Interview with Martin Dougiamas

Interesting interview with Martin Dougiamas on the future of technology enhanced learning. From his own experiences as a child of the School of the Air in Western Australia to future developments and their impact on universities. It's nearly 40 mins but worth watching.

Interview with Martin Dougiamas from Michael Feldstein on Vimeo.

Effective Assessment in a Digital Age Workshops

Effective Assessment in a Digital Age Workshops
From challenge to change...

Using principles of good practice, work with colleagues towards an effective model for the use of technology in assessment and feedback.

A series of free workshops based around the JISC Effective Assessment in a Digital Age publication www.jisc.ac.uk/digiassess and associated online resources www.jisc.ac.uk/assessresource will take place during January – March 2011. Workshops will be held in London (20 January 2011), Birmingham (16th February 2011), Bristol (March 2011, date to be confirmed) and Newcastle (24 March 2011). The JISC e-Learning Programme will be working in partnership with the JISC Regional Support Centres on these events.

These workshops will be exploring how the use of technology in HE and HE in FE, linked to principles of good practice in assessment and feedback, can help promote more effective learning. These workshops, which draw on the work of recent JISC-funded projects as well as related significant developments in the area of assessment, will have a practical, hands-on flavour with a focus on how to move from current challenges towards sustainable change.

The workshops will be suitable for:
• Lecturers, tutors and course leaders who design assessment and feedback for their learners on HE-level courses
• Intermediaries with a role in supporting practitioners with assessment, and technology-enhanced assessment (learning technologists, e-learning/ILT champions, staff developers, educational developers, academic registry)

Further information together with the registration form for the London workshop is now available from www.jisc.ac.uk/assessworkshops

Kindle

There have been a couple of recent articles in The Guardian (Can Amazon turn e-Book Mainsteam?) and the BBC (Amazon Offers New Kindle for the UK Market) about Amazon's imminent release of a UK Kindle and Amazon's claim that some form of e-book tipping point is imminent.

Does anyone know if the major text-book providers and journal publishers support Kindle? I might be tempted to buy one, and even recommend it to students, if there was a reasonable chance that it'd be useful for more than reading the latest Dan Brown on the beach.

There is an iPod touch, iPhone and iPad version of the Kindle software so you might need even need the hardware (priced at £109 for the WiFi version and £149 plus free connectivity for the 3G version) providing that there was a reasonable supply of good text books at reasonable prices.

The Myths and Opportunities of Technology in the Classroom

This is quite US centric and based more on schools than HE but still has some interesting ideas. However, the teacher as enabler not at the centre is nothing new. As I've said many times before, it's just the method used in TEFL. Perhaps everyone should spend some time in ELTS?

Free eBook: Emerging Technologies in Distance Education.

This new eBook from Athabasca University looks at a whole series of emerging technologies for distance education. Incidentally, it contains a Chapter by Rita Kop on the TRIO Project in DACE.

The blurb for the book call it a " one-stop knowledge resource, Emerging Technologies in Distance Education showcases the international work of research scholars and innovative distance education practitioners, who use emerging interactive technologies for teaching and learning at a distance."

An continues that this "widely anticipated book harnesses the dispersed knowledge of international experts who highlight pedagogical, organizational, cultural, social, and economic factors that influence the adoption and integration of emerging technologies in distance education. Emerging Technologies in Distance Education provides expert advice on how educators can launch effective and engaging distance education initiatives, in response to technological advancements, changing mindsets, and economic and organizational pressures. The volume goes beyond the hype surrounding Web 2.0 technologies and highlights the important issues that researchers and educators need to consider to enhance educational practice."

Sue and Bob on Plagiarism

Hmmm.... not sure about these videos. There's a whole series of them. Here's one on plagiarism. What do you think?

Bye bye BECTA........ who's next?

So BECTA is one of the first victims of the government's spending cuts. Could it be the start of greater scrutiny of education IT projects? Will there be others to follow? As Rory Cellan-Jones Technology correspondent for the BBC notes, BECTA "has been criticized for being captured by technology suppliers and failing to keep up with trends like the use of open-source software." Perhaps there is a lesson there? Maybe they should have joined Learning Technologists Anonymous when they had the chance?

E is for Excellent

I just attended the School of Engineering's Learning and Teaching committee to report on the last two meetings of the e-Learning Committee and the outcomes of the HEFCW Benchmarking exercise. At the end of my report, I was asked the following question (only partly in jest I think):

"What is e-Learning?"

It's a surprisingly difficult question and one that even those of us that are dabbling in it find quite difficult to answer. It's certainly more than using Blackboard to give students access to course materials and manage a module. It's surely more that just computer-based assessment and plagiarism detection.

I sensed from the discussion following my report that it's tied up in my colleagues' minds with distance learning. But it can't exclusively be that either, because it's supposed to enhance the learning experience of our resident students as well as those that are far away.

The confusion is understandable: even those that attended the benchmarking "scoring" exercise had some difficulties with the terms that where being used in the evaluation. What exactly is usability, accessibility, student experience, pedagogy, QA and QE? And how exactly do you cost, evaluate and reward e-learning approaches?

Perhaps the problem is that the e in e-learning is usually taken to stand for electronic. The projects being funded as a reward for partaking in the benchmarking exercise are largely electronic, but are called e for enhancement (there's a RSC/JISC meeting on this theme next week in Cardiff) and that's preferable. But I like the title of the upcoming "Excellence in Learning and Teaching Conference" to be held here in Swansea. I like e for excellent –an "Excellent-Learning Strategy" is one that Schools and departments would be really eager to get behind!

Now we just have to hope that a few of our colleagues agree to present at the conference, and more importantly that significant numbers of them actually turn up!

How to Use Social Software in Higher Education

As noted in Alan Cann’s Science of the Invisible, EU funded funded project iCamp has published a handbook on “How to Use Social Software in Higher Education” and it’ll be on my “to read list” over the Easter break. The iCamp site itself looks to be worth monitoring.

We are not alone…

Today I typed learninglab into my web browser’s address bar with the intention of visiting Swansea University's hottest  web destination. And I was intrigued by how many sites Google and Live Search threw up as suggested destinations. Quite a few are apparently concerned with the same things that Swansea’s Learning Lab is and several might merit further investigation. Are there any intrepid explorers in the Learning Lab who want to put on their hiking boots and report back on any treasures that they find?

Onramp and Voicethread.com

"Ed Techie" (Martin Weller) recommended a new on-line resource for educators wanting to learn about e-learning. The resource is called Onramp and it's being published by Jennifer (Jen) Jones on her blog Jenuity.com. Although I've only just discovered it and have only read the introductions and "lesson" 1 of the 12 so far published, it looks like it'll become a very useful resource. I've already discovered an interesting networking tool called voicethread.com which Jen uses in lesson 1 to illustrate the power of networking (for educators rather than their students).

Personal Learning Environments?

I must confess to being confused about what a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) is. Having just watched Graham Atwell's new slide cast on the topic, I can agree that a PLE should be an environment that allows "accessing and searching, aggregating and scaffolding, manipulating, analysing, storing, reflecting, presenting, re-presenting and sharing." But doesn't that mean that, in the e-learning context, a PLE environment is just a computer (desktop, laptop, netbook or mobile) and a web browser? I wonder if the introduction of any form of technological "platform" restricts at least some of the opportunities for wide collaboration, reflection, discussion and personal learning? I observe my students informally engaging in many of the activities that a PLE is supposed to promote (including face-to-face conversations). They're engaging in personal learning, but they don't go into an artificial "environment" to do it. Maybe PLEs, like VLEs, are more about institution and teachers seeking control, than students' learning.

Digital Student

The Education Guardian today published a supplement in association with JISC called Digital Student. Discussing technology in further and higher education, it looks like it should be required reading for all in the Learning Lab community. Headline topics include Academia Tackles the Future, Second Life for Teaching? and 'Building a Difference'. Other topics include articles on the difficulties of motivating staff to use technology, podcasting, e-portfolios and copyright. Hopefully more special supplements will come.

'What would you not want to see in any future education system?'

'What would you not want to see in any future education system?'. Through Million Futures Future Lab want to collect a broad range of views - negative as well as positive - about future education systems. These views will help to inform the Beyond Current Horizons project.
Go to Million Futures website...

Zoho Notebook: An Easy Way to Create Web Content from and on the Web

In preparation for the up-coming new academic year, I've been checking out the latest versions of tools in the Zoho Office suite. As a e-learning application, the notebook application seems particularly worth a longer look.

Essentially a container for web objects presented within a notebook idiom, Zoho Notebook makes it easy to combine text, graphics, (Internet hosted) video and audio, freehand graphical shapes, other web pages, RSS feeds(!) and and even embedded Zoho applications (spreadsheets, documents, presentations, etc.) into interactive presentations. As an example of what can be done, this presentation "Should I Know Web 2.0" by Henry Thiele uses a Zoho Notebook to present the educational case for Web 2.0 technologies. There's nothing here that you couldn't, with some effort, do in PowerPoint (or with rather more effort in Blackboard!), but by being about the web and at the same time on the web, it seems somehow more compelling. It certainly convinced me that there's something worth exploring further! 

Plus, wouldn't it make a great tool for creating e-portfolios?

Blackboard - the future

Blackboard inc have released some video presentations about their Project NG (Next Generation) this is the hybred product that includes the final best of breed integration of WebCT and Blackboard into a single product. The presentation is not yet complete and more will be released as it becomes available. Nor is there as yet any formal release date - though at the BBWorld Europe confernence in Manchester Michael Chasen CEO suggested that it would in fact be version 10 sometime around end of 2009 early 2010 with some of the changes hitting version 9 early in 2009.

If you can bear the american hype as the presenter gets "really excited..." about every feature, it is worth a look as it illustrates the new drag and drop structure along with the context sensitive menus for course editing. You can view the presentation here it is an improvement on

Abject Learning: I use the enemy...

A minor movement in e-learning community seems is edupunk which seems to have sprung up from nowhere on a wave of anti-Blackboard fever. Tony Hirst has already started to track the meme with another of his clever RSS feed mashups. The latest contribution is the video response by Martin Weller to Tony Hirst's video "Changing Expectations" (blogged about here). The soundtrack is Anarchy in the UK by the Sex Pistols so "turn it up to 11". Stumbled upon via Abject Learning.

more about "Abject Learning: I use the enemy...", posted with vodpod

Shout out for OUseful Info!

As I mentioned it at this morning's E-Learning and Cakes session, I regularly read OUseful Info. Tony Hirst's regularly updated blog is a great source of ideas for new ways to use and mash-up Web 2.0 goodies into E-Learning resources. Tony is an E-Learning Technologist at the Open University (OU), and the OU is an institution that should really know how to do e-learning! I find I have 43 of Tony's articles starred in Google Reader and among many other things, it helped me discover Grazr, Slideshare and Pageflakes! I thought it would therefore be worth recording the link for others to share.