COVID-19 and the subsequent #pivotonline has higher education paying a lot more attention to the use of digital and online technology for learning and teaching (digital education). COVID-19 has made digital education necessary. COVID-19 has made any form of education – and just about anything else – more difficult. For everyone. COVID-19 and it’s impact is rewriting what higher education […]
Understanding (digital) education through workarounds and quality indicators
What are the impediments to quality teaching and what can be done to remove them?
This is something I wrote in a protected post years ago. I want to get this bit out in the open. It captures an important distinction about Quality Assurance from John Biggs and asks a question (the title of this post) that I’ve yet to see an institution address effectively. Lots of big projects and events paying lip service, but […]
Improving jQuery theme/Content Interface integration
The Problem One of the benefits of using jQuery as the initial framework for the Content Interface is that you can leverage the existing ecosystem. e.g. jQuery’s themes enable a default Content Interface (on the left) to be “themed” (on the right) by changing a single line of CSS. The problem is visually obvious in the above. The Reviewed and […]
Learning to think in React
As outlined previously I’m taking some steps toward learning and using the React Javascript library to develop some web interfaces/applications. The following documents progress toward writing that first application, which is largely confined to develop an initial mock-up and then learning more about the “React way”. Developing a mock-up The React site provides an introduction the main concepts of React. […]
Playing with React.js as a technology for CASA
Can React.js help extend CASA support for forward-oriented design? As the title suggests the aim here is to discover if the React.js library for building web (and other) user interfaces might help address some limitations and add some needed features to the Contextually-Appropriate Scaffolding Assemblage (CASA) idea (Jones, 2019). I’m going to be spending a fair bit of time on […]
Exploring auto-coding with NVivo
The challenge here is learn more about using NVivo in order to design processes for a research project exploring the prevalence and nature workarounds in higher education learning and teaching. Can Word documents be imported and pre marked up? The current plan is to have people complete a Word template. The template consists of numerous questions related to Alter’s Theory […]
Early steps with Gephi
Playing with Gephi A friend is in the final throes of her PhD and wants to visualise some of her qualitative findings using a network diagram. I’ve skirted around network visualisation without ever really doing anything but wanted to learn more. Following documents and reflects on my explorations and experiments trying to help out. The main focus being on figuring […]
Three mashup types for digital learning and teaching
Introduction Over the last 12 months my work helping improve digital learning and teaching environments has relied heavily successfully integrating a variety of technologies. It has relied on mashing up different technologies into effective learning and teaching environments and experiences. The following reflects on that work and identifies three different types of mashups: Mashup within the LMS. Mashup to change […]
Office365, charismatic technologies, and the ecological perspective
The following began as a summary of Hammond, M. (2019). What is an ecological approach and how can it assist in understanding ICT take-up? British Journal of Educational Technology. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12889 A paper that introduces the ecological approach to explain the disappointing uptake of digital technology in schools. Then I stumbled across the work of Ames (2015; 2019) on charismatic technologies. […]
Is training the barrier to quality online learning in higher ed?
TL;DR Recently there have been various suggestions that the biggest barrier to quality online learning in higher education is lack of knowledge held by teaching staff (Johnson, 2019; Mathes, 2019; Roberts, 2018). More or better training, faculty development and requirements for formal teaching qualifications are proposed as the solution. The following argues that this is just a symptom of the […]
Theory of workarounds
Introduction The following is a summary of the paper Theory of Workarounds. Alter, S. (2014). Theory of Workarounds. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 34(1). https://doi.org/10.17705/1CAIS.03455 The paper provides “an integrated theory of workarounds that describes how and why” they are created. It is a process theory “driven by the interaction of key factors that determine whether possible workarounds […]
The conceptualisation of e-learning: Lessons and implications
The following is the content of my first solo journal article. Jones, D. (2004). The conceptualisation of e-learning: Lessons and implications. Best Practice in University Learning and Teaching: Learning from Our Challenges. Theme Issue of Studies in Learning, Evaluation, Innovation and Development, 1(1), 47–55. I’m posting this because: sadly the journal is no more; the only version I had on […]
It’s more than how you use the technology – authoring online content
At the recent ASCILITE’2019 there was a common refrain throughout the conference, which started with the original keynote as captured in the following tweet #ASCILITE2019 Keynote Speaker Professor Emeritus Mike Sharples – "focus on pedagogy not technology" as ""it's not what you use (technology) but how you use it (pedagogy)" pic.twitter.com/d2BFyAY5xK — Michael Volkov (@volkov_michael) December 3, 2019 While I […]
How to share design knowledge in design for digital learning?
Using Blackboard Learn to design and manage a quality learning environment is hard. Managing the web content alone is hard to do well. To do so requires significant HTML, CSS and related web design knowledge. Knowledge that not everyone has, or should have, or can have. That’s why there are so many ugly Blackboard sites. The difficulty of sharing this […]
Exploring knowledge reuse in design for digital learning: tweaks, H5P, constructive templates and CASA
The following has been accepted for presentation at ASCILITE’2019. It’s based on work described in earlier blog posts. Click on the images below to see full size. Abstract Higher education is being challenged to improve the quality of learning and teaching while at the same time dealing with challenges such as reduced funding and increasing complexity. Design for learning has […]
Testing out h5p interactives and tracking
Feel free to play around with the following h5p interactive (one of the examples provided on the h5p site). I’m testing out if and how it tracks people’s engagement with the interactive. What does it do when someone who doesn’t have an account on this blog (and/or doesn’t login) interacts? What data can I see? By default it appears that […]
