mickelous

Since I last posted about Threadsy, they’ve pushed out some new updates which have (in my opinion) made it even better.  For a full description of the changes that have been made, see Threadsy’s blog post, but I’m just going to highlight three new or updated things that I like.

1. The new user interface is very nice.  It is much easier to navigate your way between different accounts, and all of the buttons are a bit bigger which makes it much easier to find what you are looking for.  I really like the move towards a more tabbed approach along the top for inbound, drafts, sent and more.
2. You can now give each of your email accounts a nickname, so instead of your account being <domain>1 you can give it a name that means something to you, for example ‘Work’.
3. This one is a little bittersweet for me.  Threadsy have added label support, but as folders rather than pretty colours in my inbox.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m really pleased that I can go to my ‘Facebook’ label/folder and find all the related emails, but I’d really like to see the labels in my inbox like I can in GMail.

Threadsy is developing all the time, and I’m really looking forward to the next major release to see what they implement next!

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Tired of having to log in to multiple email accounts and social media accounts every morning to check for all your messages? Then perhaps you should try Threadsy.

What is Threadsy?

Currently in beta, Threadsy is a web-based communication consolidation tool.  In plain English, that means that you can have all your personal email (e.g. GMail), Facebook and Twitter accounts all available in one place through one login.  These are divided up into two sections: a large column on the lefthand side for ‘inbound’ messages (all your emails) and a smaller column on the righthand side for you ‘unbound’ stream (Facebook and Twitter).

You can do all your normal activity through Threadsy including sending new messages and replying to emails.  If you use GMail as your personal email account you can also archive emails like you would in the GMail interface which will also archive it on your GMail server as well.  Threadsy also pulls in your address book so that you can easily send emails to your contacts. You can also sign up to Meebo which brings all your chat accounts like Google Talk or Facebook Chat into once place.

The ‘unbound’ column allows you to keep up with your news feed on Facebook and timeline on Twitter.  You can also reply and retweet Tweets and comment or like Facebook posts.  Any tweets that you are mentioned in, or Facebook messages or comments sent to your inbox or written on your wall will also show up in your ‘inbound’ stream so you’ll be sure not to miss them.

What I like

The first, and most obvious advantage to Threadsy is only having to login to one place to check all my emails.  I have three personal email accounts that I use and being able to login to once place means that I can check them all regularly and without having to have multiple tabs or windows open. I also like the fact that you can comment on Facebook posts or reply to a tweet from within Threadsy rather than having to click through to another site or application.

My favourite feature, however, is when you click on an email from a someone who I also have as a contact on Facebook or Twitter as the ‘unbound’ column then shows me their profile information and profile photo and any recent status updates or tweets from that person. I’m also a big fan of the way Threadsy ‘unshortens’ shortened URLs (such as bit.ly) so you can see what you are clicking on as well as embedding linked YouTube videos so you can view the videos directly from Threadsy.

What’s missing?

Those of you who use labels in GMail will find that they do not import into Threadsy at the moment. It is also not possible to get to your Twitter lists or click on hashtags to view the full conversation, although you can search for the hashtags using the unbound search function.

I’d also like to be able to see Google Buzz posts and RSS feeds, or at least for Threadsy to pull in my feeds from Google Reader.

Final thoughts

I should be clear that Threadsy won’t work for your University email account, so if you use your Kent email as your main email address then Threadsy is probably not going to be something you will find very useful.  However, for those with more than one email account who are fed up of logging into multiple websites to check your messages, this could be the tool for you.

I have to admit that for the moment I will probably continue to have my GMail account open as I use labels a lot to organise my messages and to make it easier to locate important emails.  I also have a Twitter client installed on my computer to keep up with Twitter during the day, but I do quite like not having to login to Facebook to keep up with what’s going on there.  Whilst TweetDeck (a popular Twitter client) also allows you to have a ‘News Feed’ column, it’s not my main  client as I prefer something a bit more compact, and Thready’s replying and commenting functionality makes it a lot more useful than TweetDeck.

Whilst I probably won’t be using Threadsy on a daily basis, it’s certainly a tool I’ll be using when I’m away from my own computer(s) and want to check all of my accounts quickly and I’ll certainly be checking back regularly to see what new features the team have added.  I’ll also be keeping an eye on Mozilla Raindrop which promises to provide similar functionality to Threadsy but as an installable program on your computer.

If you want to give Threadsy a go, you can sign up to the beta at www.threadsy.com.  If you have any problems signing up, leave a comment as I have 10 invites to give away as well!  If you do give Threadsy a go, do comment on this blog post and let me know how you got on and what you thought.

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The learning technologists here at Kent have been reading the 2010 Horizon report preview and we’ve made an initial response here: http://blogs.kent.ac.uk/learn-tech/2010/01/25/2010-horizon-report-preview/

We’ll be writing a further response when we’ve read the full report so check back soon for that.

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I’ve spent the last hour and 40 minutes following live feeds from Apple’s ‘latest creation’ event where Steve Jobs has just announced the latest shiny Apple toy to grace our palms: the iPad.

First, I should clear something up.  I’m a big fan of Apple products. I have an iPhone which literally goes everywhere with me and I would replace it in an instant if something happened to it. I also use a MacBook (now rebranded as the MacBook Pro) at home and would not go back to a Windows-based laptop (or a Linux-based laptop for that matter). If the funds were available, I’d use a Mac at work too.  I’m not going to go into the Apple vs. PC debate here, a Google search will give you more than enough reading material for that, but suffice to say I am probably bordering on being an ‘Apple fanboy’.  Yet I’m writing a blog post about why I won’t be buying an iPad…

The positives

Just because I won’t be buying one doesn’t mean there aren’t some great features.  For a start, it’s a very attractive piece of kit.  It’s a good size and weight which makes it more portable than my netbook and the built in apps like email, web browsing and calendar are pretty smart.  The iWork (Apple’s office suite) apps look easy to use and the accessories previewed looked pretty cool, particularly the keyboard dock.  The graphics are not bad either.

It’s biggest selling point for me though, is the iBook app and related store.  Apple have got five major publishers on-board already and if the iPad is successful I’m sure more will follow.  If journal publishers join the party and libraries get involved as well then the iBook app could be an excellent eBook reader.

Yet I still won’t buy one…

The biggest missing feature for me is multi-tasking.  With my netbook I can have my email, Word document, web browser and Skype/IM open all at once (that’s my minimum desktop!) and can flick between them very quickly.  With the iPad, every time I want to change applications I’d have to close the app I’m using to open the next one.  It already bugs me on my iPhone, on something closer to a proper computer it would drive me nuts.

That’s not the only reason.  When I’m typing I like the feedback of having a physical keyboard under my fingers.  Yes, there is the keyboard dock that I’ve already mentioned, but that’s one more thing I’d have to carry around and I’m just not sure I’d want to type two hours of notes from a meeting on a touch screen.

Another noticeable absence is some form of webcam.  I don’t use the webcam on my netbook often, but if I’m away from the office and using Skype to make a call I’d like the video as well.  There’s also no support for Flash in the web browser, and whilst HTML5 might be a solution in the future, it’s not quite there yet.

When it comes down to it the iPad is, at least for the moment, just a big iPhone/iPod touch with better graphics.  I’m sure developers will create some excellent and innovative apps and I do think the iBook app could be a big hit but it’s not enough for me to pay $499 for one just yet.

If Apple release a version that can multi-task though, I would seriously be tempted…

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Being a Learning Technologist, it’s only appropriate that I write a blog post about all the technologies that I’ve been using during the snow.  Some of the examples below are technologies I’ve been using over the last few days whilst its been snowing outside, others I’ve been using to find out about the snow or to get around being away from my work computer.

Twitter

There’s more than one Twitter tool I’ve been using during the snow.  The first, and most obvious is the #uksnow hashtag.  People around the country, myself included, have been using #uksnow to build a map of current snowfall around the country by tweeting “#uksnow <postcode> X/10″ with the score out of ten relating to the amount of snowfall (1 being a few flakes, 10 being total whiteout).  On the #uksnow website this is then translated into a rough approximation of where and how heavy the snow is around the country.

Secondly, I’ve been using Twitter to find out whether the University has been shut or not by following @UniKent.  The tweets have been published between 10-20 minutes before the all-staff emails have arrived in my inbox, and there have also been tweets about local travel information.

Dropbox

Dropbox is a cloud storage solution that allows me to sync up to 2gb of files between computers automatically.  Anything I copy into my dropbox folder at work will be accessible from my dropbox folder on my home computer.  I can also access my dropbox through the website from any computer with an internet connection.  Using dropbox means that I don’t have to email myself the latest version of a file at the end of the day if I want to work on it at home, I just open up my dropbox folder and the file is there.  Very useful on Friday when I had a few ideas I wanted to add to one of my documents that would otherwise have been trapped on my work computer.

iPhone

All of the above technologies I can access using my iPhone.  As well as those I’ve already mentioned, I can also use my iPhone to check my email, calendar and RSS feeds.  More importantly with the snow, I can keep track of the weather using any one of the many weather apps that are available from the iTunes App Store.

Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking tool, and one that I’ve been meaning to investigate for a while, and being away from the distractions of the office (the ringing phone and people dropping in to my office) gave me an opportunity to have a play.  Social bookmarking is a way of sharing website and resources that you are interested in or have been reading so that others can read them too.  I’m not going to go into any more detail here as I’m going to post a more comprehensive blog post soon with a few ideas on how social web 2.0 tools can enhance learning and research.

Elluminate

Elluminate is a web seminar and conference tool that I’ve currently been using to access the live and recorded sessions from a virtual conference at the University of Leicester’s Learning Futures Festival 2010.  With Elluminate, the presenter can give their presentation over the internet, sharing slides or web resources as required as well has running live polls to gather information and opinions from participants.  The presenter can also be viewed using a webcam if they choose. The participants can discuss and ask questions in a chat box next to the slides as well being able to raise their virtual hand to ask a question using their own microphone if they wish.

Virtual conferences are not just useful when the country shuts down because of snow.  Hosting the conference online has meant that people from around the world who may not have been able to justify travelling to England have been able to participate in the conference bringing different cultural perspectives and opinions together for some very interesting discussions.  I’ll be blogging more about what I’ve learnt at the conference next week once the conference has finished and I’ve caught up with the sessions that I’ve missed.

Google maps, but not as you know them

One of the workshops at the Learning Futures Festival was a chance to come up with a few ideas as to how Higher Education might change in the next 15 years.  We each chose a starting statement from a choice of four and were then sent off to the Labyrinth, a customised Google map, and given a city to start from (mine was Vienna).  Clicking on the city brought up a challenge, with some thought provoking questions which we had to answer in the context of the starting statement we had chosen.  We all had to keep a travelogue on a public wiki where we recorded our answers and thoughts.  Once we had completed the task we were sent off to another city to complete another task until we had successfully found our way out of the Labyrinth.

What surprised me the most about this workshop was how involved in the task I became.  By the end of it I fully believed in the future I had created even though it was based on one statement that may or may not come true and was ready to defend my ‘future’ to anyone who wished to challenge it.

Second Life

Second Life is a virtual world where you are represented by an avatar of yourself that you have created.  Whilst I’ve had a look round Second Life before, I hadn’t really had the opportunity to experience this virtual world with other people so I was glad to get the opportunity to try it out with others from the conference.

At the end of each day of the conference, all the participants are invited to the camp fire on the virtual island that the Beyond Distance Research Alliance had created.  Here we all have a mug of hot chocolate and discuss the days sessions, sharing ideas and opinions.  I have to admit that I’ve been a bit sceptical about Second Life, but I’ve really enjoyed the discussions and networking opportunities around the camp fire and have felt a lot more comfortable talking to people’s avatars than if we were just chatting over a conference call.

I also had the chance to wander round a virtual lab today.  Whilst it is a long way from being finished, the concept is really interesting and I’m looking forward to seeing how the lab develops.  Again, I’ll be blogging some more about Second Life and some examples I’ve seen during the conference later next week.

Conclusion

Who says snow days are unproductive?

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That’s right, I’m on the move. After two years at the Law School I am moving over to UELT on Monday 14 December 2009 to become the Faculty Learning Technologist for Social Sciences.

As a result, my blogging is likely to become a tad split. General University-wide learning technology posts will be going on the Learning Technologies blog, (http://blogs.kent.ac.uk/learn-tech), and I will continue to blog about personal opinions and thoughts on learning technologies on this blog. No doubt after a couple of months over at UELT I will have more of an idea how best to divided my blogging to ensure that things end up on the appropriate blogs. What I won’t be doing is duplicating material. If I post something on the learn-tech blog, I’ll link to it from here if relevant.

On the plus side, it does mean that I will be able to dedicate a lot more of my time to using, testing and breaking various technologies and software and have a far wider experience base which will hopefully make this blog more relevant to a wider audience.

If you are a member of staff who is part of the Faculty of Social Sciences, please do get in contact with me if you have any questions, ideas or just fancy a chat about learning technologies. My contact information can be found on the e-learning website: http://www.kent.ac.uk/elearning.

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Yesterday evening, Helen Carr (Director of Learning and Teaching and module convenor for LW588 Public Law 1) and I took 100 TurningPoint handsets over to Woolf Lecture Theatre for a lecture Helen was giving about the English Legal System to prepare students for their upcoming summative assessment in Week 6.  The advantage of using TurningPoint for this lecture (hopefully) makes the delivery more interesting for the students (particularly at 5pm on a Thursday!) and it also helps the students to see where they may need to re-visit (or in some cases visit for the first time) particular sections of the course before their assessment.

TurningPoint (picture right) is an interactive response system that enables students to answer questions posed by the lecturer during the lecture and view the responses in a graphical format.  Think ‘Who wants to be a millionaire’ but without the exciting music.  There are a couple of software options for using TurningPoint but we used the plugin for PowerPoint that integrates the questions into a PowerPoint presentation.  The advantage of this (at least in my opinion) is that many academic staff are already familiar with PowerPoint so it is not a huge step from creating a slide to creating a TurningPoint slide and adding some questions.  I tried this on both 2003 and 2007 versions of PowerPoint, and whilst it works on both, the options are much more obvious and easier to change in 2007.

Those of you who know the University will probably be thinking, ‘Woolf Lecture Theatre is a bit big for 100 students’.  Here’s where we were breaking from the norm.  Currently, the University only have 100 TurningPoint handsets, but our largest module has 524 students and the module last night has a total of 385 students so we had to work out how best to spread 100 handsets over 300+ students.

In the end, we decided to get the students to work in teams of two or three.  I had a couple of concerns about this, the first being the logistics of handing out and retrieving the handsets, and the second being that students in groups with a ‘new toy’ could lead to quite a bit of noise which may disrupt the flow of the lecture.

Logistics wise, it all worked out well.  Helen and I set up the receiver for the TurningPoint handsets and started the PowerPoint presentation, by which time most of the students were seated (about 250 students).  We then distributed the handsets to students in groups of two or three with Helen doing one side of the lecture theatre and me doing the other side.  This only took about 5 minutes to do, which was much quicker than I’d anticipated and I was left with three handsets which I then gave to the students who turned up late.  Gathering the handsets in was also fairly simple, Helen stood at one door and I stood at the other and the students handed in handsets as they left with a quick check after everyone had left to make sure there were no handsets left lying around.

The lecture itself went well.  Helen’s slides were well composed with a number of questions that may come up in the students’ assessment in week 6 and a following explanation describing why the correct answer was indeed the correct answer.  The students engaged well with the questions and seemed to enjoy the opportunity to discuss each question in their groups before answering.  Whilst it got a bit noisy at times, generally the students quietened down between each question and Helen was able to complete all of the questions she intended to ask during the lecture.

My final thoughts?  I wasn’t sure whether getting students to work in groups in a large lecture theatre was going to work, but I was pleasantly surprised that it not only worked but seemed to be very effective.  The proof will be in the results from the assessment in week 6, but from looking round the lecture theatre, the students seemed engaged and interested and there was definitely a lot of note-taking going on!  If you’ve been put off from using TurningPoint because you teach more than 100 students in your lecture, I’d certainly recommend giving it a go.  In fact, even in smaller groups I think that asking the students to work in groups works well and encourages them to discuss their answers and in some cases argue why their answer is correct.

For a bit more information on the pedagogy of using TurningPoint handsets, have a look at Susanne Krauss’ PowerPoint slides and bibliography from her demonstration at the E-learning forum (ELF) last May.

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I follow Anne Marie Cunningham on twitter.  Anne Marie is a GP and a Clinical Lecturer at Cardiff University who is interested in new technologies that further medical education (yes, I have just stolen that from her profile information!) and writes interesting blog posts on social media and learning technologies, often in response to studies and journal articles.

Recently she wrote a short blog post on a student’s use of Wikipedia when asked to compare a journal article and a Wikipedia article.  It shows the prejudice against Wikipedia and the unwillingness of the teacher in this example to teach how to use it constructively, whereas the student shows us how it should be done!

The student’s approach is exactly what we should be encouraging; students (and academics) updating incorrect Wikipedia articles rather than complaining that they are wrong.

I’d also recommend Anne Marie’s blog post in response to the BBC’s article on the Tech Addiction report from Cranfield University.

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For the last two or three weeks, it has been really busy with freshers’ week and week one. As a result, a number of queries and problems have come in, adding to my workload from the iteration I planned at the beginning of week one (see my previous blog post for more information on iteration planning).

As scary as this sounds, with Agile it becomes a lot less scary.  The key to staying sane is prioritisation!  OK, so that sounds like a fairly obvious statement, but how often do you take a few minutes out of your day to look at your list of tasks and consider which ones are the most important?  Using user stories has meant that my ‘planned’ work has already been prioritised, based on business value, ideal hours and common sense.  So what do I do when extra work comes in?

The most important thing to remember is that one of the fundamental principles of Agile is ‘responding to change over following a plan’, so if something more important comes in, dropping a user story off the bottom of this current iteration is not the end of the world.

The first thing I do is consider how long the task is going to take me.  If it is a task that is likely to take me less than an hour, I will slip it in during that day as my ideal hours for each day is 5, yet I actually work 7 hours a day.  Those extra two hours per day are there for this exact reason, as well as responding to emails, answering the phone, having a cup of tea etc.

However, if I anticipate the the user story will take over an hour, I will write a user story for it, giving it a business value and ideal hours.  From that I will then work out it’s priority compared to other user stories in my iteration and slip it into the pile at the appropriate place.  I also add it to my iteration plan on the whiteboard by my desk so that I can easily check what I’ve got to do and what needs to be done next.  I can then give the ‘customer’ a fairly accurate estimate on when the task will be completed.

Sounds great in practice,  but does it work?  The answer to that is an emphatic YES!  During my last iteration (the two weeks before week one, encompassing freshers week) a lot of last minute Moodle related requests came in, which meant I had to drop a couple of user stories off the bottom of the iteration.  My velocity, the actual amount of hours I was able to dedicate to the user stories, was less than I had anticipated due to extra meetings and more emails than normal so that also affected how much I got done.  However, everything that NEEDED to be done was not only completed by the required time but actually with plenty of time to spare, and I am confident in saying that the reason for that is using Agile to plan my working weeks.

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Last week, I was on holiday in Falmouth.  It was lovely.  I forgot all about work and spent some time sailing in and around Falmouth harbour.  But now I am back, and as it is nearing the beginning of term, I’ve got a lot on (as well as wanting to keep on top of the English Legal System project) so I wrote off Monday as an email and planning day.  But not just any old planning, Agile planning!

If this is the first time you’ve come to my blog, I should direct you to Steve Coppin’s blog on Agile which will give you an idea of what Agile is.  But briefly, it is a working methodology that has been used by software developers and follows these four principles:

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

So what’s this got to do with academic administration?  Steve is a strong Agile advocate and is interested in finding out if this working methodology can be applied successfully in an academic setting and I offered to give it a go with the English Legal System project.  However, for Agile to work effectively, I needed to apply the methodology to my entire working week, not just the bits of the English Legal System.

Creating user stories

Last month, Helen and I sat down with a pack of ‘report’ cards to plan the English Legal System project.  The idea is that you break the project down into small ‘user stories’, providing easier, bite sized chunks to prioritise and work on.  We wrote our user stories in the format ‘As a [user]…. I want to….. so that….’.  For example, one of our user stories was:

‘As a lecturer

I want to use existing resources augmented by additional resources to create an interim solution for 2009/10

• So that students have resources to use this year
• So that we have more time for the final solution’

On the back of each user story, we wrote ‘acceptance criteria’.  Until each of the acceptance criteria has been met, that user story is not completed.  The above user story had the following acceptance criteria:

• lectures available to students
• slides available
• ability to add additional materials

Once we had written all the user stories we could think of, we went back through and assigned two numbers to them.  The first number was the number of ‘ideal days’ that we estimated each user story would take.  Ideal days are based not on a full working day, but on (realistically) how much time you are able to work solely on that user story.  The second was the ‘business value’ of that user story; how important the user story is to the customer.

Planning my work

It was with these user stories three weeks ago that I planned my first two week ‘iteration’.  Steve and I worked out how many ideal days I had for that two weeks, taking into account prior commitments and a bank holiday.  Having done this we then worked out the priority of the user stories for the first ‘release’ (planning and approval).  This is not an exact science!  Our business value was a score between 0 and 20 which we then divided by the number of ideal days to give us an initial priority list.  We then looked at order we had put the user stories and said ‘does this make sense, knowing what we know?’.  This involved rearranging some user stories to fit with the availability of key members of staff and also making sure that we didn’t have user stories higher up the priority list that technically could not be done before a user story lower down the list.  Finally, we had my first iteration planned, and it was a success.  I completed everything I needed to, and when extra work came in, it was easy to drop a user story off the bottom of my iteration (ones we’d brought in from the next release to fill extra time) and keep on top of my work.

Which brings us back to last Monday.  It was time for me to plan my next two week iteration, this time on my own.  Steve and I had already had a chat and decided that because of the nature of some of my user stories and other work coming in that converting my user stories to ideal hours may work out better.  I then wrote some new user stories, not for the English Legal System, but for the induction and orientation preparation work I had to do before the beginning of term.  Once I’d done that, I worked out the priorities, rejigged it to fit with timing of events where necessary and that was it, job done.  On Monday at 9 a.m. I felt swamped and unsure how I was going to get everything done.  By the time I left at 5 p.m. I knew exactly what I was going to do and when.

I’m now half way through my second iteration and it’s going well.  I’m still on target to complete everything on time, despite having extra things given to me as the week went on.  My ideal days consisted of 5 hours work, leaving me 2 hours a day to keep on top of emails and deal with queries as they came in, giving accurate estimates on when I would be able to complete any extra work that came in.

Planning in this way particularly helped me on Thursday when I was struggling to concentrate on my presentation for sessional teachers.  Instead of sitting there staring at it for the rest of the afternoon, I looked at the whiteboard that I had written my iteration on and picked a ‘quick win’ user story that had a lower priority but fitted the time I had available.  I haven’t done something that I had planned to do in this iteration, I have just slightly rearranged the order so that I use my time effectively.  This means that everything still gets done by the end of my two week iteration and will hopefully result in a happy customer (boss!).

Next week is going to be a very busy week, and I hope that my Agile iteration will help me to keep on top of everything in the madness of freshers week.  I’ll let you know how it goes!

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