the talk available via the podcast module.

Text adapted from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_to_great
Buy the books from Amazon:

The second one, on the social sector, is the one most relevant to higher education, but ideally they should be treated as a companion set.

Assessment 2.0: how do you assess eLearning 2.0?
Sun, 18 May 2008 21:12:53 +0200

I have always been passionate about formative assessment. In education 1.0, summative assessment is the predominate approach, and end of X exams are commonplace, where X is course, term, semester, or year. As we enter the exam period at UWC, it seems appropriate to reflect on assessment. Of course, I have a beef with exams because I do not believe that they serve any useful purpose, though they do give the illusion of doing so. This iPaper on scribd.com is an interesting take on assessment, so I thought it appropriate to make it available here, as we go into our very extensive exam period.

Proposal with respect to CSS and Javascript
Fri, 02 May 2008 11:19:22 +0200

Now that I have to pay for hosting, I am looking at performance with a
closer eye. If you have not done so, install the Yslow firefox plugin
and look at some of our sites.

One issue that has concerned me is including the same file more than
once. This happens when we add header scripts and CSS.

Yahoo has this to say:

It hurts performance to include the same JavaScript file twice
in one page. This isn't as unusual as you might think. A review
of the ten top U.S. web sites shows that two of them contain a
duplicated script. Two main factors increase the odds of a
script being duplicated in a single web page: team size and
number of scripts. When it does happen, duplicate scripts hurt
performance by creating unnecessary HTTP requests and wasted
JavaScript execution.

Unnecessary HTTP requests happen in Internet Explorer, but not
in Firefox. In Internet Explorer, if an external script is
included twice and is not cacheable, it generates two HTTP
requests during page loading. Even if the script is cacheable,
extra HTTP requests occur when the user reloads the page.

In addition to generating wasteful HTTP requests, time is wasted
evaluating the script multiple times. This redundant JavaScript
execution happens in both Firefox and Internet Explorer,
regardless of whether the script is cacheable.

One way to avoid accidentally including the same script twice is
to implement a script management module in your templating
system. The typical way to include a script is to use the SCRIPT
tag in your HTML page.

<script type="text/javascript" src="menu_1.0.17.js"></script>

An alternative in PHP would be to create a function called
insertScript.

<?php insertScript("menu.js") ?>

In addition to preventing the same script from being inserted
multiple times, this function could handle other issues with
scripts, such as dependency checking and adding version numbers
to script filenames to support far future Expires headers.

Can we add the capability to the addHeader to detect whether the same
file is being loaded once and only then render the header output.

This could be done as follows:

add the header gooddies to an array, and then remove duplicates, sort by
file extension to separate the CSS and then render the output.

Thoughts? d

Personal learning widgets
Mon, 28 Apr 2008 10:16:08 +0200

As I showed in yesterday's post, a web widget is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML-based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation. They are derived from the idea of code reuse. Other terms used to describe web widgets including: gadget, badge, module, capsule, snippet, mini and flake. Web widgets often but not always use DHTML, JavaScript, or Adobe Flash.

Security considerations

As any program code, widgets can be used for malicious purposes. One example is the Facebook “Secret Crush” widget, discovered in early 2008 by Fortinet as luring users to install Zango malware ...more on Wikipedia.

Personal learning widgets

To demonstrate the potential of web widgets to contribute in the area of personal learning environments, I have included below, three word of the day widgets.

 

 

Of course I would have included African language widgets if I had found any. Maybe this is a good student project for some of our language students within the Arts faculty. 

These widgets are from Widgetbox, which is found at
http://www.widgetbox.com

HIV/AIDS quiz - some scary information
Sun, 27 Apr 2008 22:17:51 +0200

Widgets are all the rage these days. A number of sites offer widgets that can be used on blogs or in content pages. Some have learning potential. Spring widgets is one site that have some useful ones, although most are utterly without value at all. This one on HIV/AIDS makes a useful learning tool, so I am including it here as a demonstration of the Widget concept.

 

How to do it:

Go to the site offering the widget, and customize it as you like. Most sites offer blog specific code, or plain HTML. Grab the HTML, normally by copying it from the site, and then come to your Chisimba site and create a page. Type some text if you want, and then click Source on the WYSWYG editor. In source view, paste the code from the widget site in, and then click save. If you do further edits in WYSWYG mode, make sure you do not accidentally delete the widget.

Thats all there is to  it. Spring widgets are located at
http://www.springwidgets.com/