Conference in Tartu from 2-3 April 09.
http://conference2009.e-uni.ee/index.php?n=en&do=20 is website for conference.
Estonian teachers in vocational and higher education gathered in Tartu for a conference with international speakers. So many shared problems, so many worries and fears around online learning, so many varying definitions.
My papers on the changing teacher role and the plasticity of the online environment can be found in next week or so from the conference website.
Have a look at LeMill – Estonian shared repository for teachers and trainers. www.lemill.net. Also used as social software. Links to world, and flickr etc!
Great hospitality from Estonian conference team – many thanks for great simultaneous translation, at social as well as conference sessions, good food, great company from other keynote speakers and the team.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: conference, e-learning, Estonia, plasticity, teacher role
CAL09 Brighton, UK 23/3/09-25/3/09
Learner 2.0, Tartu, Estonia 2/4/09-3/4/09
UFHRD, Newcastle, UK 10/6/09-12/6/09
ICICTE, Corfu 9/7/09-11/7/09
ICEL 09 Toronto, Ontario 16/7/09-17/7/09
Categories: Uncategorized
Latest foray into publication: a basic guide to research methods published online for free student download
www.bookboon.co.uk
Oddly it has been listed under Marketing?!
Interesting business model – their profits come from relevant advertisements placed in the online downloadable book. Authors, we note, get nothing until people start dowloading, then maybe a few coppers if enough download it!
Still a useful exercise in self-discipline for the author!
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: free book, online book, research methods
Well attended conference in Agia Nappa – glorious surroundings with direct access to beach. Despite the sun and sand, the conference provided quite enough stimulus to keep me away from the distractions. Delivered paper on “identify crisis: who is teaching whom online?” which was well supported and led to lively discussion. My research proposes a transition from teacher to learner using online environments for teaching, which can be seen as empowering or upsetting, depending on your point of view.
As learners begin to get to grips with the huge possibiities of accessing information and differing perspectives over the web, there is more reason to justify challenge to what teachers say in the classroom, more ways in which they can develop confidence in online identities and metamorphose from the quiet person at the back of the class, to the pro-active challenger online. Good stuff. Unless, that is, you define yourself as a teacher by seeing yourself in charge in the classroom. Then there are stressful encounters ahead. Where now does your authority come from? To set the curriculum, to design the online course area, to ask the questions, to pace the interaction and appearance of learning artefacts. Do you have that authority any more?
Of course teachers do still have authority online – especially upfront when they are designing interactions and activities and content. But they are no longer the sole architects of their students “course”. Web integration allows students to use other HEIs for notes and ideas, monitor currency of content and find others to ask questions – possibly talking directly to far distant experts. Challenging when we work out what teachers are meant to be doing. But still plenty of opportunities for “good” ie inspiring, questioning, problem-based teaching.
Categories: online learning
Tagged: elearning, identity, learning, roles, teaching
Important conference relating to online learning coming to University of Brighton March 23-25 2009. NOTE deadline for abstract submission this Friday 26th September 08.
“The CAL biennial conference, in association with Computers & Education, and Elsevier, is one of the premier international conferences addressing computers and learning. It has a proud tradition of engendering critical debate on the key issues being tackled by researchers and practitioners in all areas and levels of, amongst other things, Educational Research, Evaluation, Learning Technologies, Teaching, Technology Enhanced Learning, Social Networking, Education Policy and Subject Specific Applications of Technology in Education and Learning.
There will be three international keynote speakers, paper presentations, symposia and poster presentations. All presentation formats should include some opportunity for further discussion.
We invite symposia from research groups or networks who are active in one or more of the themed areas. These would consist of a cluster of related short papers which may cover work in progress, methods and theories as well as completed studies.”
Categories: learning and assessment · online learning · universities
Tagged: elearning conference deadline
Free online tools were discussed in a great presentation at ALT C conference in Leeds earlier this month. Jane Hart runs a website which tests and gets people to vote and comment on their use of these tools – as a result of which there is a league table of the most popular.
The presentation finally made me get on and do something about social bookmarking, blogging, a homepage which brings stuff together, mindmapping software etc etc. In fact life has changed since this workshop. I am now using igoogle as my homepage with lots of feeds from blogs, news etc (there is a design with sheep on it, so I am happy). WordPress.com is clearly a coming favourite as this blog has been so easy to create and maintain. PBWiki.com is a great simple and freely hosted wiki development tool which I am testing for groups which are meant to be leaderless. Delicious social bookmarking is a joy simply because you can group website bookmarks under tags and categories, making finding bookmarks much easier. And of course you can use different web browsers but still find your bookmarks over the web. Free mindmapping software from bubbl.us.com is very simple, not particularly exciting, but free so all my students can be encouraged to use it – rather than the mindgenius software I have used in the past which they would need to pay for and is not on student licenced computers on campus.
All in all, I’m having a great time with this stuff, setting up before term starts a lot of hopefully timesaving ways of keeping track and keeping in touch. One bit of software I have not yet used but am so pleased to have finally found, is VUE, which is presentation software – free again – based on use of images and short notes. I saw it used some years ago and loved it – didnt know the name. Now I know it, I am bound to find a use for it!!
Categories: academic staff adoption of e-learning · learning and assessment
Tagged: elearning tools free software
Recent meeting with Jennie White of Bournemouth university who described innovative delivery of business seminars. Make the students do it all themselves. Give them high quality recorded lectures streamed through VLE and then set a semester long project for seminar groups based on business topic, with pairs taking over each of ten work roles in their business. They took video registers (on their own mobiles or one of them brings a video camera) per week to prove attendance and each week two did recorded presentations on the project progress from their perspective. Final presentation run by Director of group (in this case a Marketing Director since topic was marketing) either solo or using rest or some of seminar group. This is watched and marked by staff, then self and peer assessment of single factor – contribution to group project – done online and computed as a weighting for the group presentation mark.
Many great ideas here. Would it work for all business topic seminar groups, maybe not. Would it work only when sufficient credible roles for participants? Would it enable all learning outcomes? What if groups could not find, or book from uni, video equipment? How get acceptance for peer assessment? Could latter be proportion of mark rather than weighting? Random allocation of roles – allow switching in first week?
More questions?
But it does solve: lecturer boredom at delivering answers to same questions to multiple seminar groups, seminars turning into mini-lectures, seminars gaining differential advice and guidance from different lecturers, low seminar attendance. So worth pursuing.
Categories: learning and assessment
Tagged: assessment e-assessment seminar
Managerial metaphors? seems we are all moving towards them, not just because I work in a business school. At ALT C there was talk of managing change, strategies needed, policies, targets, objectives. Just intrusive common language I suppose, yet I wonder if we are letting this metaphor take over?
Universities as learning communities – to what extent do we let Wenger’s legitimate peripheral participation and practical mastery in to our dialogues?
What about a conference metaphor? An academic conference can be seen (OK it’s not the only view) as a meeting of lively, interested actors who have in common their humanity and needs for fun, communication and good food and drink, but have a drive to engage and debate. Conversations with strangers are encouraged because we trust in a roughly common aim. That pays dividends as we find our ideas in dialogue being honed and looked at from different perspectives. Sounds good for a uni model to me – could we sabotage the silos?
ALT C Crowdvine link
Categories: universities
Tagged: conference, metaphor, models
