ATLC – 2010 Day 2 September 20, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentThis was a bit of a SHARE Project day as we had a paper in the morning and a poster at lunch.
Angela Trikic and I shared our presentation slot with some innovative projects. This included “DAT’s the way to do it? Medical students and Learning Technologists working together at Peninsula Medical School. Sally Holden, Russell O’Brien, Zac Gribble, Paul Russell, Carmen Mallett, Robin Oswald“ This considered the concept of Dr as teacher, which encourages students to understand the importance of the role of Drs as teachers and life long learners. The elearning support unit provided support and resources on the induction to this course, which included collaborations with students on the production of reusable learning objects. Another paper ”Personal inquiry in formal and informal settings: nQuire for scripting interactions Eileen Scanlon, Mike Sharples, Paul Mulholland, Members PI Team” provided an overview of some activities of the Personal Inquiry (PI) project which is funded by the ESRC/ EPSRC Technology Enhanced Learning programme, and is research jointly conducted between the University of Nottingham and the Open University in which young people aged 12 – 15 undertake evidence based inquiry learning across formal and informal settings. The aim was to increase engagement in science. The project created a tool to facilitate inquiry based learning activities. The final paper ”A Second Life pilot in two online M-level programmes Gabi Witthaus, Alejandro Armellini, Kelly Barklamb” looked at using second life to support work-based and distance learners, facilitated by Salmon’s 5 stage model and e-tivities. The study found that using a simulated oil rig to simulate an evacuation in SL “allowed students to take part in activities that they may later be required to carry out as practising Occupational Psychologists, such as planning work and developing training programmes.” The findings showed “that it is possible to create very flexible and cost-effective learning experiences using the affordances of SL. Used with well-structured tasks, and in combination with an asynchronous discussion forum, SL can add a useful dimension to distance courses.” Our presentation in this slot was well received and there was a lot of interest about incentives for engaging staff and encouraging them to publish as well as our approach to creative commons.
The final part of the morning was pretty active after my last minute decision to attend “Guerilla Narratives of Media” workshop, where participants in groups were asked to film ideas on their mobile devises on how to use media in teaching. The workshop was introduced with some ideas on how media can be used and then it was left up to the participants to come up with some ideas that were shared on YouTube and in a Wiki.
During lunch time I was able to provide some more information about our project to individuals that came to observe the excellent poster produced by Jon Fletcher within our project. Individual questions ranged from copyright, staff engagement and repository implementation.
After lunch I attended an endearing keynote The hole in the wall: self organising systems in education Sugata Mitra which provided observations of students self organised learning in India facilitated by a computer in wall. Mitra was able to evidence the educational progress of his young students over time that was encouraged by the interactions of their peers and some volunteer supporters, grandmother recruits in the UK. Mitra also showed a study he had carried out in Italy where students answered English questions with no English language knowledge and without the presence of a teacher just using the Internet.
The second day was concluded with some useful strategic presentations on e-learning implementation. “The programme-design sabbatical: an institutional strategy to mainstream technology-enhanced learning Colleen Connor” looked at Welsh initiative to mainstream technology enhance learning, lead by programme leaders, with a multi-disciplinary team based approach, by focusing on building the skills gap, encouraging staff engagement by routinely considering TEL in programme design, so that it was considered a normal process,. This was followed by “Infinite space: an innovative & collaborative e-learning approach to large cohort delivery David Fevyer, Brian James, Kathryn Cheshir” which focused on “the development of a multi-faceted e-learning resource to deliver a complex unit across multiple subject frameworks within the School of Conservation Sciences at Bournemouth University (BU)”. The development of this academic practice unit was a collaborative process which included included academics, research students, librarians and learning technologists. Taking a flexible on demand approach it implemented a variety of technologies and techniques to support the unit including streaming/recorded lectures, with formative feedback provided by postgraduate students. The final paper for this session “Captain, navigator, surgeon and cook: balancing leadership and support in educational change management – a case study from legal education Jonathan Powles, Aliya Steed“ looked at the transformation of an online graduate diploma in legal practice to “a group-based transactional and simulated learning” which “required a significant shift in philosophy, as well as practical changes, which affected almost every staff member in the organisation.” The change was facilitated by a team who had no subject specialism but had skills in education design and project management.
It looks like a major theme for the day was collaborative and multi-disciplinary team approaches to project delivery
ALT-C 2010 -Day 1 September 20, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentAs usual the first day had a packed schedule. It started with a challenging candid keynote from Donald Clarke, “Don’t Lecture Me” attacking the lecture as a concept, he also criticised the use of Maslow’s theory, stating that the only reason it survived was because it fitted nicely on a ppt slide. Clarke illustrated how lectures can be tedious for learners and argued that it is better if students see a first class lecture online than a mediocre one face-to-face, although he stated that all lectures should be captured so that students had a second chance to go back and listen to the info but gave no evidence as to whether students actually go back. Clarke went on to query the necessity to cling on to the traditional format of lectures, for example, instead of 1 hr in length why not 15mins, the necessity to attend - when on average only 50% do. He contested that researchers are not necessarily inspirational lecturers and that the lecture is not the most appropriate form for student thought.
The next session I attended was a workshop on Justifying the Costs of Learning Technology - this looked at the issue of replacing localised learning technology to a solution that is open source and centrally managed. We were asked to consider the resources, benefits and how to evaluate the process. This was quite an interesting session as we implemented a new VLE 2 years ago Desire2Learn and although this was not open source many of the issues we discussed in this workshop, such as staff engagement, training, content migration and gathering usage data related to our implementation experience.
In the afternoon I went to the session on Mobile Prardigms: DIY Portfolios the 3 papers presented looked at the use of mobile technologies within teaching. The first paper ”Mobilising remote student engagement on field trips Tim Linsey, Ann Ooms, Stuart Downward, Ken Field, James O’Brien” examined the use of mobile technologies in fieldwork to enable collaboration, communication and efficiency in fieldwork, as part of JISC funded project hosed by Kingston and De Montford University. A range of technology was used which included, phones, cameras and portable PCs to facilitate the integration of fieldwork. The second paper ” Immersed in the Digital: Networked Creativity through Mobile Learning Helen Keegan” presented an action research study where students used mobile phones to produce short films and discussed how students adapted their film production skills to mobile film production. The final paper “eFolio: a DIY ePortfolio (or ‘making the most of what you’ve got’) Alex Furr, Sarah Stevenage, Tom Randell, Fiona Grindley, Adam Warren” illustrated the development of a bespoke eportfolio using Wordpress that linked to their VLE Blackboard, which eventually moved more towards a portal.
During the final part of the first day I attended The tide is turning’: approaches to learning environment evaluation Susannah Quinsee, Carol Higgison, Maureen Readle, Mark Gamble, Richard Walker, although billed as a symposium this was more like a workshop. We were divided into groups that represented, teachers, learners, support staff and managers and each group was asked to consider what their given representative stake holder group would require from a VLE. I was in the group that represented learners. There was much discussion about, mobile technologies, flexible learning spaces and minimum standards of online content delivery. Again as with the morning session on looking at the cost of learning technology because we have already implemented a new VLE some the issues raised we had already addressed but it was useful to hear the experiences of other institutions and identify the similarities. I followed this by going to an engaging presentation by Sudhir Giri Head of Google Learning Labs. Sudhir gave the audience a run down of some the initiatives currently being looked at by learning labs. Which included g2g – sharing of learning material, google whiz an internal experts directory and search engine for google’s internal learning content.
