ESTICT Event #2 – University of Edinburgh

Last Thursday, I ventured up to the e-Science Institute at the University of Edinburgh for the second event of the Special Interest Group (SIG), Engaging Students Through In-Class Technology (ESTICT)

The event, which is keynoted by Professor Jim Boyle from the University of Strathclyde, saw over 50 delegates from across the UK come together to share best practice in the use of in-class technologies, with a particular focus on the pedagogic uses of Electronic Voting Systems (EVS).

Professor Boyle’s excellent keynote entitled Truth, Lies & Voting Systems took a broad look at the use of EVS in learning and teaching, particularly Microsoft PowerPoint as a poor mechanism of didactic delivery of material to students. One of the key messages from the keynote infered that,

We don’t really know what’s going on in classrooms – much, much, more meaningful classroom research, based on modern educational psychology, is needed to understand what the ‘good practice’ is?

It was also great to see that delegates were tweeting actively during the talk, where the conversation on this back channel fed into later discussion.

@jobadge Clicker research just showed us how little we know about teaching and learning

@sianylindsay computer revolution in HE must be accompanied by improvements in our understanding of teaching & learning

@authenticdasein Point: PRS et all were developed as COMMUNICATION systems, not VOTING systems

Thankfully much of this discussion has been captured by the service Twapperkeeper, which additional statistics provided by Eduserve’s excellent Summarizr service. It was also encouraging to see colleagues not able to attend the event being able to join in the conversation from afar. Whilst this had happened at larger conferences I’ve attended recently, namely the Plymouth e-Learning Conference 2010 and MoodleMoot UK 2010, this was the first time that the ESTICT community had benefited from this.

Next up were Sarah Gormley from the University of Edinburgh, and steering group member Paul Burt from the University of Surrey, talking about the some of the approaches, pitfalls and solutions related to scaling up EVS within their institutions. This is something that the e-Learning team at the University of Bath have talked about regularly both internally, and with the wider community, so it was reassuring in some sense that other HEIs had been faced similar challenges, finding the successful solutions along of the way. Of particular interest was Surrey’s approach to lending out clickers to students via a self-service system in the university Library, where individual clickers are housed in DVD box-like cases. A set of ‘thunderstorm’ presentations soon followed where colleagues covered issues ranging from using EVS to promote shared thinking wtith enquiry based learning, using a web based alternatives to EVS, through Twitter and/or PollEverywhere.

After lunch, steering group members Mike Cameron (Durham University) and Dr Sian Lindsay (City University London) successfully led a hands on afternoon workshop where delegates explored the notion of writing EVS questions for different pedagogic purposes. Much of this discussion, and the outcomes from it, have been captured on the ESTICT online community at http://esting.ning.com, so do head along there.

The event concluded by delegates discussing the future direction of the ESTICT community, and what form the next event might take. Indeed the steering group have decided to postpone the next ESTICT event until the beginning of the 2010/2011 academic year, so that we can evaluate the progress made so far by the SIG, take a close look at the Edinburgh event feedback forms… and work towards putting on even better events next year!

In the meantime, do head along to to the ESTICT Ning community website, and join in the conversation!