Off to ALT-C 2011

We’re attending ALT-C 2011 (‘Thriving in a Colder and More Challenging Climate’) this week which is held at the University of Leeds. This is my first ALT-C which I’m excited about, whereas Marie is an ALT-C veteran! Our ePoster ‘Collaborative Workflows for the Participatory Design of Open Educational Resources’ can be downloaded here (eposter 0224). We’ll also be attempting some live blogging of some of the sessions we’ll be attending, decent wireless provision permitting! We’ll also be tweeting from @jpodcaster and @marie_s

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Summer update!

We seem to have been too busy recently to even manage a short blog post but I thought I should try and put something up here before joining everyone else and heading off on my hols!

Last week, we had two pieces of good news.  The first was that we’ve had a paper published in Ariadne on our experiences over the last year piloting Elluminate Live!  (Ariadne, for those not familiar with it, is a web-based journal published quarterly by UKOLN – a centre of excellence in digital information management, funded by JISC and based here at the University of Bath).

We were asked to do the paper back in February following a session we ran introducing UKOLN staff to the potential of tools like Elluminate.  Staff attended both physically and virtually and seemed to go very well except we hadn’t prepared for what to do when you get an unplanned fire alarm!  All staff in physical attendance had to leave the building and gather outside in the icy blasts while those attending virtually were left chatting among themselves and having a play with the tool!

Our second piece of good news is related to the first in that we learnt that we have been successful in our bid to the University’s Teaching and Development Fund and have been given funding for the next year to extend our piloting of web-conferencing tools further – specifically, we’ll be looking at:

“Using Collaborative web-conferencing technology to enhance participation by prospective students from widening participation backgrounds”

We will continue using Elluminate (or Blackboard Collaborate as it has now become) through our CPD Support and Development Office, as well as exploring the potential of Adobe Connect and, hopefully, also something like BigBlueButton.

Before tackling this though, I’m off to find some nice sunsets like this!  Have a good summer……..

 

 

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Diigo Links w/b June 20th, 2011

Lots of Diigo links for the 2 weeks from Monday June 20th to Sunday July 3rd, 2011:

Choosing Open Licences : Information Environment Team

Useful info on choosing open licences from JISC Information Environment Team.

A staff guide to Open Educational Resources – Leeds Met Repository Open Search

One of the best introductory guides to OER aimed at staff we have seen.

List of Social Media Tools That Can be Used in Social Learning – Interactyx

25 Ways to Keep Learners Awake and Intrigued!

How To Convert A PowerPoint 2010 Presentation Into A Video With One Click

JISC’s Open Educational Resources infoKit

Free Stuff From Microsoft #7 – Kinect SDK – Teaching Ideas and Resources

Are you ready for the second wave of social media?

Interesting article on the way social media is heading – internal social media

TagPad

Tagpad is iPad software currently in development which enables researchers to record interviews in the field.

JISC Digital Media – Blog: Turbo charged – Turbo T.E.L. ’11

Nice summary page of some of the Turbo-TEL talks and tweets!

Teaching Lifelong Learning Skills with Twitter: A Lesson for Leaders | GETideas.org

Collecting, Annotating and Redistributing Student Work using an iPad, GoodReader, Dropbox

Good usage case on using Goodreader on iPad in conjunction with Dropbox to give feedback on students’ work.

More details on HE Cloud Pilot « Eduserv

Need to investigate further

Web2_Framework (PDF download)

Lots of info re web 2.0!

Livelab – Publications and links

Some interesting documents from LiveLab around mobile and personalised learning as well as future learning spaces. From Tim Rudd ex of Futurelab.

Southampton City College: Southampton City College strives for Gold with Moodle benchmarking Scheme

Coursekit – Education is about communication

One to watch for the future?

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Presenting with Prezi!

It was different start to the week. We had been asked to give a presentation to a group of visiting business people from an organisation called Aradel, France (
http://www.aradel.asso.fr/
) – a local economic development agency who were touring the south-west this week as part of a EU Leonardo-funded mobility project looking at Innovation Management.  We’d been asked to present on how we were using innovative technologies to deliver CPD so did a quick run through of some of the tools we use with our learners and why the technologies are so important to us.

Meet Le Migou!

After initial suggestions that we should present remotely, we plumped for a bit of an experiment and decided to have a go at presenting with Prezi.  We’ve thought about using this tool before, but never quite had the courage or time to have a play. If you’ve not come across it before, have a look at their website.  It’s a great presentation tool that makes a refreshing change from your traditional powerpoint with all sorts of options to zoom around the screen, spin things round etc.  Certainly good fun putting the presentation together, though the effect of the zooming can lead to mild sea-sickness! And it worked well with Turning Point Anywhere, which allowed us to use the clickers and do some on-the-spot questions.

If you’re interested, have a look at what we came up with!

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Diigo Links w/b June 13, 2011

Here are our Diigo links for Monday June 13th to Sunday June 19th, 2011:

e-Front: Royalty-free music for e-Learning

Not explored this much but might be useful source of music tracks for us!

d-Scribe: OpenMichigan Wiki

A collaborative and participatory model for the design of OER at the University of Michigan (thanks to Andy Lane for the link).

111 Learning Resources

The updated monster list of 111 learning resources. Includes a nice section on resources for learning design.

ClipGrab

Free, cross-platform software for downloading video from YouTube, Vimeo and other sites.

Tagxedo

Great tool for making ‘artistic’ word clouds – forms word clouds in the shape of a particular image

JISC Netskills Talk: The Rhetoric of Openness

An Elluminate session on the rhetoric of openness by Dave White from the University of Oxford

Embedding Creative Commons licenses into digital resources

A short JISC briefing paper discussing how best to embed creative commons licenses into digital resources.

New features of Prezi and Prezi for iPad

Blog post discussing some of the new features of Prezi on web and iPad. Includes a link to another post ‘How to make a Prezi – Rookie to Pro in 20 minutes’.

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Taking the plunge

What do you write in your first blog post on a new blog? As we’ve subtitled this blog ‘Reflecting on e-developments in Lifelong Learning….’ etc,  that’s maybe a good place to start?

So, what have we been up to? This morning has been taken up with a very interesting and productive series of meetings – we’re currently working on our suite of Management and Leadership units and have been having talking for some time about developing some interactive case studies.  The curriculum leader has done a great job with a script for this but we’ve only just had a chance to sit down and discuss it as a group.  It really feels as if we’ve made some progress.  We’ve cast the ‘actors’, worked out how we’re going to present the case study (using Xerte), so it’s now just up to us to make this become a reality.

This was followed up with a discussion (over an extremely large coffee) about copyright and its complexities, particularly focussing on how it affects us for the OER project we’re involved in. Definitely need a bit more guidance in this area, though the central e-Learning Team here are extremely helpful in supporting us.  This leads me nicely to the final meeting of the morning – meeting the new Head of e-Learning here and explaining our role in the OER project!

Ok, so I haven’t reflected really on what we’re up to but I’ve got something down on screen to replace the Hello World post that has been here for a while!  Hopefully, my reflection will improve with practice!

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