It’s almost the end of the first full day of ALT-C (Association for Learning Technology Conference) at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. The weather might be a bit dreary but the content certainly isn’t! I’ve been to lots of really interesting talks, there’s been several mentions of information literacy and there are more librarians here than ever before – so I’m happy!
We started the day with a keynote from Diana Oblinger from Educause, who talked about today’s learners and the Net Generation’s learning preferrances. She talked about the concept of ‘neuroplasticity’ which is where your brain changes the way it works due to external stimuli. She talked about the redesign of learning spaces, the importance of social networks and she even mentioned information literacy. A great start to the conference.
I’ve attended a couple of session on repositories, including one by staff at the University of Cambridge Knowlegde Resource Network. This afternoon Lou McGill led a great session about repurposing and sharing learning materials and the role of library staff in facilitating this. Just this moment I’ve been to a session by Ian Wallace on phyiscal and virtual spaces for learning and the concept of Library 2.0 – using social software to redesign our libraries. He also described the development of a new physical learning space at Glasgow Caledonian, called the Saltire Centre.
And Steve Bond would have enjoyed the session I went to by Julian Tenney from the University of Nottingham on Flash, XML and reusability. He’s designed an open source tool for creating learning objects in XML and its available at: www.nottingham.ac.uk/~cczjrt/Editor/
This evening it’s the Ghosts and Ghouls tour, so I’ll be no doubt scared silly! I’ll report more tomorrow on whether I got any sleep following this!
