Matt Lingard

About Matt Lingard

Learning Technologist at the LSE Centre for Learning Technology

Open Education

I have just come across the Cape Town Open Declaration, a “statement of strategy and …commitment [to open education]”. The focus is very much on the development and sharing of ‘open educational resources’ but there is stuff about the sharing of teaching practices too. It all seems quite reasonable but there is a bit of a debate around it of course, see Downes vs Wiley – Cato and Cicero revisited and Open education and the cape Town declaration. The declaration is supposed to spark dialogue so it’s off to a good start, although I suspect that particular dialogue was already there!

We’re currently working with the French department here at LSE and colleagues at Columbia University on a repository for sharing French teaching resources and while the teachers behind the project are keen to share the fruits of their labour I know that other teachers here and elsewhere are not, particularly when sharing goes beyond the dept / institution. I’m off to become a sceptical signatory if they’ll allow such a thing!

Coincidently, I also came across U-Now: an open courseware initiative at Nottingham university this week.

PS When did Martin Dougiamas relocate to Austria 😉 (See Cape Town signatories)

February 6th, 2008|Open Education, Teaching & Learning|3 Comments|

Horizons 2008

The annual Horizon reports from the New Media Consortium highlight emerging technologies that they believe are likely to impact on learning & teaching over the next 5 years. The 2008 Horizon Report (PDF) suggests the following are set to become mainstream in learning-focused organisations over the next few years:

On the immediate horizon: Grassroots Video & Collaboration Webs
Mid-term horizon: Mobile Broadband & Data Mashups
4-5 year horizon: Collective Intelligence & Social Operating Systems

Some new terms to me there. Looking back at a post on this blog about the 2007 report it seems to me that the horizons have previously been a bit optimistic… while user-generated content & social networking (last year’s immediate horizons) may be considered mainstream in the wider world, I don’t think that’s the case in “learning-focused organisations”, particularly UK HE institutions. Far from it. While some individuals within these organisations may be ‘generating’ and networking I don’t feel its mainstream practice, certainly not here in the UK HE. Only a few organisations have implemented & encouraged such activities at the institutional level. Timing aside, an interesting look into the future.

January 29th, 2008|Reports & Papers|1 Comment|

LLAS E-Learning Symposium

There were some interesting sessions at Friday’s LLAS (Languages Linguistics Area Studies) Subject Centre E-Learning Symposium.

The first talk by Jon Dron, Athabasca University was a shameless plug for his book of the same name: Control and constraint in e-learning. It was interesting in parts but confusing in others. I liked his example from Brighton University where they use Bb, which has an announcements tool as the default course homepage. It is relatively simple to change this default, however less than 1% of academics had done so. However, when Jon surveyed staff around 50% said they would prefer to change this default to something else. He was trying to show how VLE design influences or constrains users who will usually opt for the easier (default) option.

January 28th, 2008|Conferences|Comments Off|

Type an mp3!

I just found VozMe on Jane’s E-Learning Pick of the Day. It’s a simple tool for creating an mp3 from text you type. Here is my last blog post as an mp3*! You can type in English, Spanish or Italian. There are also WordPress and Blogger Plugins so it can become a feature of your blog.

*I’m not sure how long VozMe keeps the mp3s for so I’m attaching it too: VozMeExample

January 24th, 2008|Images, Audio & Video|3 Comments|

LSE4You Blog

There is a new LSE4You blog run by the ‘eDevelopment’ team, which I guess is a new name for an old team, certainly new to me. There is also a Suggestions board. To get to the board you have to pass through the “LSE Authentication Service”. The blog is WordPress but I’m not sure what’s behind the board.

January 16th, 2008|Blogging|Comments Off|

Emerging Technologies and Careers

I’m travelling back from Harrogate and the AGCAS “Emerging Technologies and their use in Careers” event and am taking advantage of the free wireless on the new National Express East Coast service. Excellent!

My sessions were well received and I felt the whole event went really well with a great set of speakers today building on my introductory tour from yesterday: blogs, feeds, podcasts, screencasts, social bookmarking, social networking, e-portfolios & PLEs, virtual worlds and wikis… and they all stayed awake thru it all 😉

I used a wiki for an evening homework activity which worked really well. The AGCAS Harrogate wiki also contains all of the presentations from the two days.

A word about the wiki

I looked at three free wikis for this: wikispaces, pbwiki and wetpaint. I rejected wetpaint first as I felt it was too busy and I wanted something cleaner. I initially went with wikispaces but I wasn’t happy with how it dealt with simultaneous editing which was an issue for this particular exercise so I selected pbwiki as it locks the page when someone is editing it. The delegates who in the main were using a wiki for the first time were very positive about it and I was very pleased with both how the exercise went and the performance of pbwiki itself.

January 11th, 2008|Conferences|1 Comment|