The tree that Tweets: Real-time data, real-good TEL

I'm guilty of sometimes getting myopic about TEL as consisting of the effective use of VLE systems. Administering, maintaining and extending VLE infrastructure is a vital foundation for TEL practice. It provides the platform for learning activity design (in all its forms), tutoring, and analytics to assist with student success. In all of this it's easy to lose sight of the potential of TEL to, somewhat more adventurously, add to the authenticity of learning.

A colleague at the Open University is a keen advocate on supplying students with real data in their learning. It's a value all TEL practitioners will endorse; technology routinely extends into authentic environments, particularly where the gathering or analysis of data is technologically-mediated and so already digitised. A recent catch-up with a different OU colleague showed me something very interesting. A stone's throw away from my current OU desk (though safely protected by at least two walls and my naturally poor aim) is a tree with a Twitter account (@TreeWatchOU, though the tree's account is as active as my own), providing real-time and regular data about its sap flow and trunk diameter.
The OU tree provides data-points every 15 minutes, starting from 2:10pm on Saturday May 5, 2018. All data is freely available from the bottom of https://treewatch.net/en-open-university-milton-keynes/. Other trees in the TreeWatch.net, err, family provide additional data such as soil and air temperature, air relative humidity (air RH) and soil moisture in addition to sap flow and diameter.

What's exciting about this is that students are able to interrogate real data, and see actual patterns of tree response to environmental factors in real-time - something too difficult to do without TEL. It's tremendous to see this sort of work going on, in addition to the other innovative work in the award-winning OU Open STEM Lab. This is a great example of how a custom TEL innovation can be used in addition to the standard core approach characterised by a VLE.

Take some time to get to know our tree.

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