Embedding Twitter in Moodle

As many readers will already know, Twitter has recently announced major changes to the use of their API. This has a range of knock on effects, not least potentially killing old embed codes, etc, but as things currently stand, there are still a number of options for you to embed Twitter in Moodle. I'm quite into using Twitter in the classroom, and have presented research at the SOLSTICE conference this summer. So it was important for me to find out what all these changes mean.
This post will review a few of these options, but remember, these may change further. N.B. If you don't want to read it all, scroll down to the bottom and watch the screencast...

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Twitter Widgets

There are a number of Twitter Widgets that can be customised (colours, etc) and embedded in Moodle. Access these by going into your Twitter settings (accessible via the cog icon in the top right), and clicking into Widgets.

You can create 4 different types of 'timeline' widget based on what it is you want to achieve;

• User Timeline - display tweets from a particular user's timeline
• Favourites - display a particular user's favourited tweets
• List - display tweets from members of a particular twitter list
• Search - display tweets matching a particular hashtag (#).

The major difference since the API changes, is the requirement of a Domain. If you wanted to embed the widget into a Moodle unit would need to enter the domain. e.g. moodle.mmu.ac.uk (you don't need to include the 'http://www' here.

When you are finished customising the widget, click the 'Create' button and you will see the HTML code that can be copied and pasted into Moodle (more on this later)...

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Buttons

As well as creating widgets, you can also create a range of Twitter buttons. You can access these by clicking into Resources link that appears underneath the Trends.

The four options here are to create buttons to carry out a specific function;

• Share a link
• Follow a user
• Tweet a Hashtag
• Mention a user

Each button has options to customise, e.g. links, hashtags, usernames, etc. Again, this shows a Preview window and provides the HTML code that can be copied and pasted into Moodle.

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What to do with the HTML code

In any of the above scenarios, you are presented with HTML code. You don't need to understand what this code is or does, beyond the fact that it's the magic to achieve your aim e.g. embed a timeline or create a button. Putting this in Moodle is surprisingly easy;

• Decide where you want the widget/button to appear e.g. 
• in a label within a week/topic (Add a resource > Label)
• or in a HTML block in the right hand column (Blocks > Add > HTML)
• You should see the pretty standard HTML editor (unless you are using Google Chrome). Look for the 'Toggle HTML Source' button on the editor toolbar - It looks like this: < >
• Pressing the 'Toggle HTML Source' button deactivates most of the buttons and leaves the plain HTML text view. This is what Google Chrome users would automatically see, as HTML editors in general have problems with Chrome (one of it's few downsides)
• Go ahead a paste the HTML code that you copied from the Twitter website, and click 'Save'.
• Voila

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Demo Screencast

This work by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

The eLearning Industry

This post is primarily aimed at students studying the final year eLearning Multimedia unit at MMU, although it would be great to get the views of other professional across the sector. The post hopes to give an insight into the types of jobs in the field of eLearning...

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The eLearning industry has grown exponentially in recent years due to an increased awareness around the benefits of technology to enhance learning, teaching and assessment (and actually, the whole student experience). Some of the benefits of technology include;

• Aid learning and retention (see Mayer)
• Anytime, Anyplace access to materials
• Support/facilitate social learning across geographical boundaries
• Environmental advantages
• Reduce travelling
• Reduce costs

To this end, a range of new career pathways has emerged. According to video (below), the top 10 in demand jobs in 2010 did not exist in 2004. So by this very fact we are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist, using technologies that haven’t been invented, in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems. This places an obvious challenge on our education system.

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The careers developed for the eLearning industry range from being purely technical, to purely pedagogical, with some in between. N.B. the following is a brief summary of some these roles - there will be many things I haven't included, but if any readers if feel I've missed something important, please share your views in the comments section.

Technical jobs: might include scripting/coding to integrate various systems. Take for example, MMU’s Moodle installation. When you log into a unit, the information in the right hand column is created dynamically. The Assessments block, which enables you to access more info about coursework/exams, has been custom developed to link with the University’s Coursework Receipting system. The information it presents doesn’t actually live in Moodle. The same is said for Reading Lists.

Other roles may include the hosting and development of VLEs. For example Moodle is an open source VLE so developers can write bespoke themes based on CSS to adapt the look and feel of the VLE. The same applies to other systems as well; things like repositories and media servers.

Pedagogic jobs: often focus on the direct benefit of technology to teaching, learning and assessment. These roles often include working with course teams to plan what technologies may be used, how they will be integrated, the support structures around integration, and at what points in the course lifecycle they will be introduced. As such, role holders may often be qualified teachers/lecturers, which helps their understanding of theories of learning and teaching, but they may also come from computing backgrounds (or a bit of both).
These roles may also include aspects of training other staff.

Development jobs: These roles are probably more popular in the US than in the UK (I think), and often focus on Instructional Design and Content Development. Therefore role holders will liaise with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) on actual content, and then develop this content into interactive and engaging packages, using a range of tools/technologies. Again, knowledge of teaching and learning might be a pre-requisite in order to understand and integrate suitable opportunities for formative and summative assessment.
Flash has traditionally been a key tool for bespoke software development here, but in recent times 3rd party ‘Rapid Development’ plugins convert Powerpoint presentations into interactive Flash files. Take for example, Articulate Studio, Adobe Presenter or iSpring. Other tools integrate Screencasting (a method of recording the activities of a computer screen) into such Flash packages. There are a number of free tools here, but Camtasia Studio is one of the leaders. This area of the industry is reacting to the Flash Vs HTML 5 debate by developing/releasing versions to output HTML 5 packages (as well as or instead of Flash, and to varying success). Many of these tools offer free 30-day trials.

Job titles across these three categories are often blurred. Variations on the ‘Learning Technologist’ role are quite common, and there is a lot of discussion across the sector related to the actual role of the Learning Technologist.
Further to these three categories, there is another higher level role, considering the strategic deployment of learning technologies. Again, these could be separate roles based on a technical or pedagogical focus, or even cover both.
It's probably fair to suggest these would be typical of roles in the UK Education Sector. If we expand this further, we see roles related to the Learning Management System (LMS) as well as hardware (SMART and Promethan) and software (PebblePad ePortfolios) companies.

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Useful Resources 

• Watch this short (5min) clip, which demonstrates how the advancement in technology has influenced society: Did you know…
• MMU’s Learning & Research Technologies Department - http://lrt.mmu.ac.uk/
• Demos of Articulate can be viewed here - http://www.articulate.com/products/presenter-demos.php
• Current eLearning jobs in Education via Jobs.ac.uk
• The eLearning Network offers a commercial slant
• Further info on CIPD eLearning

This work by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Communicating with Year Groups through Moodle

Year Tutors and Programme Leaders have a common challenge in easily communicating messages to large groups of students. This post discusses how you can use the Programme/Network Area in Moodle effectively to solve some of these challenges.

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You may not be aware that groups of students are automatically created in Programme/Network/School areas in Moodle based, on their year and mode of study. If you click into 'Groups' from the Administration menu (within a Programme/Network area), you will see students are grouped according to their 'Year of Study' and 'Type of Study', which means staff can target specific resources and activities to particular groups.

As you can see from the image on the right, students in the Computing & Digital Technology Network are grouped in multiple ways;

• The beginning of the group name relates to the Programme number (11398A), and the year instance (11/12). 
• Following that we have CH (Combined Hons) or UG (Undergraduate). In some areas you will see PG (Post-graduate) instead of UG.
• Then we have the Year of Study (1, 2, 3), which relates to University Levels 4, 5 and 6; alongside the Type of Study, broken down as Full-time (F), Part-time (P) or Sandwich (S). Also, where appropriate, we see indicators for partner college students (MN, SC, SP). 
• The number in parenthesis relates to the number of students in that particular group.

So what now?

Well now we know what (and who) they are, we can add the relevant groups into a Grouping, e.g. Level 4 students from across the Network (inc. CH, FT, PT and S). Then, we can create a forum that is only available to students in that particular Grouping, making it much easier to get messages out to specific cohorts of students more efficiently, and providing them with a platform to discuss academic (and perhaps non-academic) work. You can learn more about the difference between Groups & Groupings here.

The Computing & Digital Technology Network area has forums for each level that are really well used by students, and were identified as 'good practice' in the Students' Union Student 'Shout Out' event....

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Of course if you want to communicate with large numbers of students that are not automatically grouped, you could always create your own custom groups. The post on Moodle Groups & Groupings clarifies the difference between the two and demonstrates how easily you can create your own. Of course, you can always feel free to give me a shout to run through this with you.


This work by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Using Flickr to share images

Last week a student asked me if there was any central repository of images of the University (buildings, lecture theatres, labs, etc) that can be reused and embedded into coursework. I'm not sure if there is, so thought we could start one ourselves, which would help them, but also help many other students. It might also educate them a little around issues to do with copyright, and in particular, the Creative Commons licenses (I've done a separate post about CC here).

So Flickr has many facets: Sets, Groups, Gallaries, etc. I have opted to create a Public Group (although you can have different permissions, such as 'invite-only groups' if you want something a little more private), and I am the lead Moderator and Administrator for the group - if needed, it's easy enough to give other people Moderator access as well.

Students can easily join the group - Multimedia @ MMU - from the group page: http://www.flickr.com/groups/mmu_mm/ (the URL is customisable). Once part of the group, members can then upload their own photographs to the 'Group Pool'.

Easy!

I have then used FlickrSlidr, a simple 3rd party tool to embed a slideshow of the images into my Moodle area. All in all, it took me about 45 minutes, and that included researching the different aspects of Flickr as I'm not really a power user! Take a look at the slideshow below - bare in mind it's only just been created, so will hopefully start to develop over the next few weeks.



Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

I mentioned the Creative Commons licenses above - they are gaining increasing attention with the significant investment into Open Education Resources across the sector (but that's a separate post). I took a short time in class to introduce the concept of Creative Commons to students, and encouraged students to make the Creative Commons Attribution license the default for photographs they upload to Flickr (can be applied from their account preferences). This means they can be searched for from Flickr's dedicated Commons pages, and can be reused by anyone, as long as they attribute the original author.

I'm happy for other staff/students to join the group and participate in building or reusing the images we generate, and of course if you're interested in implementing this yourself, I'm happy to lend a hand.

Are you doing anything interesting related to sharing images or any other works amongst students? If so, leave a comment.


This work by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.