Reflections on ALT-C 2009

ALT-C 2009 took place in  sunny Manchester! The conference dinner in the very impressive surroundings of Manchester Town Hall was memorable, and praise was deservedly heaped on the students who helped to prepare and serve the meal.    There was much to digest too in terms of conference presentations and discussion – here are 6 [...]

VLEs – engaging students (but what about the staff?)

In ALT-J March 2009 an article by Alice Maltby and Sarah Mackie from the University of the West of England explores the extent to which use of a VLE can help or hinder student engagement.
The article describes a project in which student activity in the VLE was tracked and this was mapped against their performance. [...]

Revised approach to HEFCE’s strategy for e-learning

I have at last had time over Easter to read the  revised approach to HEFCE’s strategy for e-learning “Enhancing learning and teaching through the use of technology“, published in March.
I found it very useful, in giving an overview of the context and key recent developments, together with a framework for institutions to use when considering [...]

JISC Learner Experience of e-learning workshop

Yesterday I attended the JISC Learner Experience of e-learning – Phase 2 findings workshop in Bristol.  The event proved to be an active and enjoyable introduction to some of the key findings of the research so far as well as to some of the methodologies used to collect qualitative data.
The central message coming through was [...]

Futures cafe – cloud computing and google apps for education – 19th March 09

Yesterday I attended the Futures cafe event organised by the ILRT in Bristol. The 2 speakers were Sam Peters, Business Development Manager for  Google Apps for Education and Andrew Charlesworth, Director of the Centre for IT and Law (CITL) at the University of Bristol.
Sam started by giving an overview of “Google apps for education“.  She [...]

Learning Futures Festival 09 and typed V written exams

Last week I attended the Learning Futures Festival 09 event in Leicester.
In the first keynote Sugata Mitra gave an interesting presentation on his “Hole in the wall” projects and his ideas around self-organising learning systems. His research shows that groups of children can learn many things if they have shared public access to a PC, [...]

WEETHE – eXe presentation

I have been further exploring eXe recently and last week I presented a short demo at the WEETHE meeting at the University of Gloucestershire.  I used the Ready-to-run Windows version, which I had on a memory stick, and this worked well.
This was followed by a hands-on session by participants using the tool, and some discussion [...]

Some thoughts from ALT-C 2008

Last week I attended the ALT-C conference in Leeds, which was on the theme of “Re-thinking the digital divide”. Here are some of my highlights:
John Davies from the University of Sussex presented the Skillsclouds project. This is an interesting idea on the use of tag clouds to support student understanding of transferable skills. The project [...]

Thoughts on the Moodle lesson activity

As part of some work I am doing on looking at tools for creation of learning objects I have been investigating the Moodle lesson activity in more depth over the past weeks.  This activity allows for the creation of sequential and conditional activities. Although this is one of the more complex activities available in Moodle, [...]

Thoughts from the Cheetah symposium

On Tuesday myself and Andy Ramsden attended the Cheetah project symposium in Leicester. This event, led by Gilly Salmon, was well-attended by a range of participants from both the Cheetah and Adder projects, who included Librarians, e-learning specialists and lecturers amongst others.
It was a useful opportunity to share experiences and discuss possible future development. My [...]