Reach Further

ELESIG - the Special Interest Group for those interested in Evaluating the Learner Experience of E-Learning - invites academics to a seminar on Impact of learner experience research – digital literacies. It’s on Thursday, 20th November 2008 at the Evolution Suite, Longbridge Technology Park, 1 Devon Way Birmingham B31 2TS.

This is the first in a series of ‘Impact Symposia’ in collaboration with HE and FE colleagues currently undertaking research into selected areas of the student experience. At each of these events, as well as receiving input from key researchers in the field and engaging in developmental activities, there will be opportunities to share your own research and practice related to the topic under investigation. The first of these symposia concerns digital literacies.

The event is free to members of ELESIG and membership of ELESIG is open to anyone interested in the learner experience and the learner voice. ELESIG is a Reach Further community of practice.

More information at ELESIG

Tuesday 21st October 11 am - noon BST. Seminar title: Mobile technologies for education in development contexts - challenging the obvious, with John Traxler, Reader in Mobile Technology for e-Learning (School of Computing and IT, University of Wolverhampton). In the seminar John will talk about his work on mobile learning in Kenya, the lessons learned and their transferability to other developing country educational contexts.

To book a place just comment on this post (We will keep the comment private if you so wish)

More info

At Reach Further it’s one of our fundamental beliefs that bringing people together helps solve problems. Our vision is “bringing people together online, to share, to work and to learn”. Whether you call it social media, social networking, Web 2.0, online communities, the blogosphere, ebusiness or any of the other buzzwords, what it’s about is bringing people together to share what they know and to solve one another’s problems in a variety of domains from elearning and education to diversity in business.

There are many people working hard to apply social media principles to the non-profit sector in working for social good - American Beth Kanter is one and David Wilcox in London is another.

One of Reach Further’s projects is a community for elearning researchers and professionals around the world. We manage the ELKS (E-learning and Knowledge-Sharing) community for the Beyond Distance Research Alliance at the University of Leicester, on behalf of the UN’s Global Alliance for ICT in Development, with partners from Sri Lanka, Chile, Uruguay, South Africa, Sweden, Italy and the UK, and members all over the world. ELKS is a global group of practitioners and researchers sharing information about how learning technologies can be used to bring education and training to all the citizens of the world, rich and poor, and to provide a vehicle for us all to learn from one another. It isn’t all about low-cost and low-tech elearning options but those are obviously crucial.

Webinars and free courses bring together academics and teachers from all over the world. Topics might range from how to use wikis so that Universities with minimal bandwidth (and minimal electricity) in Africa can collaborate internationally online, to how to use e-tivities in discussion forums as simple portable elearning objects. Our next webinar will be about mobile learning, which has revolutionised learning in places where there is no traditional IT infrastructure:

Mobile technologies for education in development contexts - challenging the obvious, with John Traxler, Reader in Mobile Technology for e-Learning, Director, Learning Lab, Conference Chair, mLearn2008 Ironbridge, Associate Editor, International Journal of Mobile & Blended Learning (School of Computing and IT, University of Wolverhampton). Date and time to be confirmed [UPDATE: Tuesday 21st October 11am - 12 noon]. Please join ELKS to find out more.

If you are a practitioner or researcher in elearning in HE anywhere in the world, or with an interest in elearning anywhere in the world, you can become a member of the ELKS community by contacting us. All we ask is that you contribute as much as you gain.

This is a post for Blog Action Day - Poverty (October 15th 2008)

The presentation we gave last month at the ALT-C conference in Leeds is now online: Model for sustainable online community networks

Whether you’re trying to create a learning community for the students starting your course or trying to nurture a community of practice for your business or organisation, one of the key elements of your strategy should be welcoming your participants. Every e-moderator should have welcoming techniques in their e-moderating toolbox.

Here are five top tips for creating a welcoming environment in that vital starting period.

1. Explore what your community software or VLE offers in the way of welcoming emails and the like. If there’s an automated email to members when they sign up, see if you can personalise it to your situation in a friendly and helpful way. If the only email they get is an organisational one, and you can’t edit it, send your own separate email through the situation to welcome them to your course or community.
2. Have an “Introduce yourself here” activity ready in the online discussions forum when your new users log on. Encourage them to share information about themselves in a non-scary way - ask for “safe” information but don’t expect them to reveal really personal details this early. Ask “What do you have on your desk?” or “What can you see from your window” so that they are encouraged to share information but it’s not as scary as being asked to detail their children’s ages or the A-level grades they got!
3. Welcome every contributor individually in your first discussion. Later on when the community is working well they will be happy to answer one another, and you won’t need to make so many posts yourself, but at first, it’s essential to make them feel welcome and valued as soon as they make their first post.
4. Offer a series of icebreaker activities (in the same way as you would in a classroom setting) to help the group begin to share information, respond to one another and begin to gel. Design the activities well so that purpose and task are clear, deadlines are obvious and you have modelled an appropriate response. Salmon’s e-tivities framework is an excellent way to design effective discussion activities.
5. Use the announcements feature in your VLE or community software (Moodle and Blackboard both have this feature, for example), or send an email at an appropriate interval (e.g., I do it once a week in a 9-week course, twice in a 4- or 5-week course) to motivate and encourage users to log on and foster a lively and busy community.

These are just some of the ideas from our E-moderating course. Reach Further’s next eModerating and Online Tutoring course (for academics tutors and teachers) starts 13th October, and covers introductory e-moderating skills for running courses online. Find out more.

Our academic colleagues, clients and partners might be interested in the webinar we are running tomorrow, Friday 27th June, in the ELESIG community. ELESIG (the Higher Education Academy’s Special Interest Group for the Learners’ Experience of Elearning)  is a community for researchers and practitioners who are looking at evaluating the learners’ experiences of learning technologies in their courses. The webinar will take place in ELESIG’s Ning social network space, and we will be introducing the event with a live online conference in Elluminate, thanks to Elluminate’s generous donation of an online conference room for ELESIG’s meetings.

Schedule

10 am: ELESIG introduction in Elluminate room
11 am: Discussion of Lee Harvey’s “Researching the Student Experience: An Action Implementation Cycle“
12 noon: Using online diaries and journals to evaluate learning (Debby Cotton, Emma Purnell and Sue Murray)
3.30 pm: A look at the MoleNet Project - m-Learning for m-People - with Richard Brook

More information at ELESIG (Membership is free).

Is the motivation of online learners changing as the web itself - and the techniques and technologies available to educators – evolves?

I was writing about motivation of online learners for the eModerating and Online Tutoring course I’m tutoring next week. I’ve been teaching this unit for a few years now and I update the material every time, as one can with an online course.  This time I happened upon the BBC’s report  about web usability guru Jakob Nielsen’s annual report.

Apparently Web users are getting more ruthless and selfish when they go online - people are just  much less patient than they used to be. Users - and no doubt learners too - want simply to reach a site quickly, complete a task and leave. Users are beginning to ignore efforts to make them linger and have little patience. So it’s become even more necessary to be explicit about the kind of interactions that we want our students to take part in. Good and engaging design of online activities - or e-tivities as Gilly Salmon calls them – is more important than ever before. And dare I say it, courses like ours – giving teachers and lecturers the skills to facilitate interactivity, discussions and learning online – are more essential than ever before?

Tutors and teachers can learn to create online activities and teach courses online during a 5-week online course in Moodle starting 4th June 2008.

Helen Whitehead of Reach Further is tutoring an eModerating and Online Tutoring course in partnership with Park Lane College in Leeds. This is an introductory course for those starting to or planning to teach online in HE, FE, schools or work-based learning environments. The format - 5 weeks online in Moodle - is based on successful courses run in the past with local, national and international participants and builds on Helen’s work with Professor Gilly Salmon at Leicester University.

We are delighted to be able to offer the course to teachers and tutors inside and outside the College. A mix of participants from different institutions will, as in our previous courses, form a lively and mutually supportive community.

Although it’s in Moodle, the skills taught are generic and not VLE-specific, so the course is suitable for those in institutions with different VLEs or which have not yet chosen their learning platform. Moodle is very easy to use.

More information at eModerating and Online Tutoring Course details

Contact helen@reachfurther.com for more information or to sign up.

Comments from previous students:

• “One of the features of this course was the excellent modelling of emoderating practice.” Lecturer, King’s College London

• “The course has constantly challenged me and pushed me to reflect in diverse and unexpected ways. Exciting, intense and highly productive discussions.” English language lecturer, University of Chile

Reach Further is very proud that Sharon Wood, our junior web and social media developer, has won one of the West Yorkshire Adult Work-Based Learner Awards 2008, announced this week. Sharon has won the award in the Culture, Media, Sports and the Arts; Leisure, Hospitality and Tourism Category. Sharon, just completing a Foundation Degree in eTechnology at Park Lane College, is a returner to education and will be continuing her studies at Leeds Metropolitan University in the autumn. She worked for Reach Further as an intern before becoming an employee.
The awards will be formally presented at the West Yorkshire Lifelong Learning Network Celebration Event on 12th June at Leeds Civic Hall. Sharon will receive a certificate and £100 gift voucher.

Sharon is excited by all the possibilities of Social Media and Web 2.0 and has been helping Reach Further create blogs and community sites for individuals, organisations and companies as well as supporting the editing of Kids on the Net. We feel she is a real asset to our business and are absolutely delighted that her calibre has been recognised in this way.

Congratulations, Sharon!

Graeme Pirie, Helen Whitehead and Sharon Wood (right) at Venturefest earlier this year.

Reach Further are delighted that Graeme Pirie and Sharon Wood have recently joined us on the staff. Both of them were interns with us as students on the Foundation Degree in eTechnology at Park Lane College, Leeds, and we are very impressed with their aptitude and abilities.

“I’m looking forward to developing my skills in web development, particularly designs, themes and functionality for blogs, social networks and communities,” said Junior Web Developer, Graeme. “Reach Further is a vibrant and busy company, with lots of opportunities.”