“New Pedagogies for the Digital Age”

Looking forward to Steve Wheeler’s session to launch our faculty e-learning programme this year.
Six sessions all in all with e-expertise, fun, food, lots of sharing of ideas.

prezi rules!

great and free – like all the best software!
here’s my amateurish first attempt to use in uni next semester as an introduction to terms in HRM

Business Faculty e-learning programme

The Faculty programme is now launched in Brighton. This programme aims to inspire, stimulate and debate technology enhanced learning in the Faculty. The key areas of pedagogy in relation to Studentcentral, Community@Brighton and Web 2.0 applications, will be considered. We hope to stimulate staff engagement with e-learning and raise opportunities for online assessment.

Facilitated by the Business e-Learning Research Group, the programme will include three invited speakers, two internally facilitated workshops and a final symposium with experts and invited participants from faculty. After each session with an external speaker, six participants will be invited to an evening meal with the speaker hosted by BeL to continue the debate.

A Community@Brighton site will run alongside the programme and BeL will offer one-to-one drop in sessions after each internal workshop for staff who wish to experiment with a little help.

First event 3rd Feb 2010.

Pedagogic Research Conference at Brighton

Small but perfectly formed conference yesterday in the new Checkland Building at Falmer. Keynote speaker – Professor Glynis Cousin from the Institute for Learning Enhancement at Wolverhampton – was wonderfully fluent in pedagogic research, and encouraging to those of us who prevaricate about what researching in relation to our teaching practice means.
My session on e-modelling argued for risk-taking and vulnerability in the HE classroom and online, on the basis that we need to model not perfected presentation skills, but live learning. Some good questions and comments, so worth pursuing. The paper is in EJEL Volume 7 Issue 3, “E-modelling – helping learners to develop sound e-learning behaviours” just available online, but there is more to this debate about challenging teacher conceptions and classroom behaviour in relation to learning.
Also a great social networking activity with lego from Katie Piatt, demonstrating the difference between Blackboard and elgg. Maybe though we need to get tough about adoption before community@brighton really takes off in learning and teaching roles.

webcast from Vienna

Received this today, looks worth a visit: Emerald are pleased to announce a webcast to mark the opening of the Centennial Peter F. Drucker Forum to take place in Vienna on November 19, from 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM CET. Retransmission for the US – 8:00 AM to 12:00 PM PST (11:00 AM to 3 PM EST)

Please follow the link to the Webcast:

http://www.druckersociety.at/index.php/peterdruckerhome/multimedia.

Participate in the full opening session featuring:

Dr. Doris Drucker – widow of Peter Drucker

Pastor Dr. Rick Warren, Founder of the Saddleback Church

Prof. C.K. Prahalad, Professor of Strategy, University of Michigan Ross School of Business

Prof. Charles Handy, Social Philosopher

Prof. Fredmund Malik, Owner and Chairman of Malik Management Center St Gallen

Adrian Wooldridge, Management Editor of The Economist
Please follow link to view the full conference program:

http://www.druckersociety.at/index.php/09-global-forum/program

Conference papers

What kinds are there? We all know about the doctoral research in progress, the full research paper nearly an article lookalike, and the working paper in between, where the full results are not expected but a substantial view of the literature should be started.

But the real conference experience shows a different typology. There are the “I did this” report papers – often the least interesting unless you are keen to do exactly the same thing yourself. There are the “This is what we did and we evaluated it” papers, which offer at least a little evaluation of the action or event but still belong to a remote academic island somewhere we may not wish to visit. Then we have the “I met some people from other universities and we did the same thing in different places” paper. This one has more research pretensions and might be useful to listen to, but is still largely located in the “thing we did”.

What other kinds of papers present themselves? There are the straight literature reviews, which are honest about search terms and targets and don’t expect to be more than a lit report. I like this kind of paper because it genuinely offers some work you might not have to do yourself, and gives a meta-analysis to some extent of a particular area. They often present with some kind of flaw, e.g. a severe limitation on target journals or search terms, but are upfront about that.

Then we have the researcher opinion piece: The “I have done quite a bit of research and this is what I think” paper. These vary hugely in quality – some genuinely stimulating and creative – these are the ones not to miss. Others can turn out to be founded in a narrow field or limited experience and offer only thinly disguised personal opinion without evidence.

Don’t forget the sponsors! These are papers which have been commissioned somehow by a provider of software, learning resource, hardware etc who look this way for academic credibility, enjoining academics to trial and publish. Not all bad, they offer ideas and examples, but are not so often highly rigorous because of the limited choice of software, resource or hardware.

OK, there are also some really good papers reporting dimensions of a major research project. The downsides here are usually that sources of funding are precious so researchers sometimes use these as an opportunity to boast, or milk the project with x papers about only slightly different aspects of the project.

Am I sounding cynical? Tell me what I have missed here.

ECEL 09 in Bari, Italy

plotting research

Last conference of 2009 for me – no more papers to present until next year. This time I spoke about communication technologies, choosing amongst them – we had a lively debate about the merits and demerits of blogs, wikis, livechat, message boards and dear old email. I was reflecting on these delights in relation to power, status, relationship to VLE and various other dimensions. Just part of the everyday teacher job to sort out what fits best. All agreed that more than 3 comms channels was immensely confusing – advice needed. Yet another idea set to work into a paper.

Most of the benefit of this conference to me was making connections, old and new and moving them towards a research project idea, watch this space.

BAM conference in Brighton

Really new style of conference for me. Loved the format of Development Papers where in round table format there was no av but papers were presented with handouts (when people remembered). The great thing was that everyone round the tables contributed, as interested “supervisors” or “advisors” to the paper. So having gone with less than huge enthusiasm about my topic – leadership in not-for-profit organisations – not sure whether it was a legitimate study, not sure if I knew nearly enough to talk about this, in fact I came away from the session so stimulated and keen, that this is now on the active research list for me and I need to find some small scale funding to move from pilot stage to larger interview stage.

And being in Brighton, ice-cream was available next door…

ALT C in Manchester 2009

Yes two conferences in Manchester in the space of two weeks. While I have nothing against Manchester, the prospect of going again in the third week of September for an Examination Board is not vastly pleasing.

ALT C will be worth it though – last year’s conference was greatly stimulating, great fun and came away not just with new academic thoughts but also workshop feedback and new technology understanding. This year my colleague and I offer a paper based on that feedback and further research – will we find some answers to helping staff use VLEs etc? Many have tried and few have arrived. The answer, as always, is likely to be complicated but primarily needing a focus on the human level, whatever the technology.

BERA 2009 in Manchester

Due to be my first visit to this esteemed conference; looking forward to the experience. My colleague and I will be presenting a discussion paper on some action learning research, feeling our way towards relevant practical conclusions and recommendations. How hard it is not to be solipsistic when reporting action research around your own attempts at innovation.  Let’s hope we can strike the right note of humility without getting an inferiority complex in the face of all these clever people…