Increase in the number of users of online services

South Essex College now has up to 20,000 students and up to 2,000 members of staff. The represents a large increase in the number of users who can now access the College's online environment.

Usage stats don't normally mean a great deal but it's interesting to note that since 28 January of this year the student homepage of the College's intranet (C_Space) has been accessed 1066054 times.

In order to ensure that teaching staff are familiar with C_Space we will be running training sessions each week on C_Space resources and services.

Technology Exemplar Network News

The Technology Exemplar Network has just published its first newsletter.

As part of our contribution to the Network, South Essex College will be working with students to promote the use of technology in teaching and learning.

During the past couple of years students have had a major impact on the way the College uses web-based services in its teaching. It is therefore appropriate that students should now act as advocates of ILT as South Essex College.

More on the 'learner voice'

South Essex College has developed a range of social networking tools that allow students to share experiences and ideas regarding their teaching and learning. Students can create blogs, post status updates using an in-house Twitter type application (Seek), vote in online polls and post messages in online forums.

These tools are becoming increasingly popular amongst students. During the last academic year, for example, 25855 messages were posted in 1023 topics in 245 forums. Since the start of the current academic year students have posted over 8000 messages in the forums.

Students here hardly need encouragement to make their views known. We are though planning to issue a number of netbooks to students to enable them to access the College’s social networking tools via the wireless network. Informal soundings to date have indicated that we will not be short of volunteers when it comes to allocating netbooks to students.

Technology Exemplar Network

South Essex College is now a member of the Technology Exemplar Network. The network is a group of FE Colleges and skills training bodies which aims to promote and share the use of technology to support teaching and learning.

The Network was launched in 2008 to help colleges and other learning and training organisations use technology more effectively by sharing best practice. It is led by Becta – the government’s educational technology agency – and the Learning and Skills Council (LSC).

South Essex College will be working with the following Colleges on the network

• College Of West Anglia
• Otley College
• Boston College
• Workers’ Educational Association: Eastern Region
• Leeds City College
• Blackburn College
• Southend Adult Community College
• Grantham College

More information about the network can be found here.

Updates on the work of the network will be published on ICTHorizons.com

This week's poll of the week

This week's poll has been suggested by a student. The poll went live this morning and so far over 450 students have voted.


We have been running a poll of the week for students since 2002. The first ever poll was on the UK voting age and attracted 278 votes. Currently over 2000 students vote in the poll each week.

seeK: the first three weeks

As you may know, we launched an all new version of our student intranet last week. At the same time, we also unveiled a brand new student area called c_live. The launch went as smoothly as could be expected, there were some small issues (broken links etc) but no major problems in application logic.

There is a lot to be said for how to best manage a transition between systems, our school of thought is to flip the switch and see how it all works out, trusting in our robust design. This, to a large degree was the correct decision as few students struggled with the new system although there was much discussion on the system in our forums.

When we did 'flick the switch', it was with a sense of personal trepidation as included in the upgrade was a web application called seeK. seeK is a twitter/facebook style status sharing application designed to provide students with the social networking & collaborating functionality they crave whilst ensuring it takes place in a secure and managed environment. I was nervous, as it can easily been seen as a chat application with no benefit to teaching and learning.

This is a similar argument that was levelled at the internet when it was first offered as a resource, however it is my thinking that unsupervised or unmanaged any resource can be a distraction (doodling in a text book is a good example).

So what happened?

From uploading the application to the live server, it took under a minute for the first seeK status to be posted, that in itself is a record. The thing is seeK isn't on the main page of seeNet, it's a completely different section called c_Live, which means:

• The students recognised a new version of seeNet
• Realised there was a new section called c_live and clicked the link
• The Student was presented with a range of new applications they hadn't seen before 
• Posted a status update

All within a minute and with no guidance from us.

Say what you want about the term digital natives, the students took to the concept of seeK like ducks to water.

So all went well?

When I first unveiled the system to the team for testing, we messed around and posted silly status updates, if we did that, I wouldn't expect anything less from our students. Students will test the boundaries of the system they are given and boy howdy did they do exactly that. The one that stands out from the rest was a student  using an harmless css injection attack to change the background image of c_live to a picture of himself!

The Scunthorpe issue

To protect our students from inappropriate status updates I've created a simple regex function that parses the status checks for certain words. My opinion is that swear filters are an exercise in futility, in that it a machine cannot detect (at the time of writing) the intent of the sentence. That means that the system can only check for a range of string values and execute the correct response based on the validation of the string. We can easily create a sentence that will pass through the swear filter, but can still be offensive. Better yet we can legitimately use swear words in a sentence e.g. Literary students can discuss the character of Phillip the Bastard from Shakespeare's King John. The system won't know of the play, let alone the character, all it will see is a word that is in the list of banned words and block the update.

It begs the question, if users can circumvent the system and the system itself can block legitimate discussion is there any point to a profanity filter?

Leaving the censorship debate aside, seeK has given us unparalleled access to the learner voice and their opinion of the changes on seeNet. I think that seeK gives us access to a previously unheard majority within the College as not everyone uses the Forums or emails us with feedback.  In fact I've spent the last week modifying seeNet based on the feedback received via seek including swapping the two column layout for a three columns and making it fixed width. Alongside feedback, I've set up a default MyseeNet account that is auto associated with all student feeds, it allows us to ask questions, give answers and in some cases help students find lost memory sticks!

The bottom line is that we need to find new ways to communicate with students, whatever your thoughts are on e-learning, web 2.0, digital natives etc. Social networks and the internet aren't going to disappear just because some in education are afraid of change, students are expecting their learning experience to match their social one.

Students want it, if we're not listening to our learners we're not being good educators.

At the time of writing 793 seek profiles have been created,  3048 status updates have been posted and 1085 friends have been added since the launch of seeNet 2.0 on the 25/11/2009.

c_live

I've reached a milestone, apart from some CSS layout bugs c_live is 99% done.This has been a big project of mine and although I've mentioned it here and there I haven't really done a full blog post about it. I should probably start at the beginning, for the last year or so the Interactive Learning Strategies Team have been thinking about our long awaited upgrade to our bespoke learning platform, seeNet.

A lot has changed within education since seeNet's inception in 1999, google was a relative unknown, there was no such thing as mobile internet and Apple's ipod was just a twinkle in Steve Job's eye.

The main problem of current VLE's is they have, for lack of a better word baggage.

When e-learning was first being thought of, it was such a radical concept that people talked and championed and enthused and discussed and presented..... you catch my drift. This continual fervent chatter created the impression that e-learning was something in a box that you could just unleash and suddenly everything would just work. It didn't and for a range of reasons that are probably best left to another blog post. The failure of e-learning create a deep suspicion of technology within the education sector, right at the time students started to expect it.

I finished my diploma at South East Essex College just before seeNet was switched on, so I was part of the last generation to go through a course without online ILP's,Wikis, Courseplans, online collaboration even the internet was restricted. Compare that to now, you can access anything, anywhere, you can check your bank accounts whilst grabbing a cup of coffee from Starbucks.

Let's look at our typical student (for now, lets assume there is such a concept as a typical student), they are comfortable with technology, they can happily surf the internet, chat with friends, share content, shop, use mobile phones etc. So we can comfortably say they know how most things work in an internet browser on a superficial level. Yet most in education are still stuck in the late nineties, especially our learning platforms, this got me thinking. If I was a student now, what would I expect when I logged on? Now I should preface this by saying I'm not talking about "College of the future" that wouldn't even require the student to log on.

And so c_live was born.

I looked back to my college and university experiences to see what technologies and services would have made my life easier.

seeLinks:

The one thing that always annoyed me is that you're doing some research on campus and you find something really useful on the internet, so you do the sensible thing and bookmark it. Except that when you go home, you've forgotten the address and you can't get at the bookmark as its stored on your user profile on the network. We're almost through the first decade of the new millennium and our student has two options, trudge back up to campus, log on and email it to your home account or have the foresight to jot it down in a notebook?

We shouldn't be making our students life harder, so to led a helping hand I created seeLinks, its a xml based web app that allows students to store useful links within the browser, all you need to do to access them is log into the vle, this can be at home, work, or even at starbucks.

seeFeeds:

Information overload, TMI  are just a two terms demonstrating the problems of living in the information age. We get content fired at us from every angle and sometimes it makes it difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff. seeFeeds is a simple to use RSS feed aggregator, RSS feeds can help, instead of looking for the information, you can get your favourite websites to send information to you. This means that the information that will populate your c_live experience is tailored to you.

seeNotes:

You remember I mentioned scribbling down the url when talking about seeLinks? This takes the same concepts and applies it to a notepad, got a deadline? note it down here. What about a study meeting with students from your class? Instead of jotting it down in margin of your book, you can write it here and you can be sure that it won't be misplaced.

Seek:

Seek is probably the biggest change in what we're offering students. There's been a lot of talk this past year of how online collaboration tools can help students. Twitter has been cited as an example of how we can quickly update and share information with friends and colleagues alike. Currently education has no such tool to offer, however giving students unfettered access to a micro blogging site is full of pitfalls and makes it hard to manage students use of it. So I took the quick microblogging features of sites like digg and twitter and developed an application that would enable students to interact with each other and share information whilst being in a secure and manageable space.

Blogs:

Blogs have been a big buzz word in education for a long time now, but they've always been an external application that students have to log into. I've given students the ability to create blogs and share them with the rest of the student body (subject to our approval) with one click. If students elect to share their the blog with other students, it's published to a live feed that is available direct on c_live.

Look and feel:

c_live doesn't look like your typical learning space, or any other learning software for that matter. That's because instead of creating the application logic and interface myself, I posted on our student forums that I was looking for students to help shape the way c_live looked. A games development student offered to design the interface for c_live, I accepted and the design that he came up with was completely left field but epitomised the ethos of c_live completely:

Simple, effective and like nothing in education today.