The first six months of 2009

Over the course of the last months, I have been fortunate enough to be have been given the opportunity to travel around the UK, attending various meetings and conferences. Given that we are soon to embark on the summer vacation period, I thought that this might be a good opportunity to summarise where I have been and pick out one highlight from each trip.

January
Learning Futures Festival 2009, Walkers Stadium, Leicester [blog post] –  The opening keynote was delivered by Professor Sugata Mitra from Newcastle University, who spoke on the title An Alternative Schooling: Self Organising Systems in Education. He spoke about self-organising systems, in particular, describing and reflecting on his involvement with the Hole in the Wall (HIWEL) research work.

February
EVAF4All: Electronic Voting Analysis and Feedback for All project, University of Edinburgh [blog post] – First meeting of those institutions involved in the project. Development of an innovative system which allows students to view their results after taking part in EVS related activities. Students will be directed back to relevant content through the system and presented statistics regarding whole class performance.

March
Engaging Students Through In-Class Technology: EVS and beyond SIG, City University, London – first meeting of the steering groups. The first event will be in November 2009 at Leicester University. For those interested in finding out more, visit the relevant Ning community at: http://estict.ning.com

April
MoodleMoot UK 2009, Imago Centre, Loughborough [blog post] – Martin Dougiamas, Founder and Lead Moodler, gave an exceptionally enjoyable and interesting presentation about the Moodle development process, and an insight into the features that await in Moodle 2.0. The new Repository API can connect to Alfresco, YouTube, Flickr, Google Docs, Mahara (e-Portfolio), other repositories (OPuS?!). Martin’s demonstration used this (slick) functionality to search and copy in an image from Flickr… and embed a video from YouTube. [very cool!]

Plymouth e-Learning Conference 2009, The Roland Levinsky Building, University of Plymouth [blog post] – Delivered my first conference presentation with Alan Hayes (Department of Computer Science). A fuller description of the study, including the presentation of research data, conclusions and scope for future work, can be found in the paper. This can be downloaded from OPuS.

May
An Introduction to Google Apps, University of Bath – Sam Peters, Business Development Manager (Education) at Google came to the university to give a useful introduction to cloud computing in the form of Google Apps. This presentation gave an insight into how these applications are being used at other universities in the UK and US. My former colleague, Roger Gardner at the University of Bristol, has reflected on a similar session on his blog. Since the presentation, I have started to use Google Sites to power my website at nitinparmar.co.uk.

June
The 3rd Technology Supported Learning Conference, Technology Supported Learning in the 21st Century: Issues and Paradigms in Transformative Tertiary Education 2009, Staffordshire University [blog post] – I presented my first conference poster, Developing and Facilitating a creative teaching culture using an Electronic Voting Systems,  that I had co-produced with Andy Ramsden, Head of e-Learning at the University of Bath. It can be downloaded via OPuS.

Roll on ALT-C 2009 at the University of Manchester in September!

3rd Technology Supported Learning Conference

Earlier this week I attended 3rd Technology Supported Learning Conference, Technology Supported Learning in the 21st Century: Issues and Paradigms in Transformative Tertiary Education 2009 at Staffordshire University.

Professor Mark Stiles of Staffordshire University gave the opening keynote at the conference which emphasised that we are living in a change world, in part relating to the directions that universities are currently moving towards. He argued that universities must be flexible, responsive, agile, learner focused and engaged. Instead colleagues are seeing some universities continuing to follow business processes which are not fit for purpose, and/or allowing themselves to be driven by the mainstream or past. Universities, and departments needs to identify what the things they take for granted are, and what they could potentially stop doing (to keep on moving forward). He went on to say that,

Bureaucracy can be a very real barrier to innovation, and much bureaucracy is founded on satisfying “sectional” needs or “regulatory” requirements.

This talk was followed by an inspiring (and fast paced!) keynote from Sian Bayne from Edinburgh University who gave an insight into the opportunities for developing teaching approaches in the 21st century. In particular, she spoke about her (and her students’) experiences of studying on the MSc in e-Learning programme at Edinburgh at the use of Second Life to support their learning. In particular, I was stuck by the comment that e-Learning artefacts are often linked to conventional metaphors and conceptions. So, a virtual art gallery-type space that was developed in Second Life (where just about any artefact can be created) was created to follow the pattern of a traditional gallery, rather than… well… something completely different!

During the lunchtime poster session, I spoke briefly to Sabela Melchor Couto, a Spanish Teaching Fellow at Roehampton University about her resource My Roe Spanish. This Netvibes powered website is an innovative use of both the personal homepage aggregator, where Sabela tags appropriate websites with tags via delicious for her students.

Roehampton University's Netvibes Spanish portal

This resource was developed in collaboration with Andy Hoang, an e-Learning Advisor at the university. As a Spanish learner myself(!), I particular liked the use of different tabs along the top of the screen to guide students towards different parts of Spanish grammar… as well as the innovative useful of two popular Web 2.0 applications. This does of course raised question of using external (free) solutions to power core services – Sabela assured me that RSS feeds with backed up using diigo. Another Web 2.0 service. Hmmm…

I also presented a poster, Developing and Facilitating a creative teaching culture using an Electronic Voting Systems,  that I had co-produced with Andy Ramsden, Head of e-Learning at the University of Bath. It can be downloaded via OPuS, our institutional research repository.

During the afternoon, Professor Gilly Salmon from the Beyond Research Distance Alliance, University of Leicester, painted a picture of how learning spaces might look in the future under the title ‘Dream Learner’. During the keynote, two areas caught my interest the most.

The first were thoughts on the use of Web 2.0 technologies currently, which in part is being driven by learner expectation built up from practice at schools. [Gilly gave an amusing example of her granddaughter using a VLE or ‘Virtual Learning Environment’ at school]. We already know that Web 2.0 is high in HE being “deployed across a broad spectrum of university activities”, but in learning and teaching usage is sporadic and non-uniform. In particular, there seems to be no blueprint for the implementation (or should that be, embracing?) of Web 2.0. I note that the University of Edinburgh published draft Guidelines for using Web 2.0 services, but am yet to see this practice repeated elsewhere.

Second, the JISC funded, The MOdelling Of SecondLife Environments (MOOSE) project. “MOOSE investigates the scaffolding and processes needed to enable groups of students in Higher Education to establish their socialisation and engagement for more productive information and knowledge exchange and learning through the medium of online 3-D Multi User Virtual Environments using Second Life.”. In particular, Gilly mentioned that a version of her Five Stages Model, related to Second Life, will soon be published.

I rounded off my time at the conference by attending a workshop by Christa Appleton (Staffordshire University) entitled Using e-Learning Models to inform teaching practice. This engaging session gave an introduction to a number of development models which are in use at Christa’s institution, some of which are detailed on the relevant website. The session concluded with the presenter offering a glimpse at the Best Practice Models for e-Learning Online Community which is power via a Moodle website.

Finally, and as always, there was a useful back-channel of Twitter tweats running – see http://tr.im/nhEP. Unfortunately, the lack of a free, open wi-fi network for conference delegates reduced the impact of this. Overall though, a useful conference that was worth attending.