SMS at Bath

I’m really pleased to announce that Geraldine Jones (http://www.bath.ac.uk/learningandteaching/staff/gjones.php) is becoming the project lead on this University of Bath pilot. I’ll still be the overall project manager for the pilot studies. This is a great step forward as the project can tap into Geraldine’s vast experience of SMS and mobile learning, and her evaluation skills She’ll be focusing on evaluating the current pilots within the overarching project, and recruiting future pilots.

FYI – web services are at the final stages of rolling out the small (tiny) url service that was developed by Matt Roper in the e-learning Team. This will allow you to significantly reduce the size of your urls for inclusion within the sms text message.

Please see … http://go.bath.ac.uk

I have just presented at a SMS conference at Cyldebank College organised by Edutxt (http://www.slideshare.net/andyramsden/edutxt-glasgow-sept08-uni-of-bath-presentation). I’d just like to report on my use of using SMS during the presentation to engage with audience interactions.

I used two similar approaches. firstly, I asked an open question which involved them talking to the people around. They had to text a reply to “how is the person next to you using SMS in Teaching. Learning and Administration? Or how are they planning on using it?” I asked them to use a question identifier. Then after a number of slides I had developed the session narrative to actually be able to use the text responses. I deliberately designed the lecture to leave 5 minutes between asking the question and me using the responses in a constructive way. This gave people time to complete the activity and all the replies to be sent. Interestingly, one person said that there reply wasn’t listed when we looked. So a lesson about factoring time.

To use the responses, I accessed the EduTxt interface, selected the CSV report, manipulated the report (I opened using Excel, then removed the columns which weren’t required, replaced the question identifier with a space), and then I re-sized the responses into a format that I could analyse in the session.

In the second approach I repeated the approach but instead of simply displaying the results I cut and paste them into a word cloud generator. This is because sometimes I find it very difficult to find patterns across a large number of replies with everyone staring at me.

I’ll admit that this type of use isn’t new. In fact I’ve reported on previous uses elsewhere (http://www.mobile-learning.blog-city.com). However, it did highlight that practice (gaining confidence) and appropriate questions meant that it could integrate effectively in the lecture with very little effort, and provides excellent feedback tool.

David Mullings and I had a very constructive meeting with Laura manning in Computer Science. We set up the account,  discussed the issues of managing opt in/out, and worked through some of the likely scenarios. A clear dependency with this project is the need for the URL Alias service (short url service). They are ready to go ….

We had a very constructive meeting with Student Services to start to work through how they wanted to use SMS to support them. They have started to develop user requirements specification which outlines their aims. The meeting also discussed how we might support each other and where they will go next. Given annual leave commitments we’ll meet up in 2 weeks time after people have logged into the software, and discuss the issues of populating the gradebook, and who will see what.

The MoodleTxt plug-in has been installed in Moodle. Therefore, for those who wish can send and receive SMS texts through their Moodle courses. The set up is very straightforward (famous last words), so drop me a line and we’ll arrange it.