I'm trying out a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) for the first time. Wha? Here's a nice explanation of what a MOOC is by Dave Cormier. It's a course based on constructivist, and even connectivist ideas, usually free with no entry requirements. The participants create the learning between themselves with guidance from the organisers. It isn't just in one place online like a Blackboard or Moodle course. The one I'm taking is on twitter, the social bookmarking tool Diigo, people's blogs and anywhere else they fancy.

The course is about learning analytics. Don't ask me to explain it all yet... but it's about using all the ways we have to collect and analyse data, much of it developed for website analytics or enterprise resource planning, to figure out how to do education better. Here's part of a concept map about educational data mining that one of the other course participants contributed on a webinar hosted in Canada last night. There were over 80 people taking part in the session, using a shared whiteboard and a backchannel for text comments.

I'm a bit worried that everyone else knows much more about data mining and data warehousing than I do, but reassured that they plan to cover the ethical issues. And to look at how limited just using digital data is. And to think about how you could use mobile technology to connect real world and digital data.  It's nicely informal and messy, and there's already problems with different tags being used on Diigo and twitter #LAK12 and #LAK2012. My first question: what on earth is "transaction-level data"? Does that just mean getting out the credit card? If you'd like to join the MOOC go to http://lak12.mooc.ca/index.html where George Siemens seems to be doing a fine job.

The coolness of re-finding stuff

I love the way you can use free Internet tools to create your own network of meaning from scraps, clips and brief connections with other minds. Academic fashion requires anything of "value" to have an acronym these days. So you can call this a "PLN" or personal learning network, if you want. But really it's just finding stuff again when you want it.

Like this wonderful video from Eli Pariser on personalised search. I don't think most people realise that Google alters the search results they see based on their previous search history. Or that facebook is hiding a lot of what their friends have to say from them.

This is a thrilling rap by Akala telling truth about why education's important that I picked up from a friend's newsfeed. I could have missed it due to facebook's constant, bossy interference.

And how about this fantastic development from a Stanford summer school that provides an iPad keypad for blind users where the keys follow the fingers not the other way around (think about it…)?

So you can understand why a great sadness for me in this past year has been the way in which AVOS wrecked the social bookmarking tool Delicious, previously a brilliant niknak for quickly "filing" all sorts of things and seeing what other people were collecting too. Feel free to browse the 2000-odd links I saved in 2011, which I also have backed up on Pinboard. But I think I am going to have to start using Evernote properly in 2012 to replace Delicious as AVOS seems to be insensitive to the wails of Delicious users. Which just goes to show that free is not forever, and crowd sourcing doesn't necessarily make you money… 

Another festive chore will be backing up my gmail and contacts… Here's a nice summary of how to do it. If you'd like to find out more about this stuff, I'll be running the Social Media Skills Intro and Intermediate evening courses again in January - 8 hours x 2 weeks 190 euros. Happy Christmas – and yes, I keep my gardening links online too!

I’m feeling guilty because I set my digital marketing students a blogging assignment this week, yet my own blog badly needed updating… so I thought I would mention some of the lovely stuff that I am enjoying teaching for the “inclusive communications” module of UCC’s HigherDiploma in Facilitating Inclusion (Disability Studies).

You can use the iPad2 with a projector using a simple connector costing €29. so I’ve been showing the students apps like Dexteria, which has been designed with input from occupational therapists to help improve fine motor skills and costs €3.99. 

Something I like about a lot of the assistive technology apps is they show the ways that tablet computers can be used to overcome literacy issues, which affect nearly 25% of the Irish population in their use of technology. It’s a valid criticism that iPad apps can only help a tiny minority of affluent westerners. Some 25 million have been sold, so that’s about 0.003% of the world population. 

But up until recently, communication apps for those with speech difficulties cost about $8000. Now an iPad plus something like ProLoQuo  comes in at well under $1000 and there are programmes to collect old mobile phones and recycle them to reduce costs further. This very short YouTube clip shows what a change that $1000 could make to a child’s life.

Oh, and one more thing… How about this StanfordUniversity summer project where engineers figured out that blind people could type Braille on an iPad because you could get the keys to seek out the fingers, not the other way around? 

Next task: Fix the 22 accessibility errors on this blog spotted by http://www.wave.webaim.org 

Some social media back-to-school tips...

Just cranking up to thinking about autumn courses so I thought I'd mention a few nice bits and bobs I've found over the summer.

If you haven't come across http://unbounce.com/ and you are doing anything that needs people to signup or take a particular action, it's superb, although expensive once you have to move up from the free/low volume introductory offer.  Here's one I did for Midleton Tidy Towns - not the prettiest piece of design ever, but you can tweak to your heart's desire and try out A/B alternative pages and see which one gets more click-through, as well as download your user's information. http://unbouncepages.com/midleton-tidy-towns-needs-you/

I think facebook has lost the plot with its restrictive rules on competitions... the only way you can really stay within the rules is to do nothing whatsoever on facebook, just have a link to another website where you have the competition, or else use the Wildfire app which no longer has a free option and I think Wildfire's basic option is too expensive for small businesses and startups.  What is free and very useful is the wonderful Static HTML app for creating facebook fangates, and this is a great walkthrough of how to use it:  http://www.likethisfanpage.com/how-to-create-a-facebook-landing-page-static-html-iframe-tabs/ I particularly like that you can create several tabs for your facebook page. If you need to link to graphics host your pictures on Photobucket and link to them directly for free although the ads are annoying on the free version. I also think people should use facebook's feature for tagging people in posts (put an @ in front of their name then click on their profile when fb shows it to you)  - mention them and they get an email which by natural human curiousity they will tend to check out on your page...

I've set up a Google+ account and have winged about it a bit. I think it may end up just being for tech geeks for various reasons but do please add me to your circles if you're on there...

• Everyone's lack of time for yet another social network. 
• Although you can import your email contacts, you can't tell except by whether they have a profile picture up, who's already on G+ so you risk spamming people with unwanted invites unless you spend ages hunting through other people's circles. 
• You really must use the circles feature to keep the multiple posters out of your "stream" (newsfeed) in a separate followers circle or you will be overwhelmed by noise.
• It doesn't allow you to use Google Apps emails (my own email is on a .ie domain I've had for 15 years - I'm very attached to it, it's run via Google Apps, yet G+ forces me to use a separate gmail I have to log in to specially).
• It doesn't yet have a business offering.

So what do you discover this summer?