It’s taken a while but I’ve finally written up some notes from the “Designing for Learning” conference held at Greenwich University last Wednesday (July 4 2007). First up with the opening keynote was Gilly Salmon who talked about her visions of the new teacher moving away from traditional lecturing to being a facilitator of learning available 24 hours via wireless Internet access. I can’t say I can see this happening soon at the LSE. She then went on to talk about various projects running at the University of Leicester brought together under Gilly’s “media zoo” brand. Of course, each of the projects have animal acronyms such as “SEAL”, “ELKS” and “IMPALA”. These research projects are looking at the use of technologies such as iPods and podcasting, second life (of course).

The first of the parallel sessions that I attended looked at Canterbury Christ Church’s solution to organising and cataloguing their various study skills learning objects to make them easily findable. The end product is a website with a number of nice Web 2.0 style features including an efficient and clean looking search engine and a tag cloud. The solution was developed partly out of frustration with other learning object repositories such as JORUM.

My second parallel session looked at the use of Turnitin as a formative learning tool for students on “English for academic purposes” programmes. The rationale for their work was that there is a level of plagiarism that is a result of a misunderstanding of conventions and by using Turnitin on first draft essays the results can be discussed by the students and their teachers. It is made clear to the students that by submitting their first draft there will be no consequences if there is significant plagiarism found in the first draft. This approach has resulted in students using a greater number of sources, use of citation and appropriate paraphrasing.

After lunch the University of Leicester discussed the Adelie project, which has been looking at ways of planning learning redesign. The Adelie team works closely with department teaching staff where the main planning activity is a two-day workshop. One interesting component of this is having a “reality checker”; in other words a teaching colleague who hasn’t been involved in the initial planning who comes in to look at the outcomes at the end of the session.

The focus of the final session of the day was very much on the learner and how today’s students approach technology – “how well do we know our learners?” Linda Creanor from the JISC project “LEX: learner experiences of e-learning” talked a lot about Generation Y and MySpace and how these learners see elearning (VLE) as just another channel and in fact the term elearning could be viewed as a little anachronistic.