Today started with a keynote from a number of Queen’s Award winning community media projects based in Bristol, including the Knowle West Media Centre. They showed some of their films and discussed how some of these ground-up projects can interlink with more established forms of education, funding and business. It was a great keynote as it certainly differed from the standard e-learning conference paper from an ‘established’ and/or ‘famous’ academic.

The first parallel paper of the day focused on the use of virtual reality and avatars and how a lack of an established identity, structure or relationship between participants can help aid imagination. This was interesting and also an important requirement for a creative writing course, but I’ve yet to re-imagine how many LSE courses could use this environment.

The second paper looked at using filmmaking to enable student learning, in a similar way to one of the papers from yesterday. The approach was to enhance learning by getting the students to engage with the subject matter through a creative process. 

The last paper before lunch looked at a number of implentations of the use of streamed lectures at Lancaster over the last 6 or so years. The first used a talking head ‘manually’ combined with PowerPoint slides (from 2000) through to the most recent incarnation which uses Microsoft Producer. The next step will be to use Camtasia Studio for wider browser compatibility. There wasn’t much focus on value to students and learning though, apart from a simple usage survey where 34% of the target audience (non-native English speakers) said they re-watched the lectures.

After lunch one of the papers featured ‘presenter by video conference’. Firstly, the technology (Macromedia Breeze) only had one hiccough, although it did seem to insist on doing weird screen wipes when it thought nothing was happening! The topic, unsurprisingly, was about using video conference software to enable two disparate student cohorts (one at LCC, London, the other at Winona State) to communicate and collaborate. They seemed to have had some success from an organisational point of view – students had weekly meetings and communication was between small groups (LCC) to one student at Winona. The most interesting question was ‘did it enhance student learning?’, the answer was of course ‘yes’, but I didn’t really get how – probably because there wasn’t enough time to answer the question thoroughly.

Finally, the last sessions I attended today were from the VideoAktiv project. Clive Young’s was especially interesting as he gave us a run-down of the top 10 uses for video in education. Maybe I’ll list them at a later date or maybe I’ll link to Clive’s presentation when I find it online!

I’m off to the conference dinner now so see you tomorrow. Oh, and I managed to upload some images to Flickr, but with a lot of faffing around with over-secured wifi access and eventually a borrowed USB cable (thanks to Ross Little!).

See you tomorrow – if anyone is reading that is…

Kris.