Sunday, 7 September 2008
ALT-C conference Edubloggers meet-up
I really should be blogging about the ALT-C conference...
I'll be attending the fourth (but my first) ALT-C Edublogger meetup next week, taking place at Leeds Student Union Mine Bar, Tuesday 9th September, 19.30 onwards.
Apparently: " We may be moving on somewhere else but we'll stay at the Mine Bar until at least 20.30. We've been lucky enough to have had some great special guests at previous meetups - including James Farmer, Stephen Downes, Barbara Dieu, Christopher D. Sessums and Barbara Ganley. This year's meeting promises to be as jam packed with world-class edubloggers as ever, including Scott Wilson and Graham Attwell. George Siemens will also be in town - he's speaking at ALT-C early Wednesday - and I'm looking forward to meeting up with him for the first time in 3D. As every - this is an informal, fun get together. You don't have to dress up and you don't have to be an old school edublogger to come along. Everyone who has an interest in edublogging is welcome. To co-inside with F-ALT, the first ever grass roots fringe event at ALT, which will be tackling a range of cutting edge topics in a fast, dynamic debate framework, we'll be holding the microblogging session on the night. Su White will be facilitating speakers Helen Whitehead, James Clay, Jay Cousins, Andy Powell & maybe Josie Fraser in a kung-fu style roundtable. Good quality heckling and any imaginative audience participation will be entirely welcome."
I have no idea what a kung-fu style round table is. But I'll find out on Tuesday!Labels: ALTC2008, blogging, conference, edubloggers
posted by Helen Whitehead 7:12 PM
Thursday, 24 January 2008
Women bloggers
Janet Clarey has blogged this month about Women in the edublogosphere 2007
She says "When I first started blogging early in ‘07 I felt there weren’t that many female bloggers."
Which is so sad - I've been blogging since 2003, and I know a lot of women, especially in the new media and education areas who've been blogging that long. Looks from Janet's list that she now knows plenty of women edubloggers too :) I'm looking forward to surfing through her list and adding to my feeds.
Meanwhile we are sorting out speakers for a conference of women bloggers in Leeds on 12th June, and there's no shortage of people to approach - though if you have a suggestion for a speaker I'd be delighted to hear it.Labels: blogging, conference, e-learning, edublogging, educational blogs, Leedswomenontheweb, women bloggers
posted by Helen Whitehead 5:46 PM
Monday, 14 January 2008
Beyond the Campus: Learning Futures Conference at Leicester
The Learning Futures conference at the University of Leicester this year, run by the Beyond Distance Research Alliance (BDRA) had the theme Beyond the Campus. Here are some first thoughts:
Tony Bates emphasised that the most effective model for implementing e-learning in an institution was not a top-down edict (although strong vision, leadership and comitment is vital) nor individual adopters or champions beavering away alone, but a department-based team effort - just as we found in implementing Carpe Diem workshops during the Adelie project.
Phil Candy showed us some great quotes about the Internet, the Web and e-learning including a lovely Buddhist quote (thanks to Lindsay Jordan for the link).
The individual sessions held some gems. I found out all about the Fundacao Bradesco, an educational organisation funded by a bank (more on that later) with some fabulous e-learning going on in deprived areas of Brazil. Also a great project in Leicester's History Department based on the principles of ARG.
One of my favourite sessions was the drama workshop visioning workshop on Wednesday afternoon, led by Paula Salmon. We discussed and played games around three scenarios, My Very Own University, University of the World and University of Earning and Learning. At the end we split into three groups to create a playlet representing each of the three scenarios, which were videoed. Look out YouTube!
A very frendly conference with lots of food for thought and a great standard of participant. I liked the identity badge lanyards which clicked apart to reveal a flashdrive: a great idea that they had at ALT too (from Wimba, thank you). I just wish my flash drive hadn't fallen out at some point, one can always do with an extra one...Labels: BDRA, conference, e-learning, learning futures
posted by Helen Whitehead 2:29 PM
Thursday, 6 September 2007
Lessons for ELKS from ALT-C...
I'm the convenor of the ELKS community of practice - that's E-Learning and Knowledge Sharing- and it's a community of expertise in e-learning in HE, which is run for the UN's GAID (Global Alliance for ICT in Development) initiative by BDRA out of the University of Leicester. It has several other institutional founders around the world (4 continents in fact!), and with an Australian Omnium web interface. So there were several people and sessions at ALT which were of interest to me wearing this hat, particularly as one of the strands was e-learning and internationalism.
In a session yesterday afternoon Alannah Fitzgerald spoke about social computing and the sustainable support of learning communities. The community she spoke about met the needs of a very specific niche group - volunteers and workers in micro-credit and micro-lending organisations based on Professor Mohammed Yunus' Grameen Bank model. I guess an international version of the credit unions we have in the UK.
They've created a network of resources etc. aggregating information about successful projects for others to learn, including real and fictional case studies, guiding questions and reflective practice. Really helping to empower individuals and their communities and I'd love to have her talk about to the ELKS community.
I hadn't heard of the software she mentioned to aggregate metatags from the social network - SUPRGLU, must check it out. A feed aggregator for blogs relevant to ELKS would be a great idea for our community.
Karen Robinson discussed her study about how cultural and linguistic backgrounds of students affected their use of e-learning and whether technology could support them better. Her story of the student pasting other people's contributions and his own into a translator before he could post on the forum alerted me to that possible issue in ELKS discussions being entirely in English (though I am thinking of adding Spanish to the mix in some way).
Also, the use of discussion boards requires a higher level of English than listening to lectures and writing essays: and there can be cultural differences in how a forum (for example) actually looks (colour of the background!), let alone the culture of behaving in the online space.
Tore Hoel also had a message for me - "Syndication and aggregation work better that overarching frameworks or platforms." In other words, people don't necessarily want an all-singing all-dancing community that is a new, separate and time-consuming place they have to go and visit - even unique content isn't necessarily appropriate - it may be better to provide an aggregate of information that is appropriate to our project in the ways that members already like to interact.
This morning I heard Marc Dupuis talking about a European virtual campus - lots to learn here about working together, and if within Europe is difficult - going global is even harder! "European collaboration is difficult," he stated - and I have to admit from my experience of EU projects I concur. Copyright and intellectual property are of particular importance across institutions and nations - must get that issue clear for ELKS. Linguistic differences cannot be underestimated. I wonder if lessons from a European project like this can be extrapolated to global collaborative projects?
Chris Douce of the Open University talked about the plethora of standards across Europe for e-learning - so what will the situation be like when you add in the rest of the world? How difficult might it be for us to provide universal simple learning such as online tutoring skills courses or learning objects?
Paul Bacsich reminded us that teaching may be in English but "secret learning" may well be in the students' native language(s) - Arabic in the case of the Arab Open University. He also gave us compelling reasons not to have more than 9 chapters in a report - sage advice!
As next year's ALT theme is about the digital divide, I think it's probably a cue to offer a short paper about ELKS, if we're still going at that point!Labels: ALT-C2007, altc2007, communities of practice, conference, e-learning, ELKS, global, internationalism, UN, UN-GAID
posted by Helen Whitehead 5:06 PM
Monday, 20 August 2007
See you at ALT-C
I will be attending the ALT-C conference : ALT-C, Beyond Control, Learning technology for the social network generation in Nottingham on 4-6 September 2007.
I'll be there with my colleagues Ale Armellini, Sylvia Jones and Gilly Salmon. We'll be running a practical workshop on Wiki-tivities. I'm writing it now... it should be a good experience.
It's from 4-5.30pm on Wednesday 5th September.
http://www.alt.ac.uk/altc2007/timetable/abstract.php?abstract_id=1155
See you there?
Also, my old colleagues at NCSL are running a Pre-conference Workshop: on NCSL's Tools for eLearning at the Learning and Conference Centre, Nottingham. Lunch from 12:30. Starts 13:00, ends 16:00.
More at the conference websiteLabels: ALT, ALT-C, ALT-C2007, conference, e-learning, Nottingham, wikis, workshop
posted by Helen Whitehead 1:36 PM
