elearning at the cusp, 30th May, Staffordshire University.

I thought the standard of presentations at this event was very high, and with various chats over coffee it made for a very enjoyable and useful day. There are no big ideas to report, no single nugget that captured the imagination but a few bits and pieces:

• Positive reports on podcasting from Leicester. Unfortunately the site explaining the various pedagogical models isn’t so hot. The main Impala project page is OK but for me the pedagogical models page only displays in IE and then doesn’t work properly anyway.
• Interesting final assessment on the MSc in Elearning at Edinburgh, where students get to negotiate some of their assessment criteria as well as choose the “essay” format. While some students stuck to the traditional, others have submitted hypertext essays and there was one Second Life submission… which looked like a hypertext essay… your world your imagination as they say… Sorry I shouldn’t knock it, this talk was the best of the day.
• Second Life was paid a lot of lip-service (“we could have had the conference in SL”) but the overall feeling I got from other delegates was no thanks.
  
• I had an interesting chat about giving audio feedback to students and this may be something we could explore with one of the Wimba Voice tools.
• I had a couple of repository conversations, for example, Staffordshire are implementing Harvest Road Hive which will link with their Blackboard VLE. I’m still not convinced by the need for a repository for sharing teaching material except for a relatively small amount of material – study skills stuff for example but there was a definite interest today.
• 40% of the speakers wanted to remove the e from elearning… elarning anyone?
• And finally, the main theme of the day was Web2.0… and how we need to be ready for google generation, which we certainly do. BUT I also think there are far too many assumptions being made about how techno-savvy they ALL are. While 55% 12-17 yr olds use social networking (Jan 2007 in the US) presumably the other 45% don’t. And that’s before we start on how information literate they are…