Archive | September, 2008

Web 2.0 in Secondary Education

30 Sep

Back in February I attended a seminar that looked at some emerging research on Web 2.0 in Education. That research has now been published on the Becta website, with a range of final reports looking at Implementing Web 2.0 in Secondary Schools: Impacts, barriers and issues, E-safety and Web 2.0 and Web 2.0 technologies for learning at Key Stage 3 and 4: Summary report.

The researchers surveyed over 2,600 Year 8 and Year 10 pupils, surveyed over 200 teachers and  held 60 focus groups with 300 learners. The team also interviewed over 100 teachers, headteachers and ICT leaders in the schools, plus over 40 national Web 2.0 innovators and regional broadband consortium (RBC) managers.

So how much Web 2.0 activity is actually happening in classrooms, how does this compare with students real use of technology and what are the issues for schools when considering the use of Web 2.0 technologies.

Web 2.0 activity in schools

Teachers reported that the use of Web 2.0 resources in lesson time included:

  • 12% had used uploaded video
  • 9% reported writing to a discussion board
  • 6% reported editing a wiki
  • 4% reported creating or editing a social networking profile
  • 9% reported creating or adding to a blog

This level of use is characterised in the report as “limited, and where it is being used it is generally at an experimental and exploratory stage”.

Student use of Web 2.0 technologies

Students reported that their use of Web 2.0 technologies included:

  • 74% have social networking accounts
  • 78% have uploaded photos or videos to the internet
  • Older learners take part in more social networking
  • Younger learners take part in more interactive gaming using the internet
  • Boys do more internet-connected gaming than girls
  • Girls do more social networking than boys, and also use video more than boys

However, the key finding here was that “nearly all Web 2.0 use is currently outside school, and for social purposes”.

Issues for use of Web 2.0 technologies

Barriers to the more widespread use of Web 2.0 technologies cited by interviewees and survey respondents included:

  • Tension between the collaborative learning of Web 2.0 and the nature of the assessment system
  • Concerns about e-safety and strict filtering in schools
  • Lack of adequate bandwidth
  • Teachers need the support, time and space to develop skills and practices
  • Learning platforms and ‘walled garden’ approach of VLEs
  • Reluctance about Web 2.0 activities being visible on the open internet

However these issues are not confined to technology and teachers:

Many learners lack technical skills, and lack an awareness of the range of technologies and of when and how they could be used, as well as the digital literacy and critical skills to navigate this space. Teachers should be careful not to overestimate learners’ familiarity and skills in this area.

So it appears that there is a long way to go before Web 2.0 is fully welcomed into the classroom.

Intute: Social Sciences features more resources on the issues of Secondary Education, Educational Technology and Education.

The State of the Blogosphere

29 Sep

Last week Technorati, the blog search company, launched their State of the Blogosphere 2008 report which looked at the who, what, why and how of blogging, as well as taking an in-depth look at blogging for profit and how brands are entering the blogosphere. A new feature for this year was a survey of over 1000 bloggers to supplement the analysis of the data produced by Technorati themselves.

So is the State of the Blogosphere strong?

Here’s a few items that stood out to me.

There aren’t as many blogs as you might think.

While Technorati have indexed over 130 million blogs since 2002 – just 1.5 million have posted an item in the last 7 days. 7.4 million have added an item in the last 120 days – but a blog that posts every 4 months can’t really be described as active.

Blogs are established.

59% of bloggers have been blogging for at least 2 years and half of bloggers have set up a blog before – and these non first-time bloggers contribute to four blogs on average. Blogs have representation in the top 10 web site lists across all categories.

Blogging has benefits.

Over half of the bloggers surveyed said they were better known in their industry as a consequence of blogging and around a fifth of bloggers have participated in an event, contributed to a print publication or found themselves on TV / radio thanks to their blogging expertise.

So the blogosphere seems to be in pretty good shape and if you want some more analysis of the report try the Mashable take on it or track the reaction using Technorati itself.

… and what does all this mean for this blog?

As measured by Technorati, this blog is hovering around the top quarter of a million blogs worldwide – these metrics are based around the extent to which your content is commented on and linked to by other bloggers. So for this blog, which is primarily about passing on information, we are doing surprisingly well.

The blog is the most successful of our additional services here at Intute: Social Sciences and delving into our web stats turns up some surprises – the most visited page on Intute for the last couple of months, appears to have been a blog post from January about how running for President is a serious business – which seemed to take six months to become popular!

Intute: Social Sciences features more blogs which may be of interest to the academic community.

Is this the right room for an argument?

26 Sep

… I’ve told you once!

Well I was in the process of gathering together a few links and pointers for the first of the US Presidential debates, which is still scheduled for tonight. However with the recent financial turmoil and the fallout from John McCain suspending his campaign, we don’t know whether there will be a debate this weekend – or maybe there will just be a 90 minute interview with Barack Obama.

But just in case the debate does go ahead – here’s a few links of interest:

The Commission on Presidential Debates still insists that the debate will go ahead and it is a good source for looking back at past debates or try the American Presidency Project at UC Santa Barbara for a great selection of historical information

C-SPAN’s Debate Hub will be making the debate video available and embeddable, as well as tracking the debate in real time and trying to pull in real time reaction from around the web – a short YouTube video explains what C-SPAN are hoping to do

Election 2008 is the new Twitter aggregation service that brings together various updates from Twitter users relating to the campaign – you can filter the tweets by candidiate and it is sure to be aflame with heated discussion – the Twitter blog has more on this service

Past presidential debates in history is a short item from BBC News that pulls together the “greatest hits” from past presidential debates with short video clips and some nice context – probably not much that is new to debate fans, but a great introduction for the rest of us

If you find all this talk of debates a little heavy going, then why not get a little light relief. John McCain was due to appear on the David Letterman Show but cancelled as he was suspending his campaign and flying back to Washington to help in the financial negotiations in Congress – Letterman was not impressed, when he discovered that McCain seemed to be doing TV news interviews instead.

Intute: Social Sciences features more Internet resources on political debates and the US elections.

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What’s next in the US elections?

19 Sep

With the post convention bounces for both parties having just about worked their way through the system, we’re back in a close race, with a trend from the past few days slightly favouring Barack Obama and the Democrats. Or to put it another way – just about where we were before the conventions started!

The next (and possibly last) chance to shake up the polls is not very far away with the Presidential Debates coming up at the end of next week. Twitter and Current TV have announced plans to Hack the Debates and allow user feedback or Tweets to appear on screen while John McCain and Barack Obama debate.

Talk of debates reminds me of the classic debate of the modern era Nixon versus Kennedy in 1960 – and those two Presidents were presented as archetypes of how the US Commander-in-Chief is portrayed on film during the excellent BBC Four programme President Hollywood.

Other readings that have invaded my consciousness this week:

Intute: Social Sciences features more Internet resources on the US Elections.

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Where are the UK academic bloggers?

10 Sep

Yesterday, I spent a long but exciting day at an eLearning Symposium organised by the Economics Network. The delegates were keen to learn and withstood the bombardment of Web 2.0 applications that we were telling them about. The hands-on session concentrated on blogging and it got me to wondering why aren’t more UK academics blogging?

To take economics as an example, go to a blog aggegator such as the Economics Roundtable and you will see that there are plenty of US academics blogging, but UK blogs tend to come from companies, media organisations or collaborative organisations such as VoxEU or policy focussed think tanks like the Adam Smith Institute.

From chatting to the delegates yesterday, here’s a few of the key barriers to blogging:

Time -  between lecturing, marking, research, admin, meetings etc. there are only so many hours in the day, therefore as long as blogging is just one more thing to do, then it’s entirely understandable that there is a reluctance among academics to take the plunge. However a blog that supports a course, records your ideas as you undertake a research project, archives online readings that you have come across or is even written by your students – can save you time and it may soon become a virtual notebook that is a natural part of your academic routine.

Fear – like any niche activity, blogging has it’s own jargon that can seem baffling or exclusive to those who aren’t involved. There are too many conversations between people who like technology, telling other people who like technology, how great technology is. Just sitting down with a group of academics and showing them that all it takes is an email address and 5 minutes at WordPress.com or Blogger.com to set up a blog can de-mystify the whole process. Or as one delegate put it yesterday, “If I had known it was that easy, I would have set-up a blog ages ago”.

Benefits – the potential gains from blogging may not be obvious at first glance, so it’s worth spelling them out. Brad DeLong has used the phrase “the invisible college” to represent the idea that a global community can read, comment on and improve his ideas, because he published them online. Research funders will like those who disseminate their research findings and having a blog will enable you to do that while side-stepping the mainstream media, so presenting your work as you want. Increasingly commentary is content and gaining a reputation in the blogosphere might just make your latest book a bestseller.

So what needs to change? How can we help break down those blogging barriers? Here are a few suggestions, again from those at the symposium:

  • Training – probably best supplied at the institutional level, but showing people how to get going with blogs need not take long
  • Advice – there are pros and cons to engaging with the blogosphere, as there are with any other online activity – try the Guide to Blogging in Economics
  • Support – institutions should be clear who supports this activity within their set-up and policies should remind users that the acceptable use of computing facilities applies to blogs as well

A point made by one of the delegates, was that enthusiasm from below needs to be matched by support, buy-in and resources from above – perhaps this may lead to a Chief Blogging Officer appearing at a university near you soon!

Intute: Social Sciences features more UK based blogs and our editors reviewed Our Favourite Social Science Blogs earlier this year, including our pick of the leading economics blogs, plus there are more blogs featured elsewhere on Intute.

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eLearning for Economics

8 Sep

The Economics Network are running an eLearning Symposium tomorrow looking at a number of ways of enhancing teaching through the use of technology – it’s a follow up to their annual key contacts conference which brings in delegates from economics departments around the UK.

There are two strands to the symposium – one looking at elearning applications for economics – such as personal response systems (clickers), VLEs, tablet computers and a number of economics specific applications.

The second strand will be looking at Web 2.0 applications and their possible uses in economics teaching. I shall be eschewing my usual spheres of blogging and podcasting, which will be ably handled by my co-conspirator Bhagesh Sachania – co-author of the Guide to Blogging in Economics.

Instead I shall be concentrating on the social media applications of Web 2.0 and their use in economics teaching – so that means looking at services like Twitter, Facebook, SlideShare and FriendFeed. The slides are available below or you can click through to SlideShare.

Economics 2.0

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: economics elearning)

I shall endeavour to practice what I preach and the bookmarks are available on delicious and I may even Twitter about the event too, though I haven’t done that before.

In the meantime, feel free to leave a comment on how you think Web 2.0 can influence teaching in economics or in other subjects – either here or on the SlideShare page.

Intute: Social Sciences features more resources on the topics of economics, economics blogs and elearning.

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