Sunday 27 December 2009

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.

6 comments:

Cormac said...

Author: cormac
Comment:

Thanks Manish, that looks v useful, I'll pass it on to my students

Michael Seery said...

This is a great idea @manmalik. @Myexamopedia facilitates students collab study on past exam papers. Might pilot this!

@psychemedia: said...

From @psychemedia:
@michaelkls @manmalik I ws impressed by examopedia too, started thinking of how commentpress might help - eg http://bit.ly/5Zl95x

Edublend said...

Hi Tony,
Comment press does seem like what some of my students wanted to have as an additional feature on the site.

They wanted to answer a question before reading the answers from other students if they so wished.

I think this looks possible with the commentpress. Can this be installed onto Google Sites?

Tony Hirst said...

Commentpress is a wordpress plugin. The idea i had in mind for an "Exampress" demo was to use something like Wordpress MultiUser with one wordpress blog per subject area, with one post per paper, such that each question (a separate paragraph in each post) would be automatically disaggregated by the COmmentPress theme. (The latest version of the theme allows you to extract each paragraph as xml as well as being able to comment on it individually - which means you can syndicate questions, or display them at random; for example, Paragraph Embedding from JISCPress and Using JISCPress/Digress.it for Reading List Publication )

Edublend said...

It will be nice to know what is your experience when you use it. Let me know.

I looked at this http://writetoreply.org/googlebooks/questions-to-consider/#8
which actually has some comments to demonstrate the feature a bit better.

I like a few things in it and not like a few others.

I like that the comments are hidden/expandable; It prompts you to post a comment; Q & A are on the same page with manageable page lengths to list a few things.

I do not like that the users names is along the post - annonymity as well as communication comes to mind. On a wiki, such as google sites, you get the message from a poster without the name (at least in normal view). Also, there is no separate way of including tutor comments as on my site.

Keep me posted whatever you find when you do use it.