In this series of articles, the Educational Technology team will be providing an insight into existing practice using technology for learning and teaching at Falmouth University and various projects being undertaken within the sector. Our previous articles have covered a wide range of topics including Inclusivity, Digital Literacy and Course Design.
This week we’re focusing on Creative Education, a subject the Ed Tech team are more than familiar with. Falmouth is the highest ranked University for arts in many of the University league tables; The Guardian University Guide 2016, The Sunday Times League Table 2016 and Complete University Guide 2017. As such we have experience working with many diverse subjects spanning arts, media, performance and design to name a few.
Additionally the university has a dedicated MA in Creative Education which focuses specifically on educational practice and research being undertaken within the creative arts.
Many of our academic staff have come from professional practitioner backgrounds and bring their own experience of industry to the HE environment. This can make for really exciting interventions where technology and arts combine to create meaningful learning experiences. We’ve recently blogged about some of these current activities, such as Project Tango and Slack for assessment.
Unsurprisingly the abundance of specialist academics allows for diverse approaches to teaching and learning to exist within the University. Working closely with academic teams allows us to have an excellent overall view of the types of teaching practice occurring on modules at Falmouth and their impact on student learning.
Both of these example projects recognise the importance of discovery and play as part of creative educational experiences. Children are taught the benefits of discovery through play at a very early age, companies such as Tech Will Save Us introduce coding concepts to children through physical construction of technology. While for adults, Lego advocates its serious play method (LSP) to encourage individuals to creatively engage with concepts and ideas using Lego construction.
From a staff development perspective having a safe constructive environment to experiment and trial creative educational approaches is essential. So pause, reflect and find a creative experience that might work for you in your teaching.
The Dean’s list pulls together blogs from around the world about the hottest education technology issues occurring, and introduces higher ed stakeholders to a group of education technology thought leaders who share not-to-be-missed analyses of higher ed technology trends, challenges and opportunities.
The list is a peer-reviewed collection of education community experts, classroom leaders, admins and IT gurus’ blogs. We’re really pleased to be included!
“All part of the technology team at Falmouth University in the United Kingdom, these passionate bloggers offer lessons learned from the many IT projects they’ve attempted at Falmouth. They also widen the scope to discuss higher ed IT initiatives at large.”
A few months ago I stumbled across Gitbook, a tool that allows you to publish content as Markdown/HTML and then access it in a range of formats appropriate to web, print and mobile. I’ve written about it in a post on inclusivity, but it really deserves it’s own post and some wider recognition.
Here’s a video overview of the Gitbook web interface when you set up a new project.
What draws you in is the thoughtfulness that has gone into the design and the simplicity. You can set up your account with standard social media accounts; Facebook, Twitter, Google+ to verify authorship but if you also do any code development you can link the account to GitHub creating extra opportunities for publishing documentation. You can import Github, a Word document or HTML making it simple to work with existing material.
In the same way as Github, you can allow your publications to be forked/remixed by others and when you commit/save a change it has associated metadata with author, time date etc. You also have version control, so individuals/groups could work on different branches/versions, making it a pretty exciting tool for collaborative writing work.
If you’re familiar with CSS styles, you can also customise separate styles for each format, so you can have your .pdf looking different to your web version, which might be useful for readability purposes.
There’s an editing app for Mac, Windows and Linux, meaning you don’t have to use a code editor when you’re offline.
I’ve started a couple of projects in Gitbook; one about Digital Literacies in HE, as I think there might be room for a collaborative publication in the area and another is my portfolio for Certified Membership of the Association for Learning Technology which is gradually developing.
As if all the features and apps weren’t enough, you can even have enterprise accounts, which would mean all of your institutional documentation can live as code, facilitating better governance, interoperability, transparency, accessibility… literally every buzzword that you need to tick off for HE.
In this series of articles we’ll be casting our gaze over some examples of practice currently being undertaken at Falmouth University. We work extensively with a variety of subjects and often find that the learning experiences are as diverse as those teaching on the courses.
This month we’re focusing on Computing for Games, a relatively new course located within the Games Academy. The course had its first intake this academic year and is the only Bachelor of Science degree to be offered at Falmouth University.
EdTech recently met with course leader Michael Scott to discuss some of the tools and initiatives used as part of taught delivery on the modules. Peer support was a common theme that arose during our discussion with students encouraged to make use of Slack throughout the course. Michael has set up sub channels for each module and student groups are invited to also set up their own channels that relate to project teams. Students are also encouraged to use Slack alongside delivered sessions to discuss topics covered in the lecture.
Michael also described the role of Slack in setting formative tasks to the students, “Active learning through engagement and reflection is very important, so I regularly set tasks where each student does some work and then posts their approach to tackling that particular task to Slack”, using this method they’re able to view each other’s work and create a dialogue around their own solution, while also reflecting on the responses of peers.
Michael put some of the success of peer communication down to small group size and it will be interesting to follow how this translates into larger cohorts as the course grows in size.
Another tool particularly prevalent across Computing for Games is Github, a powerful platform for developers that can be used to share projects and work collaboratively with code. Michael has found a way to utilise the ‘pull request’ functionality of this tool to provide formative feedback to his students, “When students create a pull request, I am able to post comments directly within their code, so I go through projects and write inline feedback within Github to provide instant feedback to the students on their works-in-progress”.
As with many of the subjects at Falmouth we tend to see many industry specific tools permeate into the courses, it’s not surprising that Computing for Games are incorporating specialised tools into taught delivery, especially as it prepares students for an industry where knowledge of their use is expected.
So what’s next for Computing for Games, Michael has expressed an interest in finding a solution for viewing live streaming of code for workshop demonstrations, “At the moment I project what I’m doing at the front of a session, but it would be good to provide a link to students so they can stream what is happening and follow on their own machines”, the ET team are now looking into potential live streaming options like codeshare.io that would facilitate the functionality Michael would like to see added to his seminars.
If you’re interested in implementing any technology into your teaching or would like further information on the tools discussed, please get in touch.
The Educational Technology team recently got their hands on one of Google’s Project Tango VR development kits to explore the impact that this new technology might have on learning. We’re undertaking a series of pilot studies with our academic departments focussing on use of the technology to open up new avenues and concepts of space to staff and students. Virtual exhibitions, area mapping, and deeper exploration of learning concepts in practice based disciplines are all examples of how the technology might be used.
So what is it? Project Tango is a Google technology platform that uses computer vision to enable mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, to detect their position relative to the world around them without using GPS or other external signals. In short, it’s a mobile device with depth sensors and lasers.
There are various technologies; HoloLens, MagicLeap, iPad apps, that enable augmented and virtual reality where currently either price or functionality are a barrier to entry. This makes it harder to innovate within the University environment. The project tango development kit is built around the android operating system which opens it out to an existing community of developers and users and promotes new development and innovation.
The first pilot is taking place with the Institute of Photography and we expect this to run throughout 2016. We’ve starting blogging about it over at tango.falmouth.website, so look over there for updates as things progress. If you’re interested in finding out more or having a go with the device, contact the team.
Virtual Reality has been tipped to make great strides in the technology industry over the last few years. Big names like Samsung, HTC, Google and Facebook have attached themselves to the tech, and released some pretty powerful kit.
Virtual reality was originally developed for the immersive experience in film, then leading to flight simulators (in the late 1920’s), through to the 1960’s when the first head mounted virtual reality display was developed. At this point though, it was designed to immerse the user into pictures and film with no interaction.
Skip forward a few decades, and we move into the 1990’s when games started to be developed for users’ immersion into the worlds being created (Sega and Nintendo being the leaders…) where interactivity was key. And who could forget The Matrix! A film where characters live in a fully simulated world, and a good number of them are completely unaware that they don’t live in the ‘real world’.
From a learning point of view there is plenty we can do with this type of technology, especially in the creative contexts that we specialise in at Falmouth.
Immersion into environments that are not yet created is a major win for the creative industries. For example, the architecture industry makes use of VR to navigate through spaces and buildings to demo spaces to clients, and walk through proposals throughout the design stages. There are even some companies who will take architectural plans and turn them into fully immersive virtual reality visualisations. They then provide their clients with Oculus Rift headsets and host walkthroughs of the plans. Have a look at the archdaily VR pages to see what’s happening in this area.
An interesting concept is VR art. Tiltbrush for the HTC Vive (interesting that it’s not an android app as it’s developed by Google) allows you to “paint in 3D virtual reality”, and they say that “Your room is your canvas. Your palette is your imagination. The possibilities are endless.” That all sounds a bit aspirational doesn’t it, but it would be interesting to hear an expert’s opinion if anyone has tried it or seen it used anywhere?
Another growing field in VR is fieldtrips. With the improvement in graphical representations of landscapes and detail virtual reality fieldtrips are becoming more popular in education. They serve to prepare a person for a trip, re-cap details of a trip, or even replace the trip and give users the ability to visit areas they would not usually have the chance to. Dr Naomi Holmes (Sheffield Hallam), Dr Scott Turner (Northampton) and I conducted a small scale research project a couple of years ago in this field.
