Paddy U
Activity
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Paddy U made a comment
Thanks for the course.
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Paddy U made a comment
Probably the www.w3schools.com site so I could create some interactive resources and not have to rely on my very poor memory for syntax.
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Paddy U made a comment
Rules and regs are particularly useful when you're working outside your area of expertise (in which you'd hope to naturally be close to perfection.) The examples I always remember come from the building trade: apparently innocuous things like air-vent routing in a server room, or hand driers powered by different electrical supplies, could lead to a rapidly...
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Paddy U made a comment
JISC is also a useful organisation (not sure of its independence though). I went on some really good JISC short courses years ago.
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Paddy U made a comment
We've had trouble getting staff to even stick to one of around a dozen different electronic submission and assessment workflow options! There are nearly 200 guide documents supporting the different methods.
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Paddy U made a comment
Now I'm so accessibility-aware, I notice the lack of audio-support on OFS' video! Radio 4's In Touch recently had an article about how many adverts don't have any speech explaining whom the ad is for (eg ALDI's "I Like It Like That" and Lloyd's Black Horse campaigns.) A surprising ommission considering the cost of advertising time.
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Paddy U made a comment
This makes me think again about how, historically, academic qualifications may have been (to some extent) just a way to prove one was "a gentleman" (and therefore worthy of employment) rather than demonstrating specific practical skills and knowledge. Now that so many people are studying to this level, I don't know what the best way to reliably demonstrate...
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Yes, I hadn't thought of entry requirements! I've spent too long working on open-to-all sites.
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Paddy U made a comment
I love http://www.hemingwayapp.com/ as a tool to simplify copy.
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Paddy U made a comment
Accessibility, readability and usability constrain available design choices quite a lot. This may be a good thing! In many fields the function informs the form (some rather self-indulgent use of language there! ;-) ). Eg the visible stitching on hand-made upholstery, the shiny exhaust pipes on a sports bike, the towers of the O2 Arena... I wonder what the...
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@NishaJoseph I was about to ask exactly the same question!
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Paddy U made a comment
Pam is 72. She's a full-time carer for her daughter's children. She does sporadic part-time work with a low income. She left education at a young age. She has very limited experience of technology / internet. Her caring responsibilities and a difficult relationship with her daughter can make life chaotic at times. She dreams of "getting a proper qualification...
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Paddy U replied to Nisha Joseph
I was thinking the same. I wonder whether course design needs to be tested against things like "How much student absence can the course sustain?" "What level of literacy/numeracy is required?" etc?
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Paddy U made a comment
How does one create "typical" student personas without being stereotypical, but also without concocting outlandish unlikely (but unstereotypical) personas?
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Paddy U made a comment
I'm tempted to write an online persona-generator! But I'm not sure how complex to make it. Anyone got any suggestions? Also, do we need to throw *scenarios* at our courses too? Eg can we design courses to cope with a lockdown, internet outage, staff strike, illness, etc?
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Paddy U made a comment
Do the kinds of people who work in education have exposure to the full range of humanity? Are they capable of thinking up a diverse-enough range of personas? I see the value of personas as a way of stress testing the flexibility of our systems - throwing a range of "difficult" people at our course idea to see if it can accommodate them. And there *have* to be...
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Paddy U made a comment
For me, this part is confusing; I always think of "normal" design as being thinking of an objective (eg learning outcomes) and then thinking of feasible ways to reach it. So I'd think of "backwards design" as instead thinking of how I'd like it to feel to be on a course, and then see what people might end up learning having gone through those kinds of...
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Yes, when I saw "affordances" I feared this was getting too academic for me. I like the definition "An affordance what can be done with a thing; eg a button has the affordance of being pressed. A chair has the affordance of being sat on. I hope I'm understanding it rightly in the context of this course.
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For some of our interactives, we've built in so much Google Analytics that we can track when and how often every button is clicked and every screen viewed for each user. But I don't think anyone's ever made use of all those data.
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It made me think of design and marketing - in the same way, every element of a campaign or a design ought to contribute towards meeting the objective. But a learning exercise that seems relevant to one learner might seem distracting to another?
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Paddy U made a comment
I can imagine AI elements being added to this tool to make creating a course and associated materials almost effortless.
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Paddy U made a comment
Using humour within terms and conditions has a risk of going awry, particularly if one has limited contact with the students, or there's a large cohort or from very neuro-diverse and culturally diverse backgrounds. My student-caseworker friend often encounters complaints from students who feel they've been misled by course materials. I *do* like it when long...
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Paddy U made a comment
Learning through practice could also perhaps be called "learning through failure"?
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I guess I'm quite a "utilitarianist" (if that's a word) and love the idea of those flexible/fast personalised programmes. I can accept that there must be some worth in for-the-sake-of learning. But when I see some thesis titles I wonder if the student couldn't have been doing something more useful with their time!
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Paddy U made a comment
Have universities always been a way of deciding who's allowed (or can afford) to get the "middle class jobs"? Will this continue in different forms in a distopian future?
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Paddy U made a comment
Can anyone share any disaster stories where their education tech failed?
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Paddy U replied to Mark Hughes
We wrestled with categorising tools as ones we i) Officially support, ii) Know a bit about and approve of but don't have time to support iii) Haven't used, and there's a good alternative in i) or ii)
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Paddy U made a comment
Assessed education is, in a way, one of the oldest forms of data-harvesting; we subject students to a number of observed challenges, and then give them a status at the end, through the final grade. Much of the personalised software (educational or otherwise) is following this tradition of observing us and assessing our worth.
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Paddy U replied to Keith McGraw
This may be a bit off-topic, but it would be useful if AI could be used to rewrite learning materials into "high-brow" and "low-brow" versions, which could be checked for accuracy before publishing. This could enable students to choose their learning journey eg "Nuclear physics in the style of a children's book" or "European Political history, with cats"...
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Paddy U made a comment
When I started my dig-ed role, I was surprised by how MANY external tools we were using. I guess the fashion for creating solutions in-house is out of favour at the moment. Some external tools have been quite unreliable and poorly supported, but our systems are so tied in to them that we just have to put up with it...
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Paddy U made a comment
A lot of equipment has been sold, but I think uptake is limited. I recall "Smart Boards" and projectors being installed in the 90s, with special digital markers. I think a few lecturers were enthusiastic but many didn't use the expensive devices. Few of us get anywhere near to making the most of our various tech gadgets; maybe all that possiblity is too...
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Paddy U replied to Nisha Joseph
Did you mean a "dumping ground"? I think academic staff are often used to doing their own thing, so it's hard to force everyone to have consistent-looking courses. One of my colleagues has created "super styling" javascript code that makes it easy to get consistent layout by adding a custom stylesheet. The trouble with the easy-to-use CMS interfaces (as...
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I've used Moodle and Blackboard. In Moodle I liked that I could get access to the MySQL backend database to do searches and replaces, etc. In Bb Learn I get only read access to the SQL backend, but it's still useful.
I was given the job of moving a course for domestic abuse survivors from a custom Joomla site onto Moodle, but trying to make it look like it... -
Re look-and-feel of VLEs, I always note that paper novels have had the same look, feel and "interface" for decades and there's no rush to change them (in fact, books with different fonts or layouts are a pain to read, usually!) Google search and Wikipedia both have pretty "boring" interfaces, but very interesting content. So I'm often suspicious about a drive...
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Paddy U made a comment
I think the school-like 9-5 opening hours of education establishments means that courses have been designed around "giving students something to do" for all that time, using the available facilities. Online has a lot more scope for doing away with "space filler" course content, and allowing people to learn what they actually *need*. And, of course, reading...
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Paddy U made a comment
Is the need to be "entertained" during education more important for in-person or online, or is it the same?
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Paddy U made a comment
Much like the hybrid working I've been doing, hybrid learning can be really flexible, using whichever method is most suitable to the person, the task/learning-objective and the time.
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Paddy U made a comment
Hybrid is a great opportunity to cater for multiple learning styles simultaneously; you can have the lecture in person, live online and asynchronous without much extra effort. Student can participate in-person, by voice, or via live chat, or comments later on. Etc etc.
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Paddy U made a comment
I'd heard of "Blooms taxonomy" but I had it muddled up with the textbook and TV series "Gra/ey's Anatomy"! Re technology, often lecturers will have a favourite tool that they prefer to the version available in the VLE (and it may well be better too). It's hard to persuade them to make do with the VLE version.
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Paddy U made a comment
Use the flexibility of this medium to make ALL parts of the course useful: Face-to-face teaching can end up as a one-size-fits-all method of teaching. And a course that has to fit a certain number of hours can end up with content that's only there to fill the time.
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Paddy U made a comment
I'm Paddy from University of Bristol, UK. I'm a materials designer and au fait with interface design, accessibility and the capabilities of online and in-person learning. But I can't claim to have had much learning design training.
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I wonder whether grading of PHEICs would just tie up another committee of medical experts with lists of criteria on how to classify the latest PHEIC rather than actually taking action against the disease. Organisations love numbers and stats but what's needed is action. The Media loves dramatic sounding warnings in headlines and I think we've become a bit...
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Paddy U replied to Khalid Fathi
@JustinThomas That makes sense.
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Paddy U replied to Fergus Reilly
To answer 2), I'd say the disease symptoms make it infectious: humans coughing on other humans and on things humans touch. 3) This might just be splitting semantic hairs...
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Paddy U made a comment
I'm Paddy from Bristol, starting my first day of home-working in my online learning materials developer role. I'm looking for some trustworthy information about COVID-19; so many people are posting so much well-meant advice which I don't want to dismiss but I don't know whether to believe...