i+j=k

Ah. The pace of change… We’ve only just upgraded Blackboard to version 8.0 and already the next thing is coming over the horizon!

Blackboard NG looks exciting. Here is what it proposes to offer.

• Full integration with Moodle and Sakai modules within Blackboard
• Instructor dashboard - with items for review, alerts of students who are falling behind and who’s online
• Easier to set up course modules
• Insert mash up with YouTube, Flickr etc.
• Lesson planning aligning programme content to learning objectives
• Improved assessment tools (18 types of questions; drag & drop ordering of questions, add visual contnent)
• Improved Grade Centre
• Improved integration of SafeAssign
• Email, voice and SMS text messaging to groups of students
• Customised communities including integration of Facebook etc.
• Drop-down menu for easy editing of content in the CMS (Data Store).
• Integration of Scholar social book-marking
• Direct link from Bb Administrator panel to Behind the Blackboard
• Blackboard Connect will allow us to connect to students via voice, email or text
• Easier navigation via My Places

One of the next things on the horizon may be setting up an internet radio station to broadcast revision programmes etc.

A tool that may help us with this is iRadeo, a free streaming radio programme that handles MP3 and WAV files. Sounds too good to be true!

I am beginning to see leadership in unexpected aspects of life…

I often feel I fritter away my weekends and don’t really know how to enjoy myself properly. I think that this may be because I don’t have a very clear vision of what I want the future - my future - to look like. I am often happy to be a passenger. If I had a clearer vision I would hope to have more of a direction to follow and maybe know when I have succeeded in getting there.

I frequently find myself feeling frustrated whilst on holiday. I feel this particularly when we go visit Karen’s parents in Spain. I think this may be that I choose to be a total passenger and step away from making any decision. I leave it to Karen and her parents to decide what we do, where we go etc. and effectively say that I have no values. This isn’t completely true as Karen’s parents are strong-minded people and I think I place the value of “having an unstressful time” quite highly.

However this doesn’t really work as I often reach a point where I begin to feel a growing sense of frustration and being caged. I obviously do have values - things that need to be satisfied and so maybe I need to clarify my values more and envisage a vision of what a good holiday will feel like. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t read too many books just for fun but I borrowed this one from Karen and found it a good read.

It follows the true story of one man’s quest to read the entire Encyclopaedia Brittanica. As pointless quests goes this is probably the type of thing I would be attracted to… Far less energetic than climbing Mount Everest.

Anyway the book got me thinking a bit about the nature of information. The book played a lot on the idea that reading the encyclopaedia doesen’t necessarily make you smarter. Firstly of course reading something doesn’t necessarily mean that you have understood something. And even if you do understand it it doesn’t necessarily mean you will remember it in the future. The book highlighted the potential innaccuracies that can be contained in even an esteemed publication like the EB and also the changing nature of information over time.

Most importantly I think it demonstrated that the idea that the whole of human knowledge can be contained in a single work is a fallacy. The Encyclopaedia Brittanica attempts to record a particular subset of human knowledge - the so-called important stuff. Names, dates, places, theories etc.

Human knowledge is much wider that this of course. Businesses are interested in business information. People are interested in social stuff. And we’re all interested in tranisitory stuff like train times, phone numbers etc. All these sorts of information play a much more important role in our daily lives than the sorts of things in the EB. The EB is a product of the Enlightenment and, like most libraries, focusses on just one sort of information: the stuff you can write down in books.

What’s interesting is that in the Information Age these other sorts of information have become more prominent. Information technology has allowed us to take a much greater interest in these non-Enlightenment sources of information.

The Information Age brought with it Business Information Systems that have enabled businesses to process and analyse huge amounts of business information in the pursuit of profit.

The web has allowed us to access previously unimaginable amounts of trivial information that was was previously only ever captured in the negelected backwaters of libraries where the  “grey literature” was filed.

And now social networking has revolutionised the social information available to people. No longer are we dependent on local gossip and physically connected communities but can inform our friends across the world that we are “tired” or “happy” or “lonely”.

JISC InfoNet have produced a number of good resources and I have stumbled across another one - strategic planning and implementation which ties in nicely with my leadership studies

One of the main outputs of the project will be a scenario planning toolkit that will be launched at a conference in November.

This programme aims to approach the issue of strategy planning and implementation from a novel and innovative perspective. Rather than viewing the formulation and approval of strategic plans as the culmination of a regular cyclical management process, we instead intend to focus on actually achieving demonstrable organisational change driven by a combination of strategic vision and organisational need; thus re-positioning the planning process to represent the means to an end, rather than the end in itself.

This focus on actions rather than words requires a more rapid, iterative and responsive approach to strategic planning and implementation than is often currently the norm. This has implications for how the process is co-ordinated, particularly in relation to the utilization of technology and to the number and range of staff involved.

JISC have recently published the results of their survey of HEIs which reveals that the most pressing strategic issues facing FE and HE institutions are related to ‘organisational infrastructure’.

“The challenge for those charged with determining their organisation’s strategic direction is to find ways of ensuring that their high level strategies actually make a real and positive difference where most required.”

The survey also revealed what the respondents “felt needlessly wastes most time, effort and energy within your organisation”.

Hmmm… sound familiar? I think our list would include all of the top 5 apart from perhaps the issue of legislation.

Finally the responses on how often institutions update their strategic plans is interesting. Most places renew their strategic plans on an annual basis as you’d expect but - and this surprised me - a fair percentage review them more frequently.

Finally… after months of waiting we finally have a new Mission statement! (in draft form at least). It was presented after today’s ETC meeting without any fanfare as Carl was away on leave which I thought was a bit of a shame. This is BIG NEWS!

The mission statement itself isn’t bad. I think it describes something that resembles BPP College and includes a statement on values which is fantastic - just what I was looking for. At last I can begin to consider whether my values align with those of the organisation and we can begin to develop strategic plans that embody these values.

Having a mission statement is a great step forward but what troubles me is that I don’t know the process in which it was created. Who was involved in the conversation? How were the shared values arrived at? Are the stated values really our shared values? Or are they just Carl’s whims? Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of months ago we received student feedback data that Geraldine (our Data Analyst) had produced for us. Students were invited to complete an online QuestionPro survey and rate facilities according to a 5 point Likert scale.

This was the first time we’ve had such detailed data and is an extremely valuable way of identifying the areas in which we are and are not meeting student expectations.

Pleasingly it identified some aspects of our service in which we definitely are meeting student expectations - notably our online library resources which in some cases scored above 4.6/5.0! Amazing!

Most importantly for me was the student impression of the VLE. This was important as one of the objectives for the project was to achieve a score higher than 4.0. Because of the way the surveys were conducted I don’t think we could accurately say we achieved above 4.0 overall but we did score above 4.0 in six out of eight surveys which I think we can regard as a success. Interestingly the two scores that were lower than 4.0 were both part time student surveys. Without any further clues to why they rated it lower we are putting this down to the fact that they may been less comfortable moving from the old Campus system. We will need to pay close attention to this next year.

The other low score (3.0) was for the amount of PCs in Manchester which kind of told us what we knew already but provided some valuable emperical evidence to support the idea of building a new PC room.

This summer we’ve upgraded to Blackboard 8.0 and I’m struggling to understand all the new features.

Of course being Blackboard there is a flashy online presentation as well as a PDF brochure but it’s difficult to cut through the marketing blurb and work out what it really does.

• Improved GradeCentre - allows much more data to be entered and displayed and has more powerful analysis tools. The old Grade Book was something that we felt didn’t meet our needs very well so I have high hopes for the new improved GradeCentre. Hopefully it will allow us to deliver a lot more online assessments!
• Self & Peer Evaluation - allows students (or peers) to reflect and grade their own work according to their tutor’s assessment criteria. This could be a useful tool for developing critical skills.
• Anti-plagarism (”SafeAssign”) - It would be worth comparing this against Turnitin and get a proper understanding of their relative merits…It looks like this compares work with other work already held in the system,.
• Social networking (”Blackboard Scholar”) - still not sure exactly what the advantage this has over de.liscio.us but I guess it allows tutors to manage their web links better.
• Improved workflow management -
  
• 360 view
• Additional range of icons

Blackboard have been trying to sell us a new system called Outcomes which would plug in to our Academic Suite. The marketing blurb says it:

• Provides learning organizations with visibility into their institutional and learning effectiveness, and the tools and insight to guide measurable improvement
• Reduces the time and cost of assessment by structuring, tracking and reporting on assessment processes like accreditation and strategic planning
• Academic and administrative outcomes can be measured more easily using the system’s comprehensive set of instruments

Benefits of good teamwork

• Teamwork improves the working environment.
• Teamwork keeps communication consistent.
• Teamwork relieves stress.
• Teamwork reduces errors.
• Teamwork keeps communication lines open.

Characteristics of good teamwork

• Open communications
• Commitment to a common purpose, values and performance goals
• Shared responsibility
• Use of resources and talents
• Capacity for self-evaluation
• Participative leadership
• Positive Leadership Practices
  • Models the way
  • Challenges the process
  • Builds shared vision
  • Enables others to act
  • Encourages the heart

Characteristics of Effective Team Members

• Team members are supportive to achieve the results.
• Team members avoid “winning” or looking good at the expense of others.
• Team members keep the goal and the mission in mind.
• Team members are open to the ideas of others.
• Team members are mindful of and caring towards each other
• Team members share information and ideas.
• Team members support the contribution of others.

Characteristics of Effective Teams

• Have high expectations of themselves
• Maintain awareness of their culture and climate and its impact on performance
• Actively manage and build their relationships with other teams and their stakeholders
• Ensure clarity of roles and responsibilities and capacity for mutually supportive action
• Remain conscious of their interdependence with other teams and their positioning and alignment with the larger organisation
• Ensure high quality communication both internally and externally
• Regularly monitor/ review their performance and seek feedback against standards and expectations externally
• Commit to and make available time and resource for ongoing development in pursuit of success as a team