Oct 14
Had an interesting day at FOTE09 last Friday as much because of the people there as the speakers. Generous breaks and a very convivial drinks reception at the end made for some useful conversation. The morning sessions on the Cloud were dominated by companies such as Amazon, Microsoft and Huddle and didn’t go down terribly well with the twittering masses in the audience, though one relatively high spot was hearing about Leeds Met experience of providing google apps for all students.
The afternoon was much more relevant to the educationally inclined with presentations from a wide range of people and organisations (possibly too many), new faces for me including Will McInnes of Nixon McInnes who gave a very stimulating (and worrying) view of our networked, constantly changing future and School of everything co-founder Dougald Hine who not surprisingly threw out a few challenges to the qualification bound culture of HE. Others included the ubiquitous James Clay of Gloucestershire College, Nick Shelton of Bristol, Peter Robinson of Oxford university on their experience of iTunes U , Lindsay Jordan (Bath/University of the Arts) on the need for a social dimension to any learning experience and Shirley Williams of Reading on the thisisme digial identity project that some of us first heard about at the Plymouth conference earlier this year.
The final session was an extremely polarised debate on Second Life which served little purpose other than to suggest a better way of doing this in future would be to find a different panel. Two SL consultants on the pro side, and one very negatively inclined academic and someone from RSC playing devil’s advocate on the other didn’t really cut it. One highlight though was the sucessful streaming of the whole day’s proceedings in Second Life.
Others have blogged in more detail about the event already so I’ll be lazy and link you to a couple, both of which were written as the event proceeded – quite an impressive form of blogging if you can do it:
LSE http://elearning.lse.ac.uk/blogs/socialsoftware/?s=fote09
Goldsmith’s http://celtrecord.wordpress.com/2009/10/02/jots-from-the-future-of-technology-in-education-2009-p-m/
Presentations will be available in a week or so from FOTE09
Oct 14
Playing back audios and videos can be a challenge at times when one format works on one computer and not the next as we have discovered through the development of multimedia resources for students.
This is where VLC Media Player comes into the picture. It is available for download for both Windows and Mac OS and the best thing is that it’s free! Although It’s not the playback solution to all, it is capable of reading and playing most audio and video formats out there. See link below to download a copy.
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
Posted via email from HABitat’s posterous
Oct 14
Extract from recent email:
- All queries on the operation of UEL Plus and Turnitin should be sent to the e-learning mailbox elearn@uel.ac.uk where a Learning Technology Technician (LTT) or member of the Learning Systems Team will process the request. If the request is urgent, please mark the email as such but do not abuse this by marking everything as urgent. Urgent requests will be prioritised. If the problem cannot wait for an email response, then you can use the elearning telephone line 020 8223 7812 which will be covered in normal working hours with a voicemail option outside these hours.
- Requests for access to UEL Plus sites should also be directed to the e-learning mailbox elearn@uel.ac.uk or to the module leader (with Instructor access) who is able to enrol staff as teaching assistants and designers. (Please contact your LTA for information on how to do this or see http://www.uel.ac.uk/uelconnect/learning_technologies/uel_plus/faq.htm#addstaff.)
- Requests for new UEL Plus sites or ids for external staff should also be directed to the e-learning mailbox elearn@uel.ac.uk or via the form at http://www.uel.ac.uk/uelconnect/learning_technologies/uel_plus/new_site_request.htm
- New staff should still be directed to the LTA for 1:1 induction sessions but bearing in mind the limited availability of the LTA in schools, this will generally need to be agreed in advance.
- Continue to contact your LTA about more general matters or to discuss potential projects and initiatives. Please note however, that if a particular issue can be dealt with by attending a central staff development session, then staff are expected to attend
Posted via email from HABitat’s posterous
Oct 14
We are now developing a separate island for Health & Bisoscience – UEL HABitat which includes the original activities but also has a polyclinic for use by health care students (physiotherapy and herbal medicine initially) to diagnose and treat virtual patients. In conjunction with our developer Gemixin Ltd we are aiming to produce an editable virtual patient system to which academics can add cases to suit particular learning needs. This system will be independent of Second Life and its application could extend beyond patient scenarios to other problem base learning situations. Other such systems already exist but by all accounts are not very user friendly. Our aim is to produce something that anyone can use after a very basic introduction. One of the biggest issues with developing learning activities in Second Life (or other virtual worlds) is the reliance on specialist skills which are beyond the reach of most educational budgets. We hope that some sustainable solutions of value to the wider community will emerge from our current investigations for which we are very grateful to have some one-off internal funding.
The prototype VP should be in pilot in Semester A 2009/10.
See and download the full gallery on posterous
Posted via email from HABitat’s posterous
Oct 14
We started in January 09 by creating a building on UEL’s main island on Second Life with a virtual laboratory for PCR and electrophoresis experiments as well as a crime scene house (apartment) for use by forensic students. This video provides an outline of the first phase including evaluations of the student experience.
Posted via email from HABitat’s posterous
Oct 14
Nabeel Ahmed IBM Learning Technologist
I thought I would pop along and take in the presentation by Nabeel Ahmed a Learning Technologist from IBM. Mainly it was out of curiosity to observe the differences between the education sector Learning Technologists and the corporate versions. Terminology was the first thing I noticed the presentation was peperred with the language of the Blue Chip corporation. ‘Low hanging fruit’ and ‘growth sector’ sector. Hey I’m not judging! Let’s face it education terminology is equally vague at times.
So the theme for the afternoon was transformation but in my mind I always translate this to ‘change’. Basically the chap gave a brief overview of what IBM were up to in terms of usage of mobile tech internally (and what they expect to be doing). The abridged version of this was:
- Network learning and attempting to harness the weak ties (2nd and 3rd level level connections)
- IBM Blue pages now accessible through mobile devices (Blue pages being their internal directory)
- Performance support for selllers i.e. delivering just in time information to people out in the field.
- Just in time learning rather than porting courseware to mobile platforms (courseware being the generic term for e-learning courses) * I thought this was interesting shift in attitude incidentally.
- SMS messages pushed at new joiners e.g. ‘have you completed your compliance training?’
I think it is fair to say that none of that was particularly cutting edge but it was all good common sense stuff. Also some of which we already do as a Univeristy, txtools alerts for instance. Probably the one thing no University has however is the level of funding that IBM command. Apparently £60 million is being invested over five years. Not surprisingly the Blackberry was the officially supported smartphone within IBM (I’d assume due to security being stronger). However he did say that there was going to be a shift toward opening things up to a users’ personal devices.
One nice quote that he referred to from the Wall Street Journal (although I can not source it) by Sam Palmisano CEO of IBM was ‘the PC is the past, now it all goes on the mobile phone’. Not sure I completly agree but how do you define a Personal Computer these days?
Oct 14
by James Paull Gee
After reading his book ‘What Video games have to teach us about language and literacy’ it was fair to say that I was looking forward to this one. Of course not just because of my love of video games…. well maybe that was a big part of it.
I must admit it did feel like an abridged version of the first chapter of his book but that it by no means a negative statement. Very interesting stuff that introduced the key concepts around his work e.g. the creation of affinity groups around game based technology, situated learning, semiotic domains (which I am pretty sure I completely misinterpreted) etc.
Particularly liked his comparison of Yu-gi-oh with PHD level work. Admitedly this was slightly tongue in cheek methinks. This was a comparison in terms of the language and level of comprehension required to access the content of the game. For anyone who has not seen this game it is indeed completely baffling.
I definitely think his work is worth reading. If you want to read more about his work take a look at his profile page on the GLS site. Take a look at this youtube video which explains what he does a lot clearer than my babble.
Oct 14
Interesting morning listening to a fairly diverse set of speakers at the Tuesday session of handheld learning. None of the keynotes actually addressed handheld learning as such instead they addressed more general issues around education and cultural systems.
Dodgey iphone photo of the porter tun room
Particularly enjoyed Malcolm McLaren’s rant about society in general. Excellent anecodote about his days as a wine taster. Who would have guessed. Not sure I completely agree that we are culturaly restricted as he made about but perhaps he had a point. He did mention that ‘Holywood consider stupid cool’ personally I think it is going the other way these days. One example that springs to mind is Juno where the protaganist is anything but stupid. Anyway, to cut a long story short the first three keynotes set a nice tone for the conference with a mixture of entertainment and optimisim.
Lots of resources available on the handheld learning website, including footage of last years confernce proceedings. Worth a look if you have the time.
Oct 14
http://www.dcs.bbk.ac.uk/~csisc17/index.html
Well actually it is my Birkbeck profile page, a fine example of cutting edge web design as I am sure you will agree. Link at the bottom however to some of the resources (actually nothing in there at this pont!) I am going to pull together in terms of search optomization techniques. Mainly however I am just trying to create some links in different places to try and getting it to rank higher. Probably not what this blog was intended for but if you give people free will….
Oct 14
So after the lessons learnt the other week this should be a lot easier this time. The session this week is with regard to business planning and will be delivered by an external speaker from Striding Out. Smaller room this week which hopefully will not throw up any logistical problems. Fingers crossed.
Time to check the kit with my trusty checklist, defrag the harddrive of the capture laptop, load up the slidedeck and materials and away we go. Will post the link to the resource at some point tomorrow. Hopefully this time with associated powerpoint presentation and any screen captures (yet to have to cross the screen capture bridge but I am sure there will come a point)
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