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#mootuk11 via Twitter

Rose Heaney — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 12:56:29 +0000

Following on from Matt Lingard’s Twitter eye view of Grainne Conole’s keynote this morning at Moodlemoot 2011, I will be entirely unoriginal and try to do an abbreviated version of the subsequent twitterstream from a limited and highly selective perspective.

I note much excitement and interest plus a few cautionary notes in relation to University of Kent’s WebCT/Moodle migration tool documented here I believe http://t.co/p1dkxP8 (sorry no time to check this out).

There has been interest too in MMU’s migration to Moodle with a link to their staff blogs http://lrt.mmu.ac.uk/staff-blogs/ I am still hoping for a corrected link to the LT review page – now supplied see comments on main blog

Another highlight for me (I don’t get out much) has been the link to the very useful looking Screensteps tool for ‘Screen capture, image editing and document authoring in a single application’. Will be taking advantage of the 14day free trial.

And this post would not be complete without a reference to the ‘squirrel of death’ – Moodle’s answer to the Blackboard ‘rabbit warren’ of nested folders. This hitherto unknown creature first made an appearance at the M25LT group a few weeks ago but I think we haven’t seen the last of her/him/it.

That’s me for Moodlemoot 2011 today – I hope my colleagues and twitter friends will continue to keep me posted.

Connecting with Connectivsm CCK11 (2)

Rose Heaney — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 10:24:09 +0000

I am posting occasionally on a more personal blog on posterous during CCK11

Connecting with Connectivsm CCK11

Rose Heaney — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 16:29:05 +0000

I signed up for Connectivism and Connective Knowledge 2011 and have had little time to spend on it but have just listened to the Elluminate session from yesterday evening. Keeping the alliteration going I think I can say I am in a state of Confusion about Connectivism but that is apparently good at this stage (or any stage) in this course or in any learning situation from here on in.

Future of Technology in Education 2010 (#FOTE10)

Rose Heaney — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 09:40:53 +0000

I attended FOTE (footie) again this year, having enjoyed last year’s as much for the Twitter interaction and conversations with other participants as the formal presentations. This year’s was a very similar experience with record use of Twitter and presentations ranging from Microsoft’s vision of a future world of beautiful people with technology to guide their every move, to Matt Lingard’s very grounded look at staff take up (or not ) of technology and Miles Metcalfe’s cynical take on our uncritical love of technology, not to mention other offerings on augmented reality, mobile learning and educational gaming. In other words, something for everyone – or the geeks anyway.

As well as the range of technology being presented there was also considerable variety in how it was broadcast and recorded. All sessions were streamed into Second Life and via livestream, tweets are archived here, and a very neat tool Visible tweets provided a visual display of indvidual tweets as they arrived (between presentations). There’s a Flickr photostream and Chris Smith has provided an interesting video record of attending the conference remotely from Thailand http://screenr.com/E04. Video recordings of all keynotes are gradually appearing on the conference website.

The blogs below from presenters and others will give you a flavour of the actual presentations. Take a few minutes to look at the Microsoft Surface parody video in Matt Lingard’s blog – he used it to great effect even though it froze half way through on both attempts to run it. Another notable aspect of Matt’s presentation which will become apparent from the blog is the level of audience interaction he achieved.

This is a good event to participate in, however you do it, and it’s free – watch out for next year’s publicity and sign up quickly. Best quote of the day (or possibly paraphrase) from Jeremy Speller’s presentation (see link below): “Mobile learning is not new – books have been moving for long time”.

Some links relating to talks:

Augmented Reality
http://www.learnar.org/

Jeremy Speller’s presentation on mobile university
http://www.slideshare.net/jeremyspeller/the-mobile-university-last-years-model

Other useful stuff that came up:

JISC legal guidance on audio recordings
http://www.jisclegal.ac.uk/ManageContent/ViewDetail/tabid/243/ID/1608/Recording-Lectures-Legal-Considerations-28072010.aspx

Open university podcasts (more comprehensive than iTunesU)
http://podcast.open.ac.uk/

Microsoft Surface Parody (see Matt Lingard’s post)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZrr7AZ9nCY

Free tool for online meetings
Flash meeting

Audience polling system used very effectively by Matt Lingard – see his post above for more details.
http://www.polleverywhere.com/

Possible alternative to Prezi – an extension to PowerPoint used by speaker from Microsoft
Powerpoint plex

In Haste

Rose Heaney — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 08:34:14 +0000

I have had no time for core work let alone blogging recently. However I did rush something through on the Health & Bioscience blog after a presentation at Herts blended learning conference on 17th June.

http://blog.uelconnect.org.uk/hab/2010/06/17/virtual-patient-developments-june-2010/

I do many things apart from Second Life but you could be forgiven for thinking that’s all I do. I will try to widen the scope of this blog one day …….

Clouds and much more at FOTE09

Rose Heaney — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 11:18:51 +0000

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

Must start some fresh posts

Rose Heaney — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 10:18:07 +0000

When do we make time for blogging – really need to get some posts up?

All previous posts were imported from an earlier attempt to create a blog for HaB on posterous. Posts themselves came across OK but not the tags. See them in original form here http://habitat.posterous.com/