Presentation at UCISA

Today the APT Director (Nick Short) and APT Project Manager (Sarah Sherman) presented at 'Universities and Colleges Informations Systems Association' (UCISA) to share experiences from the APT project.

They presented on the approach taken in Bloomsbury to introduce online collaboration amongst users, along with providing examples of how online tools were utilised to reach the needs for staff and students.
The presentation concluded with a discussion on the future opportunities offered by working in the 'cloud' together, mentioning the potential project APT for Africa.

To view the presentation in Google Docs, click here.

Article published in the Higher Education Academy

Our article 'collaboration is the key to learning' has been published in the Higher Education Academy: Medicine, Dentistry and Veterinary Medicine (Medev). To read the article please click here.

Looking beyond the Google search engine

Academics often use the internet for research purposes, but with the vast amount of information on the web, it can often become a long tedious process. There are now many advanced ways to search the web to find relevant information quickly - check out Google's free tools below:

Google Suggest

Google 'show options'

Google Scholar

Google Advanced (search by file type)

Google Wave

Google Labs

Google Reader

Google Docs

For more explanation on these tools, click here

APT Extension Project seminar/workshop

Last week the APT team held an afternoon seminar/workshop with the Centre for Distance Education (CDE), University of London, on the benefits of using social tools in education.
The seminar involved an introduction to the Bloomsbury consortium, shared experiences from the APT project on applying social tools in educational contexts, followed by an interactive workshop in Google Docs.

The event attracted learning technologists, managers, teachers, directors, advisers from across a wide range of university's in London, where discussions were held about how collaborative tools might be used to enhance learning, teaching and working in their institutions.

For more information about APT Extension, and other projects that have emerged from the APT Project, please visit our APT Continuation Projects web page.

Google I/O Conference

The APT project has been working with Novoda.com on identifying suitable Google Android technologies to support mobile devices in Africa. As part of this collaboration, APT secured a small amount of funding from JISC to send Kevin McDonagh of Android out to the Google I/O Conference in California last week.

You can read a full review of Kevin's experiences on his blog.

If you would like to hear more about this early development work, please email nshort@rvc.ac.uk.

Nick

Useful APT Links

The following links provide some useful pointers to what is going on in the world of mobiles, health and Africa.

Android Forms - ODK is a suite of tools to help organizations collect, aggregate and visualize data

Google Earth - Track the spread of the H5N1 virus worldwide since 2003 with this award-winning animated Google Earth Mash-Up.

mHealth for Development - Looks at the opportunities provided by mobile technology for healthcare in the developing world

Wild Knowledge - Allows you to create and share interactive forms, keys, maps or images for use on handheld devices.

Open Mobile Consortium - Collaboratively developing interoperable open source mobile solutions for social development.

Frontline SMS - A free, large scale text messaging solution for NGOs

Hope Phones - Old phones save lives...

APT for Africa

We are now working to take the APT project into a new context through partnerships in Africa. The idea is that the basis step by step model for implementing appropriate technology also has a relevance to projects in less developed countries. We re therefore looking to coolaborate woith communiuty based projects to explore the use of mobile phones running Android, Google forms and podcasting.

Our first initiative aims to explore the opportunities provided by mobile technologies to enhance animal disease surveillance, reporting and feedback in Africa. It will draw on the extensive experience of its partners working in the field, university based research and development expertise and the insight and experience provided by Google and other technology providers.

Development Model

The APT for Africa initiative builds on the JISC funded EMERGE programme and the Users and Innovation Development Model. This model has been adapted by the Bloomsbury Colleges to help create and implement a step based introduction to Appropriate and Practical Technology. This has been used to introduce a range of Google tools into teaching and research with significant success (www.bloomsbury.ac.uk/apt ). The intention is now to extend this approach to enable collaboration with partners in livestock and wider development arena .

Partners

The following partners are associated with this initiative:

• London International Development Centre – coordinates the development activities of all 6 Bloomsbury Colleges

• Souther African Centre for Disease Surveillance – has a remit to promote One Health including animal disease surveillance

• Bloomsbury Learning Environment – experience of working with the UIDM model in collaboration with Google

• London Knowledge Lab – extensive R and D experience in the use of mobile technologies

• Vetaid – an animal health NGO with extensive experience in East Africa

• Google.org – provided support for SACIDS and the use of mobile technologies in the field

• JISC – government agency which provides support for the UIDM

• Novoda – Android software developer

Application

Using the UIDM methodology, the partners will work with key stakeholders in animal health to identify appropriate and practical mobile innovations. In particular this could focus on the following areas:

• Use of mobile phone devices to capture GPS based disease data by field staff for surveillance purposes

• Disease, population, environment and vaccination monitoring using mobile devices

• Decision, practical and professional support for front line staff from central offices

• Access to location/context sensitive disease/treatment information in text/audio/video format

• Local language based resources to support extension, education and advisory services

• Developing new mobile communities of practice to share experience and support

• Providing cross disciplinary services as part of the One Health agenda

These approaches will be trialled in a number of settings including:

• Zanzibar – RVC student research project on East Coast Fever monitoring working with London Knowledge Lab

• Arusha – Vetaid project with Community Animal Health Workers on disease surveillance

• SACIDS – government veterinary surveillance programmes funded by Google and Rockefeller

• Nairobi Veterinary School - educational programs on ECF working with British Council

Stairway to online collaboration

The May ALT-Newsletter from the Association of Learning Technology has a feature-length article about the APT STAIRS project. Read it here.

Presenting in Barcelona

Last week, Sarah Sherman (Project Manager) and Abigail Deamer (one of the APT STAIRS Demonstrator Leaders) attended the Blackboard European Conference in Barcelona where they presented at a poster session. The London International Development Centre (LIDC), where Abby is the Centre Manager, uses a GoogleDocs form to register members. The registration information feeds into a GoogleDocs spreadsheet, which acts as the Centre's membership database. A search tool for the database was developed to enable members to search for common areas of interest within the confines of the Blackboard area used by LIDC. The search tool is available as a stand alone tool, which is available here.

APT STAIRS back in the Guardian

The Guardian have reported on the gap between students and teachers using ICT in education and using our APT STAIRS project as an example of creating an awareness of this.
The article explains one of our demonstrator projects in detail and the benefits of using collaborative tools in the classroom. To read the 'Teach the Teachers' article please click here.

APT STAIRS demo at the JISC Conference 2009

Last month, Nick Short (Project Director) and Sarah Sherman (Project Manager) with David Flanders (Lead for Technology) presented at the JISC Conference 2009 in Edinburgh. The presentation focused on the concept behind the APT STAIRS project and was delivered as one of the live, demonstration sessions. Delegates were told how the Bloomsbury team developed the model of a simple, step-by-step approach to adopting innovative technology to support learning, teaching, research and administration.

This diagram illustrates the technological gap - observed in Bloomsbury - between students and staff (represented in this cartoon as Lecturers). Simple technology, such as GoogleDocs, can be used to bridge the gap at level (1). As users develop their abilities and advance the staircase, they can try out more challenging tools.

Read more about the JISC Conference 2009 here.

JISC Next Generation Technologies in Practice Conference

APT STAIRS project team members Sarah Sherman and Tim Neumann delivered a presentation on the concept behind the project and the skills developed by stakeholders as a result of the project. The JISC Next Generation Technologies in Practice conference was attended by members of the academic sector across the UK in addition to fellow members of the Emerge community. The conference, which took place at Loughborough University, provided a fantastic opportunity for Sarah and Tim to let people know the successes achieved by the project, leading to a number of interested individuals wishing to try out online collaborative tools.

APT STAIRS and the OSCELET community

The project demonstrator for the London International Development Centre (http://www.lidc.org.uk) involved the creation of a Google Docs spreadsheet to manage their membership directory. LIDC has developed a Blackboard Building Block, which uses the Google Docs Spreadsheet API to search for members with particular interests, presenting the results in Blackboard. This means that only members, who are all enroled into a Blackboard Organisation for LIDC, can access the database. All the documentation for the development is available on the OSCELOT website here: http://projects.oscelot.org/gf/project/lidcsearch/

Interview with Emerge

As the APT STAIRS project is nearing to an end, we are currently disseminating our findings to share our experience with others. Last week our Project Manager (Sarah Sherman) and myself (Project Officer) were interviewed by a member of the Emerge Community (Mitul Shukla) who works for Bedfordshire university in the Institute for Research in Applicable Computing department .
Mitul is responsible for researching and collecting data on the experience of projects within the Emerge Community. So from our hour interview on Elluminate we covered many aspects of our project from our original bid, our findings, our engagement with users, our choice of technologies i.e Google Docs and our evaluation plans. This information will be filed as a new case study to inform future Emerge and JISC projects, events and processes.

Training for Havering Sixth Form College

Anna Campbell, Psychology lecturer at Havering Sixth Form College and sessional tutor at Birkbeck and the Mary Ward Centre met with the APT STAIRS Project Manager, Sarah Sherman, last week. The meeting provided Anna with a face-to-face training session on Google Docs and to find out how the tool is being used in Bloomsbury. This is the first dissemination engagement we've had with a member of staff at an FE College - and it went really well. Anna went away with some thoughts on how she might use the tool to support her teaching.

Discussions with the Google Product Marketing Manager

Last week the team and I held discussions with Andrew Chang, the Google Product Marketing Manager, to share our ideas about new educational templates in Google Docs.

Andrew was keen to listen to our possible template ideas, such as Lab books, e-portfolios and assessment forms and encouraged our creative ideas to help students and staff in educational institutions.

Andrew also shared Google's future plans with the templates in Google Docs, which should provide more flexibility and a more 'personal experience' for Gdocs's template users. So within the next 3-4 months we should expect to see new things from Google...

SOAS release another Google application - Google Docs

As mentioned before SOAS migrated to Google Apps in May 2008, changing their applications to Gmail, Google Calendar and the Google Talk (for instant messaging).
This month they have just released Google Docs, which they hope will encourage students and staff at SOAS to collaborate more with each other.

Google Docs presentations have been running this week to offer an overview of the features and functions available and to help create an awareness of the new tool.

The IT Team at SOAS released Google Docs to their all staff and students accounts 6 days ago and have not had any complaints or queries so far! It appears the students and staff have adapted to the new tool quite well.

Collaboration is the key

Our APT STAIRS project was reported in the Guardian today, mentioning the benefits of online collaboration within the Bloomsbury consortium. To view the article online click here.

APT Project Demonstrator Lunch

On the 11th November the APT STAIRS team held a luncheon to say a big thanks to all the demonstrator leader's contributions, and to hold a brainstorming session on Google Docs API developments.

For more details about the Demonstrator Lunch, just visit our Demonstrator Lunch web page, where you will find information on how we engaged everybody in our brainstorming session, as well as pictures and live footage from the event.

Bloomsbury Survey Results

For all you of you who contributed to the Bloomsbury Survey of Web Use we would like to thank you again for all efforts, as your answers and comments have provided us with some very useful and valuable data.

So for anyone interested in viewing the results of technology use across the Bloomsbury Colleges please go to our Survey Analysis web page. Here you will find a Report on our findings along with a set of graphs to represent the data from academics, students, researchers and support staff.

Back up Google Docs to your hard drive

You can now download all your Google Docs documents to your hard drive with a programme called Syncplicity.

Syncplicity is a file back up and synchronization service, that works with your Google Docs account.

Once that initial sync process between Google Docs and your local Office document folder is done, you can edit any document locally using Microsoft Office Word or OpenOffice and Syncplicity will automatically upload the updated version of the document on to Google Docs.

This is very handy if you need to edit documents offline (like in a plane or a taxi) without requiring a browser with Google Gears.

Also, if you create a new document in your Google Docs account, a copy of that document will get downloaded to the local folder so you always have access to the document even without internet.

At the moment Syncplicity is free during it's beta period, and is very easy to use, with it's colourful user friendly interface.

New Spreadsheet interface

The new Spreadsheet interface has been updated, to look and feel more like the other Google Docs applications - Presenter and the Word Processor. The menu tool bar is neatly compacted at the top left hand side of the screen to access all the spreadsheet features, and shortcuts for all the most commonly used features have been placed in the tool bar.

The Forms have been updated too, being able to use drag and drop options when creating forms, as well as providing a new feature called 'show analysis', which displays your results in a graphical representation.

Google Docs Screencasts

New Google Docs video tutorials are available from our website, just go to the 'Training' page and select Google Docs Screencasts.

There will be many more video tutorials to come on the Word Processor, Spreadsheet and Presentation applications, but if you have any requests on a particular tool or feature with Google Docs, just let me know.

Happy viewing.

Bloomsbury Survey Results

As our Bloomsbury Survey of Web Use officially closed last week, we randomly selected our 5 lucky winners, for the £300, £150 and 3 x £50 Amazon vouchers. The winners from the RVC, BBK, IOE and SOAS will be presented with their Amazon vouchers at the Project Demonstrator Lunch on the 11th November at the London Knowledge Lab.

We are currently working with the survey data, which we will share with you on our website soon. We will create a brand new page on our website devoted to the survey analysis, to represent web use patterns, which we will be using as a guide for our next phase of the project - Google Docs API developments.

Google Mobile launches tomorrow!

The long awaited Google mobile phone will be launched tomorrow in the states, which will no doubt run in competition with Apple's Iphone in the run up to Christmas. It's expected the Smartphone's will be released in the UK in November.

Google have kept quiet about the technology of the phone, so no one knows exactly what to expect, other than the mobile phone will run on 'Android', which is Google's own mobile operating system, and it will be touch screen with a pull out QWERTY keyboard. It will also have a built-in GPS (global positioning system), a tilt sensor for gaming and will be available exclusively on the T-Mobile network. We also expect that the new phone will be able to run Google's range of web applications, such as Google maps, Gmail, Googles new web browser Chrome and of course Google Docs : ) So hopefully we can start editing on Google Docs with Google's handheld device, and not just view!