We are looking to recruit a Learning Technologist. Closing date is 3rd June
Here are the bare bone details
London School of Economics
Centre for Learning Technology
Learning Technologist
£38,212 – £44,624 PA
An experienced Learning Technologist is required to join an active team.
Click here for further details
Informal enquiries to Steve Ryan
The Higher Education Academy is running the National Teaching Fellowship Scheme again this year – see here for details. We can nominate up to three people from the School who can demonstrate excellence in supporting the student learning experience at LSE. The three criteria for nomination are:
Individual excellence with students (here evidence might include high teaching scores, internal teaching prizes, and strong student recommendations);
Raising the profile of excellence (here, evidence might include involvement in academic/educational development activities in your department and further afield. For example, organising an event on teaching in your department , mentoring colleagues/GTAs, running workshops on teaching in your discipline or some other aspect of teaching and learning outside the LSE)
Developing excellence (here, evidence as to how you develop your own skills as a teacher is important. For example, researching aspects of your teaching practice, attending training, regularly reviewing disciplinary teaching journals)
The application process does take time, and anyone interested in being considered should contact Dr Liz Barnett (l.barnett@lse.ac.uk or ext 6623), Director of the Teaching and Learning Centre in the first instance, before the 31st January, in order to meet the nomination deadline of 12noon Wednesday 12th March 2008. If we have more than three people being considered for nomination, there is an internal process to select the final nominees. Last year we had one successful nomination: Dr Clare Hemmings of the Gender Institute. This year, LSE will be host to the NTF Symposium in May.
Successful nominees receive a £10,000 award which they can use as they please for personal and/or professional development in teaching and learning. Contact Liz Barnet in TLC if you are interested.
I am sitting in a plenary at the ALT-C conference in Nottingham, listening to Michelle Sellenger’s interesting talk. The talk is also being webcasted using e-lluminate. I can watch Michelle on e-lluminate as well as live (and blog)
What really strikes me is that for the first time in my experience, I am sitting in a really large conference, the wireless is working fine as is all of the technology and we can actualy do, without any hassle, all the things speakers are describing.
Have anyone across this? It is a kind of word processor, designed for scientists but produces teX files. So complex equations can be copied and pasted into moodle. It also says it is good for producing structured documents like reading lists
From the link above
“LyX is for people that write and want their writing to look great, right out of the box. No more endless tinkering with formatting details, ‘finger painting’ font attributes or futzing around with page boundaries. You just write. In the background, Prof. Knuth’s legendary TeX typesetting engine makes you look good.On screen, LyX looks like any word processor; its printed output — or richly cross-referenced PDF, just as readily produced — looks like nothing else. Gone are the days of industrially bland .docs, all looking similarly not-quite-right, yet coming out unpredictably different on different printer drivers. Gone are the crashes ‘eating’ your dissertation the evening before going to press.
LyX is stable and fully featured. It is a multi-platform, fully internationalized application running natively on Unix/Linux and the Macintosh and modern Windows platforms.”
Not tried it yet but the screen grabs are very impressive. It could be useful.
The University of Edinburgh Information Systems working group has recently produced a report with the above title.
Quoting from its conclusion
“Collaborative technology such as IM, Wikis and blogs are fast becoming ubiquitous, and it is quite clear that the University, through Information Services and its partners, needs to act to ensure that it makes best use of such tools.
The report is well worth reading. It can be found here
Following on from the report is the University of Edinburgh’s Web 2.0 action plan. It is here
Following a year of evaluation, LSE has decided to adopt Moodle as its Virtual Learning Environment.
We believe Moodle has many advantages for both staff and students and these were clearly flagged up during our pilots. They include:
A key advantage of Moodle, is that as it is an open source system, it can be developed and customised in ways in which the School wants. Completely new tools and features can be added and we can share features developed elsewhere. The Open University for example, since its adoption of Moodle has developed a number of important new features and these are made freely available to the rest of the Moodle community.
I have been thinking about virtual research environments.
In this context I’m not so much interested in all singing all dancing high-end research environments but rather the provision of a set of tools that will assist academics in the kind of research collaboration I believe many of them are engaged in.
We have recently been asked to set up a WebCT course so that a group of academics worldwide can edit a book. We set up a wiki link to a web site for a European wide research project. Anthropology want some kind of virtual research environment to work with colleagues in China and elsewhere. We’ve also had several requests for blogs and wiki is linked to groups a PhD students or research groups. I also suspect that a number of academics are exploring the research potential of the Google suite of tools.
I talked about Diana Oblinger’s keynotes in an earlier post. But the other two keynotes, from Tim O’Shea and Stephen Heppell provided a fascinating contrast in all sorts of ways.
Both in very different styles and from very different perspectives were addressing the key question of what will education be like in future. For Tim there were real challenges ahead. The future was tough and the universities best placed to survive and thrive were the traditional academic powerhouses like Edinburgh. They have the strength, capability and resources to be best placed to develop exciting and innovative e-learning.
Well Jane has shamed me into finally posting. My good intentions to post everyday have so far not come to much.
The conference is seems to me to be going pretty well with more than the usual number of interesting sessions and fewer “what we did with our VLE” type presentations. Diana Oblinger’s overview of students’ use and expectations of technologies and its potential impact on education was pitched at just the right level for a keynote. It appeared to be an effortless overview but actually contained much of real substance.
Around the conference a hot issue for many is the BlackBoard patents. No new news or developments but it is clear where many delegates sympathies lie.
Jane has already mentioned the “ghost and ghouls” tour. For me the highlight was when a certain person had to be taken out before the end as it was all getting a bit too scary! hmm clearly I am not very good on picking up the psychic aura. Let’s hope only the right kind of spirts are present at the conference dinner tonight.
This could be worth keeping an eye on (from Slashdot)
| Juergen writes “You OS comes from the MIT Labs and contains an email client, Chat Function, RSS Reader, and Text Editor. YouOS is a web operating system that lets you run diverse applications within a web browser. Small applications like sticky notes or clocks. Large applications like word processing, mp3 players, and instant messaging. Even better, it’s very easy to tweak an existing application or write your own. “ |
It is currently at an alpha version, so a way to go before it could be used seriously
Follow this Link
