ALT-C 2011: The Videos

Selected talks from ALT-C 2011 are now available on YouTube.

To give you an idea of what might be interesting to you I've listed the talks along with a quick overview of those that I've watched.

• "Well, the kookaburras thought it was funny anyway!" (27:20) - Gilly Salmon has moved to Australia and gives us a quick comparison of the two Higher Education systems.
• “The city as the learning environment: making change happen in Leicester's schools" (23:09) - Josie Fraser works on ICT strategy across Leicester's schools, and here she talks about ways in which the students there want to improve their schools and learning technology use. She finishes by talking about their strategy and aims.
• "Leadership in a cold climate: Leading where the past is no reliable guide to the future. A reflection on the strategic leadership of people, technology and institutions in UK HE" (32:46) [Presentation Slides] - Ewart Wooldridge from the Leadership Foundation for HE spoke about the need for agility and change in Higher Education. While technology can have transformative, strategic and operational change on a university, he notes that currently most change is operational and then looks at how less hierarchical models of leadership, respect for professional staff, more entrepreneurial work, and more collaboration, might enable the transformational and strategic change.
• "I Have a Blind Student in My Maths/Science Class, Should I panic? How to promote inclusion for blind students" (29:38) - By Donal Fitzpatrick, Lecturer at the School of Computing at Dublin University.
• "Remembering Robin Mason" (25:01) - By Sonam Penjor, Head of Educational Technology, Royal University of Bhutan, Bhutan.
• "The ROI of Online Collaboration: Doing More With Less" (31:02) - By Rajeev Arora, Vice President of Marketing and Strategy for Blackboard Collaborate.
• "On being public...how social media reshapes professional identity" (31:50) - By Anne-Marie Cunningham, Clinical Lecturer and Academic Lead for eLearning in the School of Medicine at Cardiff University.
• "JISC's support for learning and teaching in a changing educational environment" (30:51) - By Malcolm Read, Executive Secretary of JISC.
• "Open courses: Converting, launching, and letting go..." (28:04) - Jo Axe, Associate Dean in the Faculty of Management at Royal Roads University, Canada.
• "The elusive technological future" (51:39) - John Naughton, Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology at the Open University.
• "The educational and social impacts of Plan Ceibal - a new approach to the use of technology in education" (1:02:28) - Miguel Brechner, President of the Uruguayan Centre for Technological and Social Inclusion.

[image by Jez Cope]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License.

SOLSTICE & CLTR Conference 2011: Call for Abstracts

This year the SOLSTICE and CLTR conferences will be run as one, and the call for abstracts has gone out.

The conference will focus on the enhancement of student learning through evidence informed practices.

Day one, the SOLSTICE 2011 eLearning Conference will focus on effective practices from a Technology Enhanced Learning perspective and will build on the success of the SOLSTICE Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning’s previous conferences which have run over the last 5 years.

Day two, the CLTR 2011 Learning & Teaching Research Conference will focus on innovation and development in higher education learning and teaching practice, which has been at the heart of the CLTR’s mission for the last 9 years.

SOLSTICE Conference 2010: Videos

Back in June the SOLSTICE conference 2010 took place, and if like me you missed the keynotes you'll be thrilled to know that they are now available online.

In the first keynote Professor Gilly Salmon points to the evidence and enablers for learning in Higher Education to be fit for purpose for the rest of the 21st Century.

The second keynote was by Professor Peter Hartley and looked back at 5 years of the SOLSTICE project.

If you enjoy those videos, there's more to come! The 6th SOLSTICE conference is planned for 9th June 2011.

SOLSTICE Conference 2009: It's All in the Blend?

2009 sees the fourth annual SOLSTICE Conference here at Edge Hill University, on Thursday 4th June.

The conference aims to 'explore the 'blend' between innovation, research and development of supported and blended online learning'.

In the keynote sessions, Dr Rhona Sharpe and Professor Tara Brabazon will be speaking, and abstracts for other sessions are available covering many topics including social networking, online formative assessment, learning spaces, 3D virtual worlds and the user experience.

If that sounds relevant to you, register online.


[Image from the SOLSTICE archives]

e-Portfolios: Practical and StrategicThinking

I've been attending the JISC Innovating e-Learning online conference this week, and found the discussions around ePortfolios useful.

The idea that we can split the uses of what are being called e-portfolios into 4 areas is popular. This is covered in the AlphaPlus document about existing e-Portfolio use, and gives a framework when thinking about what the purpose of their use. The 4 areas in this document are:

-Portfolio of work that demonstrates learning - The learner can put anything in here that demonstrates learning. If they make it available more publically it can be used for formative assessment by peers and teaching staff.
-Portfolio for summative assessment of learning on a course - This is marked against criteria.
-Portfolio to transfer learner information between institutions - The learner has little control over this.
-Portfolio to present your work, perhaps to a potential employer - This contains specially selected work for a particular audience.

Whatever you want to achieve by asking or encouraging your students to create an e-portfolio, you need to be able to communicate this to the students. Even if the advice is vague, and full freedom is given to the student, they need some idea of what is achievable and why they will benefit. The learner could see what could be done by seeing exisiting portfolios, like this gallery at Penn State University, and the 'e-Portfolios: Why Create an e-Portfolio' video on the e-Portfolios at Penn State podcast might help answer the 'Why?' question.

This is all at a practical level, but there is also a lot to think about around institutional strategies.

Thanet College seem to have done a lot of work in this area, and the document 'Thanet College: Personalised learning spaces - the next challenge for ILT', is worth a read if you are interested in the strategy side of things.

The ideas that stand out to me from Thanet are firstly, providing all tutors with PebblePad (an e-Portfolio system) accounts. If the staff think about their own e-Portfolio and use the system then they are better prepared to lead the students in their use.

Secondly, the idea of the Institution 'owning' the VLE and the learner 'owning' the e-Portfolio is useful, as it helps us think about and communicate to the students what we can expect from the different software tools we use.

Finally they saw a challenge in deciding where the college stood on transferability of the portfolios, which perhaps fits in with ideas around lifelong learning.

ALT-C 2008 - Rethinking the Digital Divide

The ALT-C Conference takes place over the next week. If like me, you find it difficult to get away to conferences at this time of year, you can still get involved in the three keynote sessions which are being 'broadcast' using Elluminate Live.

See details on the ALT Conference Weblog, but basically:

-Tuesday 9th Sept 08- 9:50-11:00 BST - Hans Rosling talks about world development.
-Wednesday 10th Sept 08- 14:00 -15:00 BST- Itiel Dror looks more deeply into what learning is and how that might change the way learning materials are created.
-Thursday 11th Sept 08- 12:10-13:10 BST - David Cavallo looks at learning environments and the OLPC.

Visit the Elluminate support pages to make sure your web browser will work with the site. Then go to the conference Elluminate pages at the relevant time to listen to a session, and interact with others who are listening. Elluminate Live is more than just a content delivery tool as it allows audience communication, so it might be an interesting experience if you've not used anything like this before.


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SOLSTICE Conference 2008: Videos

Did you miss the SOLSTICE 2008 conference? Well at last you can put aside your regrets as some of the presentations from 'SOLSTICE: eLearning and Learning Environments for the Future' conference are now available as WMV files to watch online:


Les Watson: From Space to Place - In which Les explores what we should think about when designing new spaces for learning - 50 minutes - [abstract] [slides]

Eric Hamilton: Learners, Learning Environments, and Classrooms of the Future - In which Eric explores changes in educational settings, now and in the future - 43 minutes [abstract] [slides]

Peter Hartley: Summary of the Conference - 9 minutes

SOLSTICE Conference 2008: One Minute Mix

This video contains photos and clips from interviews taken at this year's SOLSTICE Conference, entitled 'eLearning and Learning Environments for the Future'.




Below are links to blog posts about the conference:

Anywhere Learning by Stuart Smith
Yukiyama's Daily Life by Yukiyama
Web Services by Mike Nolan
E-flections by Paul Lowe
Blog by Lawrie Phipps

ALT-C 2008: Call for Papers

The Association of Learning Technologists Conference (ALT-C) is in Leeds in 2008, and they are now welcoming submissions of either research papers for publication in the peer-reviewed proceedings or abstracts for demonstrations, posters, short papers, symposia and workshops. The deadline for submissions is 29 February 2008.

ALT-C covers pretty much everything that you might call Learning Technology, and if you are using new technologies in teaching and learning there is a good chance you'll meet other people there who are doing something similar. I found it a good place to talk with people and consolidate ideas I'd been thinking about - but to do that you need to avoid spending all 3 days in sessions, or you'll just arrive back at work with a head full of ideas and no time to sort out what they mean to your future work!

To read of people's experiences at ALT-C visit Technorati, or read my posts from 2007 in Nottingham (day 1, day 2, day 3, after), and have a think if you've got anything to present there.

Corporate Learning: Trends and Innovations Conference

Been having a look at the 'Corporate Learning' conference that is going on at Complexitive.com.

This is a free online conference that is being run using Elluminate Live! and while some of the sessions are very focussed on business, I think that there is a lot that Higher Education can learn from the group of people involved.

Have a look at the conference wiki to see a list of past recordings and future presentations that you might want to attend (add 6 hours to the time if you are in the UK).

This got me wondering; how is what corporate educators are doing, different to Higher Education's focus? Elliott Masie points out at the SCIL Conference, 2003, there are a lot of similarities in at least how on-line content and experiences are (or should be) developed.

I certainly hope that, in the future, developments that we do will be part of projects, with plans and service level agreements - more like what I've seen in the business world. Most developments I see in HE run much more informally. I think when SOLSTICE pushes the idea of New Academic Teams this project based approach will be an important part of making it work. The plans would also have to take into account invisible costs like levels of student support, and maintenance which tend to be ignored.

SOLSTICE Conference 2007: One Minute Mix

This video is a one-minute encapsulation of the May 2007 SOLSTICE conference.

SOLSTICE is Edge Hill's Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. It's aim is to help develop a method of course delivery that has the use of technology integrated into it, rather than added on to it.

Highlights of the SOLSTICE Conference

This video is a one-minute encapsulation of the May 2006 SOLSTICE conference.

SOLSTICE is Edge Hill's Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. It's aim is to help develop a method of course delivery that has the use of technology integrated into it, rather than added on to it.

Either watch the high quality version (.wmv format) or watch the embedded version held on YouTube (below).



Details of the 2007 conference will be available soon.