Category: Tech

Edtech start up guide: re-post from #altc blog
This post was originally published here on the #altc blog, 1 March 2018.

Over the past six months we have been working on a guide about how Learning Technology professionals can work together with start-ups and now we are ready to report back and launch the first edition of the guide we have written together.

At the outset of the project, we wanted to find out what makes a successful collaboration between Learning Technology professionals and start-ups, what barriers may get in the way and what experiences we can learn from. We also asked the question why this is important and how it might be useful to the wider community, both individuals and organisations.

We have since had many contributions and ran an edit-a-thon session as part of ALT’s Online Winter Conference in December. The resulting guide document is the first version of what we hope will become a growing collection of case studies and lessons learnt, that not only share glowing examples of when everything went right, but also critically reflect on the risks, setbacks and issues we may encounter along the way.

In his foreword to the first edition of the guide, Peter Bryant writes:

Communities come together to apply tools to problems, sharing and swapping expertise and experience to enhance how we use those tools, or invent new ones. This is one of the key reasons to consider how or why you might engage and interact with start-ups. Institutions have the capacity to shape and influence a solution for their specific problems as opposed to bending critical interventions such as delivery and assessment to the requirements of the platform or technology.

This guide provides a starting point, a blueprint for collaboration. It is the result of consultation with and contributions from ALT Members and the wider Learning Technology Community and was produced by ALT in collaboration with Aula and with particular contributions from:
- Ayse Kok Arslan, Google (Contractor), Mountain View, CA
- Samuel Butcher, Scientific Collaboration Specialist at Labster, @samuellbutcher
- Maren Deepwell, Chief Executive of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT), @marendeepwell
- Dan Harding, Learning Technology Officer at Keele University, @danielharding
- Jenni Hayman, Program Manager, eCampusOntario.ca
- Anders Krohn, Co-founder and CEO at Aula, @anders_krohn
- Mikkel Lauritzen, Director of Partnerships at Aula, @mik_lauritzen
- Kate Nicolson, Education Technologist, UK @KateNicolson
- Sarah Sherman, Bloomsbury Learning Environment Service Manager @BLE1
- Lucy Tallents, freelance educator & visiting academic at Oxford Uni, UK @lucytallents
You can now access the guide http://bit.ly/altcstartupguide .

Reflecting on the collaboration from my perspective, I am struck by how much our ability to collaborate, to work together effectively in Learning Technology, is about our ability to communicate with professionals from different contexts.

There are so many competing priorities, problems for technology to ‘fix’ for the organisation, the individual or the learners, that it is challenging to manage the risks associated with trying new things. On the other hand, the rewards of being agile, or learning new things, being comfortable with taking risks and manage change, are significant.

This guide starts to chart the journey of bringing innovation into practice and we will expand it over time into new editions with more contributions and case studies that help us gain more insight into this undertaking.
04/03/2018
Making stamps.. with remixable thinkery

I’ve been taking a more playful approach to making something online this week, experimenting with new ‘Remixable Thinkery’ that Bryan Mathers has been working on as part of his Visual Thinkery projects. Have a look at the sandbox and a gallery of what others have created to date http://sandbox.wapisasa.com/ .

I had a go with the stamp template and tried out different remixes, including uploading photos, resizing/recolouring the text and moving things about.

Having a play with lots of different options is a lot of fun and I found the interface easy to use and intuitive. I tried it on mobile and desktop browsers and found it easier on desktop, but both worked.

I tried out a range of images, including drawings, like this one which I made for an online conversation on Twitter around concepts of belonging and digital citizenship last year.

Having spent a lot of time waiting in the post office in recent weeks I was inspired to try and make a stamp collection sheet with my newly created stamps using powerpoint.

11/02/2018
Comedy & competition: putting a virtual race app through its paces

I was interested to read The History of the Pedometer (and the Problems with Learning Analytics) by Audrey Watters, published on 22 June 2017, in particular as this week I was putting a virtual race app to the test.

The virtual race I took part in was a paid for race, for a charitable cause, and its premise is that you can run wherever and whenever you choose, tracking your progress and then adding your results to the ‘global leader board’ – raising funds in the process. I signed up because 1) I was curious to try out the app/virtual race concept, 2) I wanted to support a good cause, even if in a small way, and 3) the idea of taking part in a race without having to physically go to one appealed to me as someone who isn’t particularly competitive and prefers running at dawn.

The marketing around the race & app was very similar to the kind of things you read in Learning Technology press releases but the reality did not quite measure up to its vision of being part of a global army of empowered fundraisers each experiencing a fun & inspiring ‘personalised’, celebrity endorsed run. Instead I came up against a lot of small, technical niggles that made using the app less than ideal and required giving it access to a lot of information on my phone before the running had even begun. The account I had to create and the data I had to share only added to this.

The actual running was supported by a prerecorded soundtrack of comedy commentary from celebrities sharing their ‘race progress’, something along the lines of “I just made it to the halfway stage – keep going!”. Personally I thought it was too simplistic to be really amusing. You could listen to your own music as well, although I failed to make that work. For runners who were more competitive and wanted to know how they were doing, the app did not deliver either. Despite tracking your progress via GPS it was unable to tell you how fast you were going, which made the whole idea of competing with the celebrity runners from the soundtrack a bit pointless. You could guess how much time had elapsed since they passed a particular time marker, but that was it. Given that the soundtrack was so limited, it seemed to me that neither comedy nor competitiveness were served well.

My 5k run was soon approaching the finish line and the end of the race was for me the most disappointing moment: a half-hearted soundtrack of cheering was interrupted by a signal and then “You can how stop running”. That was it.

When I turned to check the app I also realised that the timer had kept going, counting the minutes, although I had already crossed the virtual finish line. For a race app this seemed a fatal flaw as it felt frustrating to not have an accurate race time even for a casual participant like myself. I can only imagine what more serious runners made of this.

Having used a lot of different running apps and gadgets over the past year I think you could do a much better job building a virtual race app and organising a race – indeed I think it could be a really good experience! It has great potential. But in this particular instance neither the technology nor the delivery measured up. It was a soulless experience for me that seemed to fall flat and left no scope for the imagination and seemed to not even try to cater for or understand its users. If any actual testing of the soundtrack took place, I would be very surprised. I hope at least it raised funds for a good cause.

02/07/2017
Celebrating the birthday of my own ‘domain of one’s own’

Fittingly after a week at the OER17: The Politics of Open conference, I am celebrating the birthday of my own ‘domain of one’s own’. I’d like to say thank you to Jim Groom and all the folk at Reclaim Hosting for their support – you are awesome!

07/04/2017
Collaboration in practice: Contributing to Emergency Rations #EdTechRations

This week saw the publication of a new book edited by David Hopkins called Emergency Rations #EdTechRations. This is a volume of contributions from dozens of individuals across sectors and below is a short description of what the book is about:

“What’s so important we can’t leave it at home?”

This book is a collection of 40 world leading teachers, academics, influencers, critics and practitioners who have answered the question “have you ever walked out the door to go to work, the shops, the gym, etc. and realised you’d forgotten to pick up your smartphone? And then turned around and gone right back for it?

It was fun to contribute my own emergency rations and I enjoyed having a writing challenge of a different kind for a change. Seeing the finished product drop through my letterbox and leafing through so many different contributions, mostly written in words, but also drawn and illustrated, made me reflect on what a productive collaborative effort this has been.

A lot of the work I do is collaborative and I know first hand that getting a large group of people to produce something specific for a specific deadline is no small task. We used a range of platforms from Slack to Google Docs and Twitter along the way and I learnt a lot from reading and commenting on drafts of colleagues and then going back to review my own.

In the end what I included only represents a small part of the content I ended up writing, but the other bits will end up in blog posts or journal articles over time.

A big thank you to David for pulling everything together!

For my part, I am going to use this experience to set my sights on more writing projects in future, both collaborative and individual. It’s been an inspiring experience to see collaboration in practice.

04/03/2017
#FLcoding16: we meet graphs in the second week

It’s the second week of the course ‘Learn to Code for Data Analysis‘ and we have started making graphs! Alongside my course participation on FutureLearn I am posting a short summary of my experience on my blog (you can read also my post from Week 1).

I found this week a lot quicker to get started, partly because I am now more familiar with the course structure but also because the Anaconda interface I am using is becoming easier to navigate. That was a good thing because I have less time this week. Picking tings up where we stopped in Week 1 this part of the course introduces new concepts and methods leading to learning how generate graphs using the plot function. I found generating my first few graphs and changing what they showed immensely satisfying. The data we are using this week is about the weather and the project of the week enables you to use weather data from your own location.

In order to practice some of the syntax and get more used to using the interface I have started creating my own fictional data set which I am experimenting with in a separate exercise book. Hopefully there will be more time to play with this and the weather project next week. For now, the course continues to engage and educate – enabling me to learn the basics at my own pace. One study resource that I have found particularly helpful is the weekly glossary. I have downloaded both of these and use them to help remember different concepts. See you in Week 3…

22/10/2016