Details of forthcoming workshops and links to LTI workshop resources and presentations.
New Year, new literacies
The Digital Literacy Programme, run by CLT and the Library offers hands-on training for staff and PhD students and will be running an exciting range of classes throughout the Lent Term. Classes such as ‘Going Beyond Google’ and ‘Keeping up to date’ are on offer in February, but also look out for some new classes focusing on managing web resources using the social bookmarking tool Delicious, using wikis and other collaborative writing tools plus a new course where can find out more about the micro-blogging site, Twitter. For the full list of courses on offer see the CLT courses and workshops page or the LSE Training Portal.
Brush up your digital literacy skills with CLT
We’ve just re-branded our E-literacy for E-learning classes aimed at LSE staff and PhD students as the Digital Literacy Programme and added a few new classes to the schedule for later in November. Classes such as ‘Going Beyond Google’ and ‘Keeping up to date’ are still on offer, but look out for some new classes focusing on managing website using delicious and using wikis and other collaborative writing tools. For the full list of courses on offer in the coming month see the CLT courses and workshops page or the LSE Training Portal.
George Soros live webcast
George Soros is speaking tomorrow (May 21st) as part of the regular LSE events programme but this is the first time that LSE has streamed such an event live. I mention it here because we’ve been able to do this on the back of our investment in Apreso (now known as Echo 360) and the automated recording of teaching lectures. Using Osprey SimulStream we’ve been simultaneously capturing and streaming some of our public lectures to extra LSE lecture rooms as an overflow facility. If you’d like to watch the web cast live there will be a link from the LSE events page tomorrow from 5 p.m. (BST) and The Washington Note are also hosting the webcast. Mr Soros is funding the back end of the streaming infrastructure. FinChannel.com have posted an article if you would like more detail.
George Soros photo used under a Creative Commons licence courtesy of WorldEconomicForum at Flickr.com
Assessment for Learning
I’m just back from a Netskills workshop Assessment for Learning: Harnessing Technologies. It was a well-structured, varied day involving presentations, discussion and lots of hands-on exploration, which I hadn’t expected. There was stuff I’ve covered before – Bloom’s bloomin’ Taxonomy and TurnitinUK but plenty of other stuff too.
I was partly there to find out more about eportfolios and we spent a fair bit of time exploring Newcastle University’s Generic Eportfolio system which looks quite nice. It’s supposed to be freely available but we couldn’t suss out how and I must follow this up with the presenter. Over on ‘Reluctant Technologist’ (my new blog!) I’m starting to get my thoughts on eportfolios together.
Completely off topic I heard about diigo for what must be the 23rd time this month. It’s a social bookmarking site with loads more functionality than del.icio.us which we already use at CLT (LSE CLT del.icio.us). I’ve been put off so far because I’ve felt it has too much going on… too busy. However, I’m going to take another look as today I’ve discovered it does re-orderable lists which can be easily sub divided with labels (great for training session resources) and groups – lists of bookmarks contributed to directly by multiple users which is something else we’ve had interest in.
UCL Teaching & Learning Network
I attended a UCL Teaching and Learning Network session on podcasts yesterday. Before I get on to podcasts I’d like to mention the impressive attendence – about 30-40 with around half teaching staff. We need to give some thought to this – do we try and do something similar here or join in with UCL – the offer is there.
The format, for those not familiar, is a monthly event in a fixed time slot and location with an online presence to support it (open guest login). The sessions themselves are two hours with presentations and group discussion. Recent topics covered include tools for collaborative teaching & learning, Moodle, & student information literacy.
A bit on podcasts
The session focussed on ‘pure’ podacsts, i.e. audio + RSS with a general “what is / how to” presentation followed by a look at examples of education-related podcasts.
Digital Media for Teaching workshop
CLT recently ran a workshop for the LSE Teaching and Learning Centre workshops programme called “Digital Media for Teaching”. You can find all of the links referred to at del.icio.us as well as PDF and Flash versions of the PowerPoint presentation on our course resources page. This workshop runs again on May 2nd. We also regularly run an “Images, Multimedia and copyright” designer workshop so look out for this on our workshops page – and we’ll advertise on our mailing list. You’ll find the handouts and links for this on our course resources page if you can’t wait. We also jointly run a ‘presentation skills’ (PDF link) workshop with the LSE staff development unit.
Languages Collaboration
Last week the Language Centre‘s Herve Didiot-Cook (Language Co-ordinator, French) hosted visitors from Columbia & Brown Universities. The main purpose of the visit was to look at ways of sharing online teaching material across institutions. Staff from CLT were heavily involved in the meetings and the presentations which included:
- Use of Drupal for organsing / storing teaching material (Columbia University)
- The i-Tunes U pilot (Brown University)
- Use of LAMS for creating sequences of online activities (LSE)
- Overview of the UK’s JORUM repository (LSE)
- Overview of Fedora software and the MIDESS Project (LSE)
Staff from all the institutions are keen to work together and pilot projects will follow soon to take this forward. More later…
Social software: Using RSS newsreaders and social bookmarking
CLT recently ran a workshop for the LSE Library e-literacy for e-learning programme called “Social software: Blog it, Tag it, Share it”. The session started with an introduction to blogs and then how to search for and find useful blogs. We then looked at various online tools available for keeping track of multiple blogs. The second half looked at social bookmarking with del.icio.us and various academic collaborative linking and referencing sites such as citeulike.
Rather than say more about it here I’ll point you to a recording or ‘screencast’ of the session created with Camtasia. You’ll need at least Flash Player 9 for full functionality. You can also find all of the links referred to at del.icio.us as well as the traditional presentation PDF, plus handouts for the personalising Google exercise and for the Google Reader exercise.
We’re running the session again on November 24th if you fancy experiencing the live event!
Kris.
Social Software Workshop
A new workshop has been added to the E-literacy for E-Learning programme:
Social Software: blog it, tag it, share it!
Friday, 10th November, 12:00 – 13:30
This session is a mixture of demonstration and hands-on activities covering blogs, RSS, news readers and social bookmarking. It looks at reading blogs as a way of keeping up-to-date in your field, focusing on how to find academic and other relevant blogs. One feature of blogs is that they produce RSS feeds, also known as news feeds. RSS feeds can be collected and read in a news reader allowing you to read the content of multiple blogs and other news sites (such as the BBC) in one place. The session will show you how to set up an online news reader for collating your personalised news, saving you from having to visit each site individually. Finally, the session looks at social bookmarking, the practice of storing your Internet Favourites or Bookmarks online, allowing you to access them from anywhere and share them with others.
Digital Directions – Law Blog
From my friend at the Law College 😉
This e-learning based blog will give law academics the opportunity to discuss the use of technology in their or others’ work
Might be useful for the upcoming social software sessions.
