Open source web analytics in action (Piwik 0.6.10)

I am just about to start an Elgg-based collaboration platform (innovatenow.net).  It still require some thinking, the whole enterprise obviously begs the question why another one … one answer is the possible demise of free web 2.0 services such as Ning … or just think about the things you better keep under control yourself (managing access rights, layout, installation of helpful add ons, as well as integration with other applications such as web analytics, wikis etc.

Anyway, I was keen to see web analytics (Piwik 0.6.10)  in action –  the  ‘tracking’ is really good, quite similar to what you might know from Google analytics. It’s good to have an inkling of how your website is perceived out there  …  Even though there isn’t much on the site I could see what information would be useful in the future:

• 120 visits so far
• Visitors clicked around 5.8 times on average (that’s quite high)
• People stayed on average less than 30 secs (no wonder)
• Visitors came to the site because they were looking for “Tim’s friends” and if you Google it yourself then innovatenow.net comes up on the 5th place (which is a high ranking but not very helpful
• One site from Unisanet links to innovatenow.net (that must be my homepage)
• And we got 9 different visitors from the US and 4 from Sweden, the high number of Britons must be a mistake

And you can widgetise most of the information above, which means you can use your access statistics anywhere you like (e.g. the usual hit counter plus)

Brave new world: The Moodle/ Google Wave

Hi,

I  was looking at  Google Wavefor a different purpose  – but some people  integrate Moodle and Wave

Moodle Wave: Reinventing the VLE using Widget technologies”

Interesting to read Martin D’s comments:

“Just realised I never actually posted about Wave anywhere yet. I saw the Wave video the first day it was published and was intrigued and amazed like the rest of you. Like most truly lasting advancements, it takes a lot of ideas we are already used to and combines them in a way that is obviously better and more usable. As to how this affects learning management systems like Moodle, I don’t think it will totally replace them (as some have been saying). Moodle (and similar systems) are (like it or not!) more about the *management* of learning at a higher level than this, a system of control and authentication that supports institutional policy and practice.”

Hmm – maybe …

or

“However, what I do think will happen is that many of the activities in Moodle will be replaced by services like these. Even in the very short term I can see Waves replacing Wikis and Blogs and Forums all over the place. Not everyone will want to use Google accounts for everything, and not everyone will want to run their own wave servers, but there will be many who do.”

Yes, that would be a step into the right direction …

Cheers C

Laptops are only half of the equation

Someone got it: ‘laptops are only half of the equation’  Quote: “I think we’re on the edge of a real inflection point where the hardware becomes so cheap that Web learning is really throughout the schools,” Hastings said. “But what I noticed is there’s really not that many people working on the software.” BTW Hastings is an interesting person …

The blog post about Hastings endeavours made me think about where ‘educational software’ is going to come from in the future. It’s quite clear that dealing with an open source product (eg Moodle) is different to dealing with a proprietary product (eg PebblePad) or Web 2.0 services (Matthew Allan’s list of applications). Will be interesting to see which form is going to dominate the market in 10 years and how universities adapt to these changes.

Mahara 1.2 ePortfolios – Beginner’s Guide

This could almost be considered a second beginning – last post is already 10 month old. Well, I am not necessarily less busy now but I agreed to review a guide for Mahara 1.2 – and here I am giving it a go …  Interestingly enough, I had to revisit Mahara over the past day’s anyway and therefore skim reading the guide was a useful refresher. There were also quite a few things I hadn’t been aware of or at least not in the context the book talked about it. Hence, a first conclusion – even though the title says “Mahara 1.2 ePortfolios – Beginner’s Guide”, chances are you find something new regardles of whether you are a beginner or not.  Anyway, most people would acknowledge that there are many shades of gray between beginners, experts and masters – and according to Dreyfus, the latter wouldn’t even need a Guide.

The book is nicely structured, which means (for me) that the book cares about readers who have questions and cannot read a book from cover to cover to find the answer. Every chapter combines some prose (purpose of a given ePortfolio, benefits you can expect if you do x, y or z, etc) with some hands-on action. You could even do a quiz in each chapter – but then I am not a big quiz fan. However, it seems a good feature if you just skim read a chap and want to know whether you missed to understand an important concept.

Another useful thing is the way three different case studies are build up throughout the book. Each case study is used to look at Mahara from a different angle (school, corporate training, and vocational training).  Personally, I was looking forward to learn more about the possibilities to drive assessment and I found an 11 step process on page 195 … The more important thing, however was an explanation on how to use course groups as a way by which learners can submit parts of their ePortfolio which can’t be changed until a tutor or lecturer has given his/her feedback and released it back to the student. In the end I believe it’s a highly recommendable book for beginners and one can only hope that there will be a similar guide for more advanced users of Mahara soon.

Disclosure:  I got a free copy of this book to review but you could browse the book on Amazon    ;)

Does your LMS talk to your ePortfolio?

Hello all (and Happy Easter), Seven month ago I had some interesting discussions about the differences and interdependcies between a Learning Management System like Moodle and an ePortfolio. Now we are a step closer to the possibility of giving students their own space and simply pull parts of their ePortfolios (eg Mahara) into Moodle for marking and feedback. If you had already some experience with putting together a course in Moodle you will appreciate the familiarity of configuring an ePortfolio (Mahara) assignment. This has also a big impact on managing ‘Assessment ePortfolios’, ie there is no need to manage things twice, i.e. only one list of students, one way of accessing assignment submissions and one place where to calculate final grades. If this sounds interesting you may have a look at mark’s screencast http://www.markdrechsler.com/?p=144  

And there is good news for the PP ePortfolio as well – students can now send their postings, blog entries or assignments directly from Moodle to PP. And if you haven’t seen it yet – Shane made a screencast for this: http://www.pebblepad.com.au/moodle.block.html  

Bottom line, in the future we need two way communication between Moodle and the ePortfolio. Teachers want to use only one system for grading and managing their classes and students should only have to type a blog entry once and be able to re-use it in their ePortfolios. So far Mahara does the first thing and PP the latter … Of course, Moodle 2.0 will change all this but then, it’s not like I will get my hands on Moodle 2.0 in a ‘near’ future

A different way of talking about Web 2.0 learning: Screencasts

I think everyone could do this: Lecturers, Academic Developers, Online Advisors or Students! 
Record your thoughts while using your ePortfolio or Moodle feature in an interesting or innovative way.
The process is quite easy – just did my first screencast and I would assume that the learning curve is rather flat for most user groups:

1) install the software

2) plug in a headset

3) start recording

4) do stuff on your screen and think aloud

5) stop recording

6) upload recording

Some examples?  See TechSmith  or user Randy

My first try was a SWF file: Managing links to external resources in Moodle boxes (2:24 min)

And then I found out that neither WordPress nor YouTube are particular fond of the SWF format, i.e. don’t accept it.

Ok so my second screencats is a proper MP4 file: Using Youtube videos in Mahara (3:00 min)

Because I told you so …

I was just reading Stephen Downes’ response to Joanne Jacobs’ posting and a whole bunch of other comments on Freire’s ideas about informal and dialogical teaching and his emphasise on needs-based learning. While I am not conversant with Freire’s doctrines I was thinking of Carl Rogers’ book “Freedom to learn for the 80’s”, which seems to argue along similar lines when he says that if you don’t think it’s relevant, you won’t learn it. You may memorise it and be able to regurgitate it, but it will hardly influence the way you interpret and interact with your environment, i.e. it won’t have a meaningful impact on you.

However, figuring out the relevance of something can be a tedious process that may take time. Time you don’t invest if you are complacently learning what somebody told you to learn in ways somebody else established as ‘recommendable’. By now you may ask ‘How does this relate to a Blog about Web 2.0 learning?’. Well, it does in quite an important way: Learning technologies have ideological allegiances too, they are expressions of educational preferences, they determine whether you guide or control your learners or let them roam and take control themselves. Looking into some open source developer communities of educationally relevant software I find this issue still underrepresented, but atm I wouldn’t know how to successfully draw a larger group of educators into the design process to remedy this problem.

Well, next week I need to map out a comparison of two ePortfolio tools: PebblePad and Mahara. I am planning to concentrate on three aspects (in no particular order): usability issues, integration issues and pedagogical values. Discussing the latter will certainly draw on the discussion started above, why should students use an ePortfolio? The answer is better not “Because we told them so ..”

No clear winner …

 My first posting was about students’ engagement with their e-portfolio. However, I had to realise that my preferred candidate application (Mahara) was not terribly well suited to support the idea of social networking.  I posted a brief question to the Mahara community to see whether I missed something that could save my plan but nope, what I had in mind is not available yet but might be in a not so far future – so let’s hope . In short, what I am looking for is a nice ‘at-a-glance’ overview that would allow an individual learner to detect and filter interesting from not so interesting news happening in her networks.

Now, this incident raised the question of ‘What does it take to create a successful networking experience?’.  For now I am settling with three basic building blocks: (a) creating interesting materials, (b) sharing, editing  and commenting that material with the community and (c) getting a sense of what is happening within your community or communities. Based on that, admittedly rough, specification, I drafted the following table to rate the three apps (Moodle, Mahara, Elgg) and it seems that there is no clear winner … It’s up to the course designer to enable a learning flow that gets the best out of each environment:

<to enlarge the diagram just click onit>

Social networking and e-Portfolios

Hi, I have been looking forward to this – finally I made some time to get this blog started …

How do we get students to engage with their e-portfolio? Or put differently, how do we even make sure that it is their e-portfolio rather than just another assessment hurdle to overcome in order to get a degree? An interesting working paper from David Tosch (University of Edinburgh) posed these questions in 2004 and I think they are still relevant questions to ask.

At the moment I am looking at ways to align social networking activities with the ideas of an e-Portfolio. More specifically I am looking at Mahara and Elgg, two tools that can be easily integrated with Moodle (our new learning platform You can have a look at the slides I used last Monday here. Of course, they are not entirely self-explanatory but they might give you an idea of what the session was all about.

Cheers, Christian

PS: I am testing these tools in a ‘localhost’ environment, XAMPP is pretty useful if you are working with Windows. You could replicate your entire VLE on a USB-drive, using XAMPP  – Happy to comment this further in another posting.