By Kevin Thompson (UltraLab / UltraVersity)

SUMMARY: A brief description of the UltraVersity project and a discussion of new collaborative technologies, focussing mainly on websites with a strong collaborative theme.

PROBLEMS:
Conflict between old and new ways of teaching & learning:

• “Solo” examinations vs. collaborative working
• Taught vs. self-taught
• Passive learning vs. Active learning
• Dissemination vs. Communication

What is required in the modern workplace?

ULTRAVERSITY:

• Degrees delivered entirely online
• Students all in full- or part-time employment
• Students geographically spread and don’t meet in person until graduation
• 140 Graduates this year

FOUR C’s OF SOCIAL TOOLS:

• Communication: email / instant messaging / voice over IP
• Coordination: shared calendaring / contacts
• Collaboration: files / wikis / blogs / writely.com
• Community: social networks / group decisions

COLLABORATIVE / COMMUNITY WEBSITES:

• Encyclopaedia: Wikipedia
• Video: YouTube, Google Video
• Art: Artpad.art.com
• Photographs: Flickr
• Music: Pandora, Blogmusik
• Bookmarks: Furl, Del.icio.us
• Documents: Writely (aka Google Docs&Spreadsheets), Writeboard
• Maps: Frappr

KEY POINTS:

• Learners can contribute to the learning process by communication with both teachers and other learners
• Online communities can work, but require some facilitation
• Wider participation does not mean watered-down teaching

LINKS/FILES/CONTACTS:

http://www.ultraversity.net
http://www.ultralab.net
Kevin Thompson Powerpoint NWETS 06 (Powerpoint from seminar)
ltscotland-sett2006-D1C.mp3 (Audio recording of earlier seminar)
kevin can be emailed at ultralab net

Take a look at these screenshots of GeoGebra. Now visit the GeoGebra WebStart page and click on the button (proper Java required). Amazingly this amazing piece of dynamic geometry software is not only free, but also runs without an installer, even under a standard user account. It will (optionally) create shortcuts and file associations for the pupil too. I’ve seen Java WebStart before and thought it was pretty nifty, but to be honest I’ve never really seen any truly worthwhile uses of it until now.

But that’s not all! You can even create web pages with your saved GeoGebra files preloaded into them (as in this GeoGebra example) – fully interactive worksheets with very little effort. There are more sites full of examples around the web, including these:

SLU.edu GeoGebra Applets (hard maths!)

Henrico County GeoGebra Applets (easy maths!)

For a school that has struggled through with Omnigraph for years and (I gather) tried some of the more expensive commercial oferings without luck, this is a real revelation. The large buttons make me think this could be a good tool for use on interactive whiteboards too.

Caveats & fixes

Unfortunately at the time of writing the author’s security certificate has expired. Depending on your settings this may cause some problems with the initial setup. Under Windows with Internet Explorer, try clicking OK to problems with the certificate. If you aren’t even given that option, put www.geogebra.at into your trusted sites list in IE, clear your cache and restart IE. As a network admin, you can add it to trusted sites for all or part of your domain via a GPO.

Within secondary education I can’t see that people would want to use it internally if they already have in-house shared calendaring (from Outlook etc). For external use it would be nice to publish a calendar with the dates of term and significant events such as school trips, shows and even exams so that parents can subscribe and stay
informed. Primaries may want to use it for their internal calendaring needs if they aren’t provided with a (suitable) solution by their LEA.

Nice features:

• Selective sharing with other Google Calendar users – Add people you know (based on their email address) to view/change/manage individual calendars or just see your free/busy status. If they don’t have a Calendar account, it offers to send an invite. I found it a tad unnerving that I could add a gmail address and it would happily give me the user’s real name even before they’d accepted.
• Search public calendars – Search within the text of calendars published on Google, the Apple calendar site (ical.mac.com) and elsewhere on the web. You can also make your calendars public and searchable. There had to be a search element somewhere, right?
• Quick add – Click the quick add link and type “Boozing on Friday” and it’ll stick an event in your default calendar next Friday. Even smarter though, I tested it with “Boozing on Friday at noon” and it scheduled an event from midday to 1pm. Even more than that, “Boozing on Friday at noon at the Kings Arms” will put in an item as before, but also fill in the location field AND link to a maps.google.com map of places called “The Kings Arms” near me. Stunning.

Things needing polish:

• SMS Notifications – US Only?! Come on Google, you have sms.google.co.uk and that works fine. When this comes for us Brits it’ll be pretty handy (not sure if it’ll cost anything though)
• Printable Calendars – The print-friendly function is a nice feature, but it sometimes produces really badly formatted calendars, particularly in “month view”, because the number of weeks being printed out isn’t a constant.
• Event Reminder Buttons – There are detailed instructions on producing reminder buttons for your website/blog, but they require manual assembly of a nasty URL string. Surely it would take a Google employee about 20 minutes to make a form that generates the HTML snippet. The form could handle validation/escaping for disallowed characters as well, which Google currently provide a (not so) handy lookup table for. Fixed! Thanks Google!
• Importing Calendars – Calendars can be imported in ical/vcal format from Outlook or iCal which is a nice feature. It seems that Google are explicitly allowing only those two programs at the moment. I tried importing a calendar file from Mozilla Sunbird and it failed first time:
  Failed to import events:
Failed to upload ical/csv file

  When I changed the code for the software that generated it from:-//Mozilla.org/NONSGML Mozilla Calendar V1.0//EN

  to-//Apple Computer\, Inc//iCal 2.0//EN 

  it worked flawlessly. Result!

My wishlist:

• User Groups – I’d like to be able to give access to view a calendar to a predefined list of people rather than adding each one individually to each calendar. Google does speed the process up a touch by remembering addresses you’ve used before and prompting as-you-type.
• Quickly Select Weeks – In the mini calendar that lets you jump to a date, you can quickly pick a month view (click “April 2006″) or a day view (click “14″), but they haven’t provided a way to get to the week view. In another calendar app (possibly Outlook Web Access, I forget) this can be done by clicking slightly to the left of that week’s row. OK, so maybe this was too obvious! You can click and drag a range of dates in the mini-calendar to display that range in the main view. The range can be 1-7 days or multiples of 7 days – awesome work Google!

Tips:

• Default Calendar – If you need to enter a lot of information into a particular calendar quickly, click the down-arrow next to it and choose “Display only this Calendar”. Any new items you create will be added to that calendar unless you select a different one.
• Quickly creating events – As well as the “Quick add” features above, you can drag an area in the main calendar view to create an event to fill the time slot. That feature alone takes all the donkey work out of manually entering the durations of meetings etc.
• Better locations – This is more of a Google Maps tip, but if you put your locations in with the format:
  postcode (Name of Venue) e.g. SW1A 0AA (Houses of Parliament)
  the Google Maps link will accurately point to your location rather than guessing and it’ll have the text in brackets as the title of its marker.
• Learn from others – Check out what other people are doing with Google Calendar on Flickr.

As I’ve read in a few places around the web, it’s important to get to grips with which sorts of activites work well on an IWB and focus on those. The not-at-all-advertised Teacher Resource Exchange allows you to search for interactive whiteboard resources, but unfortunately it seems that a lot of the uploaders tag their resources as useful for IWBs when clearly they aren’t. I’m not sure how long that site will be available, as it’s part of the Virtual Teacher Centre (in turn part of the NGfL), which is due to close on 19 December 2005. As BECTA are involved, I’m not anticipating good things.

On a related note, there’s a new Australian Blog about the use of IWB’s in education: ActivBoarding. They’re using six (I think?) Promethean ActivBoards with ActivStudio. It looks like a good place to watch for a fresh perspective (most of the stuff I’ve seen is very UK-oriented) and interesting resources. It’s a shame there’s not an open/common format between the whiteboard programs (particularly between Smart, ActivStudio1 and Activstudio2) as being able to share flipcharts etc seems to be one of the key benefits of the IWB experience. We’re firmly in the Promethean camp at school, so I’ll be passing these links on to those that can’t when I return to work on Monday.

Still not sated?: There are more resources for Promethean ActivStudio users in the Promethean resource directory and at the Lighthouse for Education.

[via IWB-EFL, Teaching Generation Z]

Image search is one example of a problem area. Google images is pretty good, but it’s far from flawless:

• As people have pointed out their results tend to be badly out of date, leading to dozens of dead links. I first noticed this when knocking together a web app to return google image results in date order (using the EXIF info in the thumbnail) – the most recent results were over 6 months old! I had been told that this was because spammers were cunningly using google to host images for their spam emails by letting google index them then linking to the preview thumbnails. Grr. (That explanation hasn’t been verified btw)
• Many sites don’t want their images to be indexed by google. Perhaps they have their own, better way of indexing the images. Sometimes the image site is owned by the competition. Either way, the results from some important sites don’t show up.
• You don’t know the copyright/licensing status of images unless you trawl through each of your results manually, one-by-one looking for the relevant information.

In this case, pupils and teachers would be far better served by casting their net wider than the reflex google image search. Having a good jumping off point in each area is important – in this case Wikipedia has an awesome page of Public Domain image resources. Mentioned on that page is flickr. Despite being bought by yahoo! recently, it’s still difficult to find fault with the site. Tucked away on flickr is a really useful page which lets you search for images with specific Creative Commons licenses. Although people often ignore the copyright on images when putting together intranets etc. it’s good to know that it’s easy to do it the right way.

A similar method can be applied in other areas – you wouldn’t google for the precise wording of a debate in Parliament, you’d use the Hansard search page. The same applies for many specialist subjects (medicine, technology etc.), or does it?