Examopedia for all students

'myExamopedia' is a wikipedia style, collaborative exam revision site for students anywhere in the world.

The success of Examopedia in my own practice is evident from the Google search for the term "Examopedia". See below, a wonderwheel on the term, links to University of Portsmouth, where I work. It also links to "Exam Revision" related search results, basically showing that it has made its place in the Google Search results. These are the main ones.

I know you are not convinced by its success yet! Now thats perfectly normal. Take look at the report written by Engineering Subject Centre's Associate Phil Barker or read his blog post on Examopedia. For this work I was awarded 1 of 4 National Teaching Awards by the HEA's Engineering subject Centre. This work has also been reported in several JISC projects and report.

Some student voices and usage stats to my site are also avilable for you to see.

Now, if you are convinced and want to use it for your students or if you are a student want to use it with your friends before your exam the visit the free to all Examopedia site.

Figure: Examopedia - Conceptual diagram.

 Exam revision is isolating and stressful, blurred boundaries through the use of web 2.0 technologies (like wiki etc) is shown to have helped. Many student prepare using past exam papers, Examopedia helps form a community around this informal activity students engage with. Its also provided opportunity for academics to gauge student confidence prior to exams on different topics and deliver relevant 'Just-in-time' teaching and encourage deep learning via guidance and feedback given on the site.

To keep you up-to-date with any further developments and future innovations follow @myexamopedia on twitter.

Lastly, if you liked the site or have a suggesstion, please drop a line or two here :).

Thanks for you time.

Cloud Learning Environment - What it is? (shorter version)

What is a CLE or Cloud Learning Environment? - The cloud can be seen as one big autonomous system not owned by any educational institution/organisation.
Let the Academics or Learners be the users, of some cloud based services, where both share the same privileges like control, choice, sharing of content etc on these services. This control is different from that in a PLE, a VLE or a PTE. If needed, the academic and the learner can have same rights to the shared content. For example, each "Google Site", can be owned by an academic or a Learner and both users be given the same rights/control by one another (depending on who creates first). Likewise Google Docs can be owned and shared between learners themselves or learners and academics under their own control.
This clearly has potential to enable and facilitate both formal and informal learning for the learners in an institution. Both the academic and the learner are free to use the tools the way they wanted and with anyone they wanted. This would not have been possible if the tools used were chosen / managed by either the academics (PTE) or the learners (PLE) or for that matter the institution (VLE). Google Apps was not designed just for institutions or for individuals, it was designed for collaboration both within and across institutions (CLE).
CLEs also make it very easy to generate content and share it with the rest of the world in a DERPable (Discoverable, Editable, Repurposable and Portable) manner, in the spirit of the UKOER programme.

Lastly, students at my institution love the Google Apps interface, which makes it very easy to get them to engage with their work using online tools. This can be seen from the crazy usage statistics of Google Sites where I now host my Examopedia.

Examopedia re-birth on Google Sites - an Exam revision site that lives on the cloud

Examopedia - A collaborative exam revision site that fosters student's informal ways of preparing for exams using past exam papers and helps them improve their solutions to past papers through critical feedback from the academic and peers. This site now lives in the Cloud which makes it an example of a cloud learning environment or CLE.

Exam revision is isolating and stressful, blurred boundaries through the use of web 2.0 technologies (like wiki etc) is shown to have helped. Many student prepare using past exam papers, Examopedia helps form a community around this informal activity students engage with. Its also provided opportunity for academics to gauge student confidence prior to exams on different topics and deliver relevant 'Just-in-time' teaching and encourage deep learning via guidance and feedback given on the site.



The Past
For the past three years I have been using Twiki for my Examopedia service that I run for my students. I have blogged about it earlier. Students particularly did not like the wiki interface and its WYSIWYG editor, although better than most, is not perfect.

This work of mine is quite close to my heart as it has won me the National Teaching Award from the Engineering Subject centre of the HEA as well as University Learning and Teaching Fellowship. Here is a link to a case study by Phil Barker written for the EngSC. Phil has also blogged about the service and has done a wonderful job of explaining the full potential of Examopedia as a service to students and as an OER.

The Present
This blog post is a reflection about moving from an institutional system (using Twiki) to a Cloud Based service - Google Sites. You can visit the new home of Examopedia that is on Google Sites on port.ac.uk domian. (This domain will die eventually and I will have to move it to another port based domain on the cloud).

It is for the first time in three years that I was able to create and share, the wiki pages involved in creating this year's Examopedia, with all students in my class. This meant that all students were invited to view the site via a link in their mail box sent by Google Sites during sharing the site with the students. It is the first time in three years that I could easily give access to all students as collaborators/editors. In the past students were required to create accounts on my Twiki site and only then could they edit the wiki pages. Now the account exists as they all have a google email address.

With Google Apps access to all students and Google mail accounts for all students, this worked like a trick. Better still, I was able to add Google Analytics to capture the site usage and site behaviour. An amazing 3000+ page views in just 14 days of its operation - most of which from portsmouth (class size = 58+80=138 students).

The Future
I have said several times that I wanted to use Google Wave for the Examopedia but decided against that at this stage as Google Wave was accessible by a handful when I created and shared Google Sites with my students.

I think when and if Google Wave becomes part of the Google Apps deal for universities I may try it out as a platform for Examopedia. I think I will straighaway loose out on the analytics part if I did that. Besides I am observing a colleague Dr. Boris Gremont's tutorial wave, who kindly added me to this wave that does what Examopedia does for exam revision but on Google wave.

What do students make of examopedia?
 It will not be wrong if I was to say that it is very successful in what it does and achieve. I surveyed a few students so far and the results are very positive. Its is not for everyone though, especially those who are very independent learners and like to revise all topics individually and practice exam questions individually. But even such student visit the site and read contributions from other students and my feedback/guidance to gain confidence.Forums are not the same as wikis and students can see the difference as in Examopedia students can conly contribute a solution. Communication between collaborators is muted on examopedia, but can go on in the forums if needed. All the contributions to a specific question are at one place as opposed to a forum which usually have a long thread of contributions and arguments too. Reading through these contributions can be confusing and time consuming.

One criticism I had this year was the amount of questions that were on Examopedia. Students said they wanted more questions to revise the entire syllabus. Clearly, they liked the revision service and wanted more of it. Another critiscim was that some of the answers were confusing. I usually provide guidance and feedback on conflicting and confusing answers. This view may have developed prior to me giving feedback but I need to investigate more. There were some access issues initially and for some time as the students first time used Google Sites and the fact that we had 2 domains (@myport and @port) did not help at all. That is why I said above that the @port domain will die eventually and we will have one domain.

Cloud Learning Environment - What it is?

I have been meaning to write this for quite some time now. To be honest, at some point in the run up to the ALT-C 2009 conference, I got this idea. There is a shorter version of this post too. There were many people at a session titled  "the VLE is Dead" hosted by James Clay, Josie Frase, Graham Attwell, Nick Sharrat and Steve Wheeler aka Timbuckteeth :).
Martin Weller blogged about the death of VLE/LMS too in Nov 2007. Scott Leislie coined a term Loosely coupled teaching a month before that. Martin's prediction about a move towards loosely coupled teaching tools has examples in practice today. However, there is more to it. Let me exaplain

PLE...a set of tools that the learners enjoy full control on and choice of.  The tools within a PLE are most likely not used for the purpose of formal education of all learners within an educational institution. Each learner may use a different set of tools to support/enhance their informal learning.

VLE...a set of tools that the learners enjoy very little control over, if any, or choice of and is an institutional system that is mostly likely for formal education. Academics and the institutions have the most control on this learning environment. Learners may have a say in it to some extent.

Loosely coupled.....to quote Scott, "course taught using contemporary social software/web 2.0 tools outside a course management system." - again these tools the learner may have little control over but the academic is the owner and has most control/choice. As its non institutional learning environment, it is most likely to support informal teaching and learning but may be used for formal teaching and learning too. I have blogged on this type of tools as my own personal teaching environment.

CLE or Cloud Learning Environment....The cloud can be seen as one big autonomous system not owned by any educational institution. Let the Academics or Learners be the users, of some cloud based services, who all equally share the privelages like control, choice, sharing of content etc on these services. Then this is different from a PLE, a VLE and a PTE. For example Google Apps for universities is hosted on the cloud, not fully controlled by any educational institution and certainly not owned by one. The tools on it are to a great extent academic or learner controlled. Each "Google Site", for example, can be owned by an academic or a Learner and both users be given the same rights/control by one another (depending on who creates first). Likewise Google Docs can be owned and shared between learners themselves or learners and academics under their own control.

This gives all parties the same rights on same set of tools. This clearly has potential to enable and facilitate both formal and informal learning for the learner. Both the academic and the learner are free to use the tools the way they wanted and share and collaborate with anyone they wanted. This would not have been possible if either the academics or the learners or for that matter the institution designed and developed the set of tools or bought it from any one supplier. Google Apps was not designed just for institutions or for individuals, it was designed for collaboration both within and accross institutions.

CLEs also makes it very easy to generate content and share it with the rest of the world in a DERPable (Discoverable, Editable, Repurposable and Portable) manner, in the spirit of the UKOER programme. With a bit of search engine optimisation it could work magic in terms of making the educational material that sits on a CLE visible and usable by the rest of the world.

Lastly, students at my institution love the Google Apps interface, which makes it very easy to get them to engage with their work using online tools. This can be seen from the crazy usage statistics of Google Sites where I now host my Examopedia.

Student mindset, Pedagogy and Technology

I read an interesting post by Ulrich Schrader in response to Timbuckteeth's post on E-learning 3.0. I have responded to the original post by Steve Wheeler recently and on the subject of Mindsets, pedagogy and technology here I go again...

Academic freedom allows academics to choose or subscribe to whatever pedagogy they think works for them and their students. Some of the options to choose from are:

• the "teacher at centre of Teaching and Learning" approach or
• the "student at centre" approach or
• the "network at centre" approach or
• the "content at centre" approach or
• a mix of above for some reason or
• any other approach

What technology? What approach/pedagogy?

• Static Web sites (Web 1.0) is very suitable for Instructions/Content - "teacher and their generated content at centre" - behaviourist/cognitive.
• Collaborative technologies (read Web 2.0) are highly suitable for Constructivist and or Socio-Constructivist pedagogy -"student/network at centre".
• Personalised learning (Semantic Web or Web 3.0?) - "relevant content/ activity at centre" - cognitive

What student mindset?
To elaborate this I present some of the helpful comments from my students:

• "A simple lecture on this topic would have been enough"
• "The best part of this unit was the lecture notes/handouts"
• "Lectures and some discussions with peers helped me broaden my thinking"
• "I like to be given some really good reading list, like different chapters from different books by different authors on same subject. Quality content that helps me find out the meaning of things myself."
• "for me the learning environment i.e. being in the company of other students and academics is of importance."

You can actually map these back to different pedagogical theories that I have used.

The above listed comments still do not do justice to the variety of students that is out there. Most academics choose the pedagog(y)ies that they can implement. Or those that cater to the needs of the majority. Inevitably there will be students for whom the chosen approach is not relevant. What about such students? We know well that all pedagogies have their own place and own audience. Therefore, a blend of pedagogies is not a bad thing.

So far...

Higher Education has traditionally been majoritarily behaviourist (Taught Courses-Teacher/their content at centre).

It is, however, changing rapidly anyway. A lot of academics now use the Constructivist approach as their chosen approach (allowing the student to be at the centre). Problem Based Learning (PBL) has gained popularity in many subject areas.

Student managed to learn through lectures. So WHY change?

I do PBL alongside lectures. Why?:

1. As it allows a change from a "teacher centred approach" to a "student centered approach",
2. Due to a top down initiative in my department that introduced PBL (I was starting my career then and I joined in),
3. As technologies like the Web 2.0 Technologies aided me in achieving this easily.

Ok, Lectures plus some constructivist work, WHY change yet again?

Well they say change is the only constant (sorry about the cliche).

I would like to think that the change should not come without some benefits. Someone smart out there with their brilliant new idea should not have an easy sail even if you are generally quick to latch on to new ideas.

If I can reach those students to whom my efforts do not do any good currently then you've got me. If the change is simple then even better. If it embraces (or replaces with a good reason) what I have been doing so far then ultimate. I am beginning to sound like I have a limit to accept change. But that's not true. I am all for it if it meets any of my conditions above. People like to put their stamp on things, in doing that they try to replace old with new. Innovation should build upon the good practice that is ongoing.

If the semantic web can help my students ( example: auto-find the content they need to aid their learning, auto-convert the information to suit individual style) then bring it on. I shall keep the goodies of Web 2.0 and enrich the student experience with whatever comes next in this direction.

To follow or not to follow: that is the question.

Everyone who twitters, either follows or blocks new users at somepoint. This is how they decide which network they want to join and whom to allow to receive their tweets. Twitter networks can be assymetric unlike other Social Networking services such as Facebook or Orkut (which are symmetric).

Other people have talked about their strategies on following/unfollowing new twitter users. Examples include Ms Bell (interesting 3Ps+S model described there). Please post in the comments section if you know of other similar posts that help you make a strategy for follow/unfollow.

Here is my way to decide upon this question:

When someone unfollows you, how do you feel?
I will feel bad. But I have not checked Qwitter for my profile yet. Okay I just did that...and...well I have to wait for them to send me an e-mail (Junk box awaits your email Qwitter).

When someone follows you, what do you do?
I make sure I check if I want them to follow me or not (bots, advertisers etc are particularly not welcome). I follow them back only if their profile is of interst to me and I think the reason for it is simply sustainability (as defined in Ms Bell post above) of my own network. I do not want too many tweets that I do not want to read (cost-benefit).

When you want to follow more people, what you do?
Mostly I find people of interest from within my network as it grows and people use new @names with interesting content in their tweets and I latch on. From time to time I use Twitnet to check the profiles of people on the edges of my network and for that matter people on the edges of other people's networks. This helps me grow my network under my control in a simple visual and more meaningful way.

When do you unfollow someone?
I only ever block people. I have unfollowed a few in the past when I find out that their views are disturbing or not appropriate. Basically my follow strategy saves me the trouble most of that time. In the past I have unfollowed and followed again as I did not have a clear strategy at that time with regard to follow/unfollow. No I have recorded it here so you can think of one for yourself too.

What happens when you have to make a decision to follow or not and you cannot?
In such cases I follow and use tweetdeck to group such people sepearately or keep them in all friends so that I can decide as time goes by. Then I can continue to follow or unfollow them later.

Your thoughts are welcome, please leave a comment below. I use twitter for Project Supervision to create a peer support group/community of interest amongst the studnets I am supervising. I also use it for my professional development. Soon I will introduce twitter in the classroom and the VLE for a true blended experience for me and my students. More on that soon. What do you use it for?

Web 3.0 and its role in Education

This post is in response to Timbuckteeth's (Steve Wheeler's) post on Web 3.0 and e-learning 3.0:



As far as I have experienced it, Web 2.0 is Read/Write/Collaborate (varying shades of it).



From 'create a site', to 'collaborate using a site' to 'search/mash-up the data from n sources to get the best the web has to offer on what you want' is more like what Web 3.0 will have to offer.


Web 3.0 may or may not have more mobile technologies. Mobile technologies do not change the nature of activity that web is used for only it access. So mobile or static access will happen for Web 3.0 - I am not so sure at this stage. I do not care either.


From an institutional prospective: The educational use of Web 3.0 will enable read/write/collaborate and re-present the information to learners in a more meaningful way than what current technologies allow - Filtering/searching/mash up etc will play a big role in all this.


From a learner's point of view: Web 3.0 will further what web 2.0 allowed (i.e. read/write/collaborate) and help learners 'personalise' the information that is created via interactions in Web 2.0 to best suit their own needs.


So far, mainly constructivist principles have found resonance with what e-learning (Web 2.0) has to offer. Web 1.0 was more suitable for Behaviourist principles (online material/ quizzes/feedback etc). Web 3.0 will make the content King, again. Thereby making the cognitive approach to teaching and learning more prominent alongside behaviourists and constructivist approaches.

Learners will use the web to suit their style of learning using their PLE. Institutions will benefit from being able to blend different pedagogies using the web as they need to cater for many different types of learners. Some academics will make use of this more than other giving way to Personal Teaching Environments (PTEs) that make use of the web in this way.

Next big thing will be the content created collaboratively via the web primed for the best use of its users (more personalised). Somewhere the PTE will meet the PLE and Web 3.0 need to make the meeting of these two as smooth as possible.