Conferences

Alt-C Day 2

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.

September 6th, 2006|Conferences|1 Comment|

ALT-C Wiki

Following jane’s postings I was wondering if ALT were organising any online coverage or if others were blogging.

The ALT-C wiki doesn’t really seem to have taken off…. but there is a link to a handful of photos on Flickr A couple of ALT-C bloggers can be found on Technorati and some more (including this blog) on a Google alt-c blog search

September 6th, 2006|Blogging, Conferences|Comments Off|

ALT-C Day Two

Hello again from Edinburgh. Just a quick update on last night’s ghostly tour which Steve thinks was not at all scary and for me was rather like an episode from Most Haunted. Let’s just say I was a lot happier when I got in the pub and had a drink in my hand rather than in a very dark and spooky vault! If you like to see a photo of me go to: http://www.flickr.com/photos/25498841@N00/236942137/

Anyway, onto the conference. This morning I attended a session on repositories and whether they’d had their day and were a failed technology. A group from the West Midlands Share project. We had quite a lively debate. The speakers were mainly talking about learning object repositories and we also had some contributions from the audience who were familiar with institutional repositories for research content. We talked about about the issues managing both teaching and research content in repositories and whether this is desirable and possible – interesting and highly relevant to MIDESS!

The keynote was Tim O’Shea from University of Edinburgh who is another great proponent of libraries and sees the digital assets and digital curation as being central to the success of research-led universities and really important for e-learning. Once again I find myself nodding lots and feeling that LSE has been leading the way integrating learning technology and libraries. Steve has promised to post something further later today, and I’ll be in touch either later today or tomorrow. It’s the conference dinner tonight at the Dynamic Earth centre which I’m looking forward to!

September 6th, 2006|Conferences|Comments Off|

ALT-C 2006: the next generation

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!

September 5th, 2006|Conferences|1 Comment|

Meeting the Challenge of the Google Generation: ALISS Summer Conference

The ALISS (Association of Librarians and Information Professionals in the Social Sciences) summer conference was held at the LSE on Wednesday 23rd August. I was chairing the event and Matt from CLT was one of the presenters.

The theme of the conference was ‘Meeting the Challenge of the Google Generation: technology or training” and there were 6 presentations including Matt Lingard and Peter Godwin, talking about social software that many of the ‘Google Generation’ now use, such as blogs and wikis. Margaret Flett from UCL and Frank Parry from Loughborough were looking at MetaLib and the role of federated searching, particularly in comparison to Google Scholar. Sarah Pavey, a school librarians gave an insight into information literacy education in schools and finally Angela Joyce from Intute, gave us an overview of the new Intute: Social Sciences website and the services available.

I really enjoyed the conference and initial feedback suggests that the delegates found it a thought provoking and useful day. ALISS would like to follow this up with a hands-on session, perhaps early in 2007. Heather has now made the slides available on the ALISS website: http://www.lse.ac.uk/library/other_sites/aliss/23august2006.html

August 24th, 2006|Conferences|3 Comments|

Designs on E-learning Symposium

I’m ‘attending’ this Designs on E-learning symposium online as I can’t go in person for the whole day. The content is focussed on “innovations in technology and elearning in relation to art, design and communication subject areas” with, it seems, a focus on ‘Web 2.0’, blogging, podcasting etc.

However it was the format I wanted flag up. Comments made in the online discussion will be viewable by participants in face-to-face discussion:

“Participants attending online will be able to access face-to-face discussions and contribute through synchronous conferencing and face-to-face participants will be able to transfer to online discussions whenever they wish. Communication technologies will be used extensively throughout the symposium in order to provide multiple channels for discussion and multiple means of recording and representation. Both audio and video Podcasts will be made of the Symposium and will be available on the Designs on eLearning website following the event.”

There are currently about 50 online and 50 attending participants booked. I’ll post a report here too.

Matt

August 18th, 2006|Blogging, Conferences|Comments Off|

MoodleMoot Keynote Commentary

http://elgg.net/mberry/weblog/126044.html

Commentary on Martin Dougiamas’ keynote at last month’s Moodle conference with links to audio too. Haven’t had chance to read read it myself yet.

August 2nd, 2006|Conferences|Comments Off|

eLit 2006 Conference

Sarah and I attended the eLit conference at Loughborough University on 28th-30th June. Overall it was an interesting conference, although delegate numbers were noticeably down on previous years. It did however mean the conference was small and friendly and great for networking. And there were some new faces from many of the new universities. Once again librarians dominated, and there were very few IT, academic or e-learning staff attending. There was quite a buzz about new social networking technologies, but also a feeling that collaboration and engaging academics and other learning support staff was crucial. Sadly Allan Martin the founder of eLit couldn’t attend this year’s conference and his enthusiasm and usual opening keynote addressed was missed. An overriding problem throughout the conference somewhat ironically was technical problems, with a projector bulb blowing in the first keynote, through to lost presentations and problems with laptops. We had excellent keynotes, notably from Hilda Kruger and Mark Stiles.

Read full eLit 2006 report

July 10th, 2006|Conferences, Research Skills|Comments Off|

DIVERSE Conference – Day 3

The keynote today was from Scott Higgins, a film historian from Wesleyan University, New England. He gave a fascinating talk on the importance of colour as part of a film narrative, using illustrations from the history of film – including an example from the beginnings of cinema (The Sealed Room, 1909), the age of technicolor from the 1930s to the 1950s and a brief mention of contempory techniques for post-production alteration of colour composition.

After coffee we were told about plans for a media portal, which the producers hope will enable a market place in reusable video and film – anything from commercially produced material from organisations such as the BBC to film produced by individual teachers. Unfortunately the supplied laptop failed the presenters and they were unable to show us a demo!

The third session of the day was from Gerald Cannon of Dublin City University who talked about their very impressive integrated system for recording everything and everyone within their Nursing Studies school. The system comprises of 36 cameras linked to various capture stations which also link to a central video server. Recording is controlled using touchscreens by the staff and students and so doesn’t require intervention from a technician. Video is encoded as MPEG 2 and 4 and is fully retrievable as each user has a personal account on the video server. The system is used for reflection on nursing practice, peer to peer assessment and also delivery of pre-prepared material. The system did sound fairly expensive though so a pressing need would probably have to exist before such an investment could be made.

The conference ended with closing remarks from Chris O’Hagan, who’s message was essentially that we must use our imaginations and try to raise the ‘lowest common denimonator’. And finally the handover to Lillehammer, Norway for DIVERSE 2007!

This final instalment is a bit rushed as I’m off to catch a plane back to London, so I might come back and add to this later.

Cheers,

Kris.

July 7th, 2006|Conferences|Comments Off|

DIVERSE Conference – Day 2

Today started with a keynote from a number of Queen’s Award winning community media projects based in Bristol, including the Knowle West Media Centre. They showed some of their films and discussed how some of these ground-up projects can interlink with more established forms of education, funding and business. It was a great keynote as it certainly differed from the standard e-learning conference paper from an ‘established’ and/or ‘famous’ academic.

The first parallel paper of the day focused on the use of virtual reality and avatars and how a lack of an established identity, structure or relationship between participants can help aid imagination. This was interesting and also an important requirement for a creative writing course, but I’ve yet to re-imagine how many LSE courses could use this environment.

The second paper looked at using filmmaking to enable student learning, in a similar way to one of the papers from yesterday. The approach was to enhance learning by getting the students to engage with the subject matter through a creative process.

The last paper before lunch looked at a number of implentations of the use of streamed lectures at Lancaster over the last 6 or so years. The first used a talking head ‘manually’ combined with PowerPoint slides (from 2000) through to the most recent incarnation which uses Microsoft Producer. The next step will be to use Camtasia Studio for wider browser compatibility. There wasn’t much focus on value to students and learning though, apart from a simple usage survey where 34% of the target audience (non-native English speakers) said they re-watched the lectures.

After lunch one of the papers featured ‘presenter by video conference’. Firstly, the technology (Macromedia Breeze) only had one hiccough, although it did seem to insist on doing weird screen wipes when it thought nothing was happening! The topic, unsurprisingly, was about using video conference software to enable two disparate student cohorts (one at LCC, London, the other at Winona State) to communicate and collaborate. They seemed to have had some success from an organisational point of view – students had weekly meetings and communication was between small groups (LCC) to one student at Winona. The most interesting question was ‘did it enhance student learning?’, the answer was of course ‘yes’, but I didn’t really get how – probably because there wasn’t enough time to answer the question thoroughly.

Finally, the last sessions I attended today were from the VideoAktiv project. Clive Young’s was especially interesting as he gave us a run-down of the top 10 uses for video in education. Maybe I’ll list them at a later date or maybe I’ll link to Clive’s presentation when I find it online!

I’m off to the conference dinner now so see you tomorrow. Oh, and I managed to upload some images to Flickr, but with a lot of faffing around with over-secured wifi access and eventually a borrowed USB cable (thanks to Ross Little!).

See you tomorrow – if anyone is reading that is…

Kris.

July 6th, 2006|Conferences|Comments Off|