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Three female students kicking at laid snow, so that it covers the image

Moodle – Teaching Block 2 Modules

December 9, 2019 / Mandy Harcup / 0 Comments

One query which we often receive from students here in TEL (Technology Enhanced Learning), is a concern that one or more modules are missing from their Moodle homepage. This is usually because the modules they are enquiring about, are for Teaching Block 2. Teaching Block 2 modules are normally hidden from student view until students return from the Christmas vacation.

Teaching Block 2 starts this year on Monday 20th January 2020. However, this is not always the case as some modules have two different cohorts of students attached to them. These modules may have a short name that looks similar to this: UXXXXX-19SEP & UXXXXX-19JAN. Depending how the module has been set up, both cohorts may have access to the unit in September, or maybe the January cohort have been put into a group and won’t be able to see the module until the lecturer releases it to them at a later date.

Lecturers decide when to release their Teaching Block 2 module(s). Some prefer to release them when the students leave for the winter vacation so that they can start looking at them, while others wait until the first day back or when the first session starts. Some students may be able to see their Teaching Block 2 modules now. It really is up to the individual lecturer.

We’re often asked; ‘Why does the January code not reflect the new year?’ – for example, ‘Why does the code say 19JAN and not 20JAN, as the year would now be 2020? This is because the code is taken from the academic year in which the course started, so as this academic year started in 2019, the code you’ll see is 19JAN. However if your course starts in the new year, it will have the 20JAN code.

It can be confusing, but as long as you can see your module(s) when the lecturer says you should be able to see them,then there is no need to worry. If you can’t see your module(s), please email us at servicedesk@port.ac.uk and we can investigate this further for you

In the meantime, the TEL Team would like to wish everyone season’s greetings and a healthy and happy New Year!

Image Credit: Photo by Naitian（Tony） Wang and Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Is it time to give doodling an image makeover?

December 2, 2019 / Marie Kendall-Waters / 1 Comment

Like the majority of people, I’m a doodler, whether I’m chatting on the phone, writing my list of food shopping for the week or at a meeting at work, if I have a pen and paper in hand there will be doodles. Some of my doodles are just swirls and rough shapes and some have given me inspiration for other creative ideas which I have put into practice. I even follow Mr Doodle on Instagram as I find the art of doodling fascinating! (If you’ve not heard of him then check him out!)

When we think of doodles, they are normally made up of squiggles, they are rough drawings that are made absent-mindely. When I think back to school days, doodling was often seen as a bad thing in class, students are perceived as not paying attention if they are seen doodling. However, what if doodling wasn’t the distraction we all thought it to be but actually had real cognitive benefits that perhaps could aid concentration and memory?

The importance of doodling – aren’t they just squiggles?

The need to draw is hardwired into the human brain. From our first scribbles at infancy to industry; doodles to explain complex theories and equations from scientists and mathematicians. In fact, it could be argued that graphic images predates verbal communication, when we think of parietal art or cave drawings by our primitive ancestors. Doodling can help communicate meanings to our ideas by giving them visual representations. When we put pen to paper, we open up our hearts to ideas, insights and inspirations.

Diane Bleck, an idea catcher and co-founder of the Doodle Institute, has taken doodling a step further and is on a mission to unlock insights, inspiration and ideas for large and small companies and schools through doodles. Diane shows how doodles can be used as a tool for strategic thinking, brainstorming and business planning. It can also be used for health and healing to relieve stress.

Visuals at Work – Episode 12: Brainstorming Mind Map
https://youtu.be/9pG_izfsgdU

How can we use doodles in the context of education and learning?

Bleck explains how doodles can be used for brainstorming and business planning, in the context of a lecture, doodles or sketches could be used for visual note-taking. Visual note-taking is a way to synthesize information; carve out the most important points and use images to convey the message simply and effectively. Studies show that note-taking enables recall and the synthesis of new information. Doodling can significantly increase the amount of retained information, according to a 2009 study. It says that even if doodling is not intentionally related to the listening task, more recall occurs. If you would like to know more about retrieval practice, check out Achieving Mastery – How Important is Practice in Learning?

Doodling put into practice

Instructional coaches, Shelley Paul and Jill Gough explored how ‘doodling while taking notes could improve memory and concept retention’ [1] in class. Before approaching their academics about using the idea of doodling, Paul tested out this theory by sketching her notes from a 2 day conference; ‘it causes you to listen on a different level’ [2]. By the end of the conference Paul found that her drawings had improved and she was able to remember the information that was communicated from the conference just by looking at her sketches. These experiences convinced Paul and Gough that ‘something powerful happens when auditory learning is transposed into images’[3]. In fact, ‘when ideas and related concepts can be encapsulated in an image, the brain remembers the information associated with that image’[4] and therefore aids memory and learning.

Doodle or not to doodle? There’s no wrong way!

We know as educators and from our experiences that we all learn in very different ways, some people are more focused when they are being creative. Doodling may help unleash our creative sides when learning and help us to retain new information and keep us focused. Who’s to say it’s a bad thing if it works? Doodling worked for children’s author; Dave Pilkey!

Like all new skills, or even old ones which we haven’t used for a while, we don’t know how effective they will be until we put them into practice – maybe this is something you could trial out with your students or yourselves the next time you attend a conference! I do think doodling does need an image makeover as it can lead to really engaging and imaginative creativity, especially in education!

I’ll leave you with this amazing ‘doodle’ by RSA Animate of a talk ’Changing Education Paradigms’ given by Sir Ken Robinson – world-renowned education and creativity expert, which shows how ‘doodling’ really can aid concentration and memory.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

References:

[1]Katrina Schwartz, 2015: https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/39941/making-learning-visible-doodling-helps-memories-stick

[2]Jill Gough, 2015: https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/39941/making-learning-visible-doodling-helps-memories-stick

[3]Katrina Schwartz, 2015: https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/39941/making-learning-visible-doodling-helps-memories-stick

[4]Katrina Schwartz, 2015: https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/39941/making-learning-visible-doodling-helps-memories-stick</P

Credit image: Photo by Lucas Lenzi on Unsplash

NEW Add-on for Grackle – Now Available for all UoP Students and Staff

November 28, 2019 / Alana Aldred / 0 Comments

You’ll be pleased to hear that Grackle – an accessibility checker for Google Docs, Slides and Sheets – is now easily available for you to use when creating documents so that everyone can enjoy your content.

Grackle is simple to use – login to your UoP Google account, select the Google document that you want to check for accessibility issues. Once you have your document open, select Add-ons from the toolbar and then Grackle > Launch from the drop-down menu.

Grackle’s accessibility checker panel will then appear on the right-hand side of your screen and produces a checklist of common accessibility problems and highlights any of these issues in your documents.

The example below illustrates where Grackle has identified missing Alt text. However, the add-on offers so many more useful tips to improve the accessibility of your documents.

Take a look at this website to find out more about the handy features of Grackle.

Yellow background, with black items on it, including a mobile and an orange book titled Change by Design

LinkedIn Learning – Change

November 25, 2019 / Mandy Harcup / 1 Comment

The definition of the word change says: “an event that occurs when something passes from one state or phase to another”, other words that could be used are adjustment, development and modification. These are all words used daily in our vocabulary and are words that reflect what is happening within the university as a whole, but mainly within our roles.

Who else looks at their original job description and specification and can only see a few responsibilities that look similar to the work that you’re carrying out now? For me, some areas have disappeared altogether, whilst others have been replaced by new processes and procedures. People are all different, some seem to embrace change easily, whilst others stick their heads in the sand and hope it doesn’t affect them or their role. I’m one of those people who like to digest (in my own way) what’s been said and then find out more information e.g. Where do I fit into the change? What part will I be expected to play in making the change happen? What knock on effect will it have elsewhere? Is there training that I’ll need to undertake? etc. etc.

During this period of adjustment when we find our responsibilities have changed and we’re expected to ‘step up to the mark’ and embrace whatever is required to make these changes happen, this is described by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross as a ‘Change Curve’. Kubler-Ross ‘Change Curve’ explains the emotions that most people go through when change is in the offering, although the original theory was in relation to the grieving process and describes 5 stages (see image below). In business it is now applied to any kind of change.

Stage 1, Denial were we blame others, which is preceded by blaming ourselves, “What have I done wrong?” and “Why me?”

Stage 2, Doubt follows quickly afterwards causing self-doubt, uncertainty and confusion, this happens normally when you’re at your lowest ebb.

Stage 3, Acceptance, the turning point, when you start to accept the change, think more rationally about everything and can start to work to solve problems that may arise to make the change work for you and others in your team.

Once you’re through the ‘Change Curve’ it’s only then that you can start to move on, and it soon becomes the norm. The length of time it takes for an individual to experience the ‘Change Curve’ varies from person to person and can depend on what the change is and how much this change is going to affect the person.

(https://www.cleverism.com/understanding-kubler-ross-change-curve/)

I bet you’re wondering what all this has to do with LinkedIn Learning? Well I’m not talking about the change from Lynda.com to LinkedIn Learning, although that has happened (see blog post Goodbye Lynda, hello LinkedIn Learning) but about the courses that may be of benefit that provide an insight into the processes that happen when change occurs. The courses (or individual videos if you’re short on time), look at change from different angles and perspectives, giving you the techniques to help you cope with change, before it happens, while it’s happening and how to come out the other end and to keep altering and growing until the process produces the end results.

When you have time, just type ‘change’ into the search box, you’ll see a list of over 48,000 items will appear, this can be filtered down by using the block on the left-hand side, to make it more manageable and tailor made to your requirements. Of course the university hold workshops on this subject as well, but we don’t always have the time to attend.

In case you were interested in the courses that I looked at, here they are:
Building Resilience by Tatiana Kolovou
Embracing Change by Todd Dewett
Managing Stress for Positive Change by Heidi Hanna
Leading Change by Gary Bolles

So go on, have a go, log into LinkedIn Learning today!

Further Reference: https://www.cleverism.com/understanding-kubler-ross-change-curve/
https://www.definitions.net/definition/change
Image Credit: Photo by Krisztian Tabori on Unsplash

pink painted finger nails going to tap a mobile phone which is laying down an a surface

Three Useful Apps for Teaching/Learning

November 18, 2019 / Andy Taggart / 0 Comments

In this blog, I want to introduce a couple of apps that could be very useful additions to any lecturers’ teaching toolbox.

Screencastify

The first is Screencastify. Screencastify is a lightweight screen recorder that can be used to capture your desktop and webcam allowing you to create videos that can be uploaded directly to YouTube and, at the same time, saved to your Google Drive. Being a Chrome extension means that there is no heavy weight software to download and it can also be used offline. There is a free version that limits the number of videos you can make to 50 per month with a maximum length of 10 minutes per video. However, you can upgrade to a paid for version, approximately £20 (it comes priced in dollars), which has no such limits.

Anyway, enough reading, here is a short demo of Screencastify in action

https://youtu.be/VwU-kwFzVHk

It does lack the functionality of a product like Camtasia, but if all you need is a quick easy screen recording it is well worth a go. You can also keep the videos on YouTube private by setting them to unlisted so they cannot be found in searches or as recommendations, students would just need the URL which can be made available via your Moodle pages.

Once you’ve made your video using Screencastify, you can have it as a stand alone resource available via YouTube or you could use it to produce an enhanced learning object by combining it with Adobe Spark.

I can see this having a variety of uses from giving video/audio feedback to forming part of a set of flipped learning sessions.

Screencast-O-Matic

An alternative to Screencastify is Screencast-O-Matic. As with Screencastify, this app also comes in free and licensed versions. The free version of Screencast-O-Mantic will record videos of 15 minutes which can then be saved as MP4 files, this version also comes with some limited editing functionality but does require a software download and does not work quite as seamlessly with YouTube or Google Drive.

Brainscape

The third app, useful as a revision aid, is Brainscape . Brainscape is an online flashcard system, you can either create your own flashcards or use a pre-made set. Unlike other ready made flashcard systems I’ve seen, Brainscape does have resources suitable for HE and not just in traditional academic disciplines. This system is free (though you can pay to release a larger number of cards) and can be accessed through your Google account.

As students work through the set of cards, they can rate how confident they are in their knowledge and understanding. Staff can create classes to which they can invite students, thus allowing you to view how many cards the students used and how they themselves rate their learning.

Brainscape says that its system is grounded in proven techniques that help improve learning and understanding. Not having used this particular platform myself with learners I can’t comment on the veracity of the claims made but as flashcards are a popular learning technique this online system is worth looking at, especially given the range of topics it covers.

Credit Image: Photo by Rob Hampson on Unsplash

Guest Blogger: Adrian Sharkey – University of Portsmouth LinkedIn Seminar

November 11, 2019 / Adrian Sharkey / 0 Comments

LinkedIn Services to Support University of Portsmouth Students and Staff

On Friday October 25th we had a visit from Ralph Blunden the Relationship Manager for LinkedIn. Since 2017 the University has been using Lynda, an online resource with thousands of courses on business, creative and technical skills. Lynda had been owned by LinkedIn for sometime and this summer, Lynda moved over to the LinkedIn Learning platform. Ralph offered to present on how LinkedIn Learning and LinkedIn could be used to support both students and staff and we had a great turnout from all around the University willing to listen.

There are now over 30,000 courses on LinkedIn with up to 40 new ones being added every week. The new platform personalises learning by making recommendations a lot more relevant, these are based on previous learning, on what is popular in the University and if a LinkedIn account is connected – recommendations are based on the skills shown on the user’s account. When courses are completed a badge can be added to a LinkedIn profile, which is particularly useful for students in order to show employability skills to potential employers.

LinkedIn have 23 million accounts in the UK, while only around 10% of these are active at any time it represents a significant section of the working population. Around 70% of employers recruit using social media showing a professional presence for employability and making connections is essential. With Industry 4.0 and changes about to happen because of emerging technologies like AI – skills requirements are increasingly fluid – Linkedin data shows the average skill having a shelf life of 5 years. While hard skills are still important, the most in demand skills for employers is creativity along with other soft skills such as critical thinking, being able to learn, teamwork and adaptability.

LinkedIn are aiming for their services to compliment learning for students and staff in HE. LinkedIn Learning can supplement in class learning, allow opportunities for flipped classrooms, support accreditation and professional development for staff. It can promote employability and placement skills for students and encourage engagement with alumni, allowing students to make important professional connections.

There a number of ways we could leverage LinkedIn Learning to target certain areas by packaging courses and creating collections/playlists or utilising the existing learning paths. Teaching excellence could include blended learning, flipped classrooms, instructional design and VLE training. Digital capabilities can be packaged, staff development and employability for students also. LinkedIn offer a mapping service, where if we supply the competencies we’re looking to develop they will map the appropriate courses against them, allowing the creation of collections/playlists.

For further support/assistance with LinkedIn Learning contact:

adrian.sharkey@port.ac.uk

Twitter: @adrianjsharkey

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/adrianjsharkey/

Image Credit: supplied by LinkedIn

boy singing on microphone with pop filter

Accessibility: Investigating Automatic Media Transcription

November 4, 2019 / Rich Heath / 0 Comments

Background

Accessibility is now an important aspect of digital learning. We need to take accessibility seriously both to satisfy the needs of an increasingly diverse student body and the requirements recently brought into law. Of course, digital learning often encompasses a wide variety of resources in a range of media. The challenge of bringing all these resources in line with regulations is considerable, both on a technical and organisational level. Fortunately technology can help to ease the burden, with a number of integrations available to help examine and fix content-related accessibility issues.

One particularly large challenge, and one that is particularly helped by the use of technology, is video. While it is possible to watch and transcribe a video manually, when faced with a library of nearly 8000 hours of video, the challenge becomes insurmountable! This is where technology can step in: it can automate the process and reduce the number of person-hours required.

For quite some time, YouTube has been able to automatically caption videos. In the past, however, the transcriptions produced by the algorithms have often been the subject of ridicule for the sometimes bizarre and hilarious interpretations. Thankfully things have moved on considerably, with increasingly advanced AI and machine learning helping to increase the reliability of computer transcription.

For the majority of our video content, we rely upon a home-spun system composed of a Wowza Streaming Media server and a custom-built front-end to manage content and metadata. While this system has the facility to allow subtitles to be added, it does not feature any way to automate the process of creating transcriptions. For this reason, we are currently investigating our options, with a view to either hosting our video content elsewhere or improving our current provision by implementing auto-transcription facilities.

The contenders

We have been investigating a few services to judge the accuracy of the transcription. We have tried each service with the same videos to see how accurately they can transcribe a variety of media content. Below are some details of three services we are currently examining.

Mozilla Deepspeech

An open-source option that can be run on-premises, Deepspeech requires a certain amount of technical skill in deploying and managing Linux servers. Being open-source and community driven, the more effort you put in, the better the output will be. It allows you to train your own neural network to increase the accuracy of transcriptions, so theoretically it would be possible to improve your transcription accuracy, although it may require a large investment of time and effort. As we are simply testing the out-of-box abilities, we have used the default models provided by the developers.

Google Speech to Text Engine

This is an API made available through the Google Cloud Platform. The service itself is used by YouTube to provide auto-transcriptions of uploaded videos. While using it through YouTube is free at the point of upload, utilising the API in your own projects can cause costs to rack up quickly (and remember that we have 8000 hours of video sitting on our servers, waiting to be transcribed). The pricing options are transparent, however, so we can easily calculate the cost of transcribing all of our existing content.

Amazon Transcribe

This cloud service is utilized by Amazon’s virtual assistant “Alexa” and works in a similar way to Google’s offering, with transcription charged based upon the number of seconds of content transcribed. The service is used by the content capture service Echo 360 to transcribe material. By our rough calculations, transcribing our 8000 hours of content through Amazon would be a little cheaper than through Google.

The results

Here are some example transcriptions of one short piece of video content.

Mozilla Deepspeech

so wee al seend apisode of the dragon tf dend where the ontroprenel holks in with a really great idea good looking numbers the dragons e recing out their hands and then one of the dragons pipes up let see your contract and os soddenly ontrepenelox exposed because they thought they had a contra they don’t what they have iser some verbal understanding your colercial contracts are really important to you business mey should be kept clear concise so the point to add value when seeking in bestment wor in ed if you come to sellin a business also commercial contracts areningportant to the void conslote because both sides of the contract should now wot their obligations are a more their rights are

Google Speech to Text (through youtube)

so we’ve all seen episodes of the Dragons Den where the entrepreneur walks in with a really great idea good-looking numbers the Dragons are eating out their hands and then one of the Dragons pipes up let’s see your contract and all the sudden the entrepreneur looks exposed because they thought they had a contract they don’t what they have is a some verbal understanding your commercial contracts are really important to your business they should be kept clear concise to the point to add value when seeking investment or indeed if you come to sell the business also commercial contracts are really important to avoid conflict because both sides of the contract should know what their obligations are and what their rights are

Amazon Transcribe

So we’ve all seen episodes of the Dragon’s Den, where the entrepreneur walks in with a really great idea, good looking numbers that dragons reaching out their hands. And then one of the dragons pipes up. Let’s see your contract over something. The entrepreneur let’s exposed because they thought they had a contract. They don’t. What they have is a some verbal understanding your commercial contracts of really important to your business. They should be kept clear, concise to the point. Add value when seeking investment, or indeed, if you come to sell the business. Also, commercial contracts are really important to avoid conflict because both sides of the contract should know what their obligations are, what their rights on.

Conclusion

As you can see from the output above, while the Mozilla software makes a good guess at a lot of the content, it also gets confused in other parts, inventing new words along the way and joining others together to form a rather useless text that does not represent what has been said at all well. I’m sure its abilities will improve as more time is spent by the community training the neural network. However, Google and Amazon clearly have the upper hand – which is not surprising, given their extensive user base and resources.

While Amazon Transcribe makes a very good attempt, even adding punctuation where it predicts it should appear, it is not 100% accurate in this case. Some words are mis-interpreted and others are missing. However, in the main, the words that are confused are not essential to the understanding of the video.

Google Speech to Text makes the best attempt at transcribing the video, getting all words 100% correct, and even adding capital letters for proper nouns that it clearly recognises. There are options to insert punctuation when using the API, but this feature is not available in the YouTube conversion process.

From this (preliminary and admittedly small) test, it seems you get what you pay for: the most expensive service is the most accurate and the cheapest is the least accurate. Also, the headline cost of using Google Speech to Text on 8000 hours of video is not necessarily accurate. We need to remember that not all of this content is actively used: this is an accumulation of 8 years of content, and it’s possible that only a small fraction of it is still actually being watched. We now need to spend some time interrogating our video statistics to determine how much of the old content really needs to be transcribed.

The best value compromise, if we choose to continue to host video ourselves, may be to transcribe all future videos and any that have been watched at some point in the last year. In addition, it should be possible to provide an ‘on-demand’ service, whereby videos are flagged by users as requiring a transcription at the click of a button. Once flagged, the video is queued for transcription and a few minutes later a transcription is made available and the user alerted.

Video title: Warner Goodman Commercial Contracts.
Copyright: Lynda Povey ( Enterprise Adviser) nest, The University of Portsmouth.

Image Credit: Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash

Through the mirror – learning through reflection

October 28, 2019 / Marie Kendall-Waters / 0 Comments

It’s easy to get swept along in the hustle and bustle and the hum-drum work-a-day life. The constant flow of work emails and phone calls, running from one meeting to the next, information going in one ear and out the other, you feel like you’ve run out of hours in the day before you’ve even begun! However, all the things you do at work, although might not feel like it at the time, have a purpose, and result in a solution that provides information that can help others!

So let’s take a step back and breath!

Let’s start with a little activity: go and make a cup of tea and ask yourself:

‘when was the last time I sat down and actually reflected on my work?’

It may sound like a silly question, but I bet most of you don’t actively reflect on your daily work life – things that you’ve achieved, things that didn’t go so well, new things you’ve learnt, ways you’ve helped people, provided new ways of doing things, seen or read something interesting that could help your team or section, events and conferences you’ve attended – there will always be something that you or your peers can learn from.

Can you think of any examples? If so, jot them down.

By sharing these experiences that we don’t always think are significant, we could aid others to learn and develop new skills and improve communication within a team/section and organisation.

The importance of reflection

Reflecting helps you to develop your skills and review their effectiveness, rather than just carry on doing things as you have always done them. It is about questioning, in a positive way, what you do and why you do it and then deciding whether there is a better, or more efficient, way of doing it in the future. By reflecting on a regular basis, it soon becomes habit and can be incorporated in your daily working life.

Reflection is an important part of learning and we encourage our students to actively self reflect – so why aren’t we?

The Open University explain the importance of reflection as:

‘You wouldn’t use a recipe a second time around if the dish didn’t work the first time would you? You would either adjust the recipe or find a new and, hopefully, better one. When we learn we can become stuck in a routine that may not be working effectively. Thinking about your own skills can help you identify changes you might need to make.’ [1]

This in turn helps you develop within your role and learn from your experiences. So how can we learn from our experiences and evolve by reflecting?

Putting reflective writing into practice

By regularly self reflecting and keeping a record of our experiences through writing we can put what we have learnt through reflection into practice. Reflective writing includes both analysis, description and helps clarify your thoughts, particularly important aspects and identifies areas where you need more support and can help work out strategies for problem solving. It can help you to personalise and contextualise your own learning experience.

The way you respond to situations, opinions, events or new information can aid in exploring your learning and achieve clarity and understanding of what you are learning. Blogging and online journals are a great way of keeping a record of your experiences and practicing reflective writing on a regular basis.

The benefits of reflective writing

It can be difficult when you’re busy to find time to reflect, but by doing so you’re learning an important skill. You’ll not only improve your writing skills, but you’ll increase you’ll self-awareness and develop a better understanding of others. Reflective writing can help you to develop creative thinking skills and encourages active engagement in work processes.

Did you know reflective learners share the following common characteristics:

Very motivated – know what they are trying to achieve and why.
Proactive in expanding their understanding of new ideas and topics.
Use their existing knowledge to develop their comprehension of new ideas.
Understand new concepts by aligning and comparing them to their life experiences.
Accept and understand that research and extensive reading will improve their comprehension and add value to their writing.
By evaluating of their previous learning experiences, they will develop their future learning and thinking.
Become self-aware and are clearly able to identify, explain, and leverage their strengths and work on their weaknesses

Learning by doing – Reflective learning cycle – the theory bit!

Graham Gibbs’ (1988) Reflective Learning Cycle was developed to give structure to learning from experiences. It offers a framework for examining experiences, and given its cyclic nature lends itself particularly well to repeated experiences, allowing you to learn and plan from things that either went well or didn’t go well. It covers 6 stages:

Description of the experience
Feelings and thoughts about the experience
Evaluation of the experience, both good and bad
Analysis to make sense of the situation
Conclusion about what you learned and what you could have done differently
Action plan for how you would deal with similar situations in the future, or general changes you might find appropriate.

Carol Dweck (2007) takes this a step further by looking at the growth mindset – which reinforces the idea that everyone can learn and learn most things well. Reflection can help you to fulfil your potential by believing you can improve.

‘In practice reflective learning allows students to step back from their regular learning methodology and develop critical thinking skills to enhance their future performance by analyzing and reviewing their learning experiences – both the content of what they have learnt and the emotions, if any, attached to the learning content.’ [2]

Carol Dweck – growth mindset https://www.ted.com/talks/carol_dweck_the_power_of_believing_that_you_can_improve#t-353

How we are ‘Learning by doing’ – Tel Tales and the Tel Team

Tel Tales is an example of reflective writing in practice, it’s a community of practice, where we regularly share our experiences, ideas, failures and learning through blogging. It can often feel difficult and challenging as a form of self reflection and academic writing as it does involve writing about our errors and anxieties just as well as our successes. It’s often hard to find the time to stand back and reflect but it’s also crucial for us in developing and evolving as individuals and as a team within the current university climate.

Reflection is an important skill in learning and developing one’s self and helps us to personalise and conceptualise our own experiences. Collaboratively, it’s a great way to share our experiences whether bad or good, and develop as a team whilst raising our profile and improving our writing and critical thinking skills.

We are always looking for guest bloggers, so if you would like to contribute to our blog and did have time to have that cuppa and reflect, then please get in touch with me and share your ideas!

AR/VR in Education

October 14, 2019 / Stephen Webb / 1 Comment

In July 2019 I attended the TED Global Conference in Edinburgh. One of the most exciting talks at the conference included a live demonstration of volumetric video – a technological development that will surely change the nature of cinematic storytelling, sports viewing, and much else besides. The technology also has huge potential in education: one can imagine using it for field trips and virtual lectures. That educational potential, however, is unlikely to be realised in the short-to-medium term: most universities don’t have the skills, equipment or financial resources to build these immersive environments. But what universities can do – and increasingly are doing – is to investigate the educational potential of established augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technology.

In early September 2019 the ALT mailing list was bombarded with “me too” responses to a post explaining how pockets of interest in AR/VR were spread across a particular institution and that it would be good to be able to somehow share that practice. UoP represents one of those “me too” responses. We know of people across the University who are exploring the potential of AR/VR for learning and for skills development. It would be great if we could bring those pockets of expertise together, in order to share tips and tricks and experience. In the first instance, a group of us from TEL and Sports Science have met to discuss this – and we hope to develop a definite proposal for how this might work over the next few weeks. Watch out for news of this. In the meantime, if you have an interest in the educational aspects of AR/VR (or volumetric video) – please drop us a line.

Image Credit: Photo by Martin Sanchez on Unsplash

The importance of doodling – aren’t they just squiggles?

How can we use doodles in the context of education and learning?

Doodling put into practice

Doodle or not to doodle? There’s no wrong way!

References:

Screencastify

Screencast-O-Matic

Brainscape

LinkedIn Services to Support University of Portsmouth Students and Staff

Background

The contenders

Mozilla Deepspeech

Google Speech to Text Engine

Amazon Transcribe

The results

Mozilla Deepspeech

Google Speech to Text (through youtube)

Amazon Transcribe

Conclusion

So let’s take a step back and breath!

The importance of reflection

Putting reflective writing into practice

The benefits of reflective writing

Learning by doing – Reflective learning cycle – the theory bit!

How we are ‘Learning by doing’ – Tel Tales and the Tel Team

Further reading:

Podcasts

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