PLEs at HEA Annual conference

I presented our work on Personal Learning Environments at the HEA Annual conference in Manchester on 30 June 2009. This project was funded by HEA Centre for Bioscience Departmental grant and took place in 2008/09 with a cohort of 220 first year undergraduate students. The project team was led by Alan Cann with assistance from Stuart Johnson and me.

Media, communications and making connections

For the first time, I attended a one day conference today purely because of someone I had met on twitter. Jennifer Jones is a first year PhD student in the department of media and communications at Leicester and is investigating social media. She walks the walk and talks the talk, and when met with resistance to the new forms of social connections offered by the likes of twitter in her own department, she decided to do something about it and organised a one day conference on the Social Media: Uses + Abuses (#uanda).

I think she did an amazing job, quite an achievement for a first year postgraduate student. She had the support of her twitter network behind her and quite a few of us were there to enjoy the conference.

Unfortunately I couldn’t stay for the whole conference, but I very much enjoyed Andy Miah’s presentation. His description of twitter as a search engine was very apt and that it is replacing email is an important message for the those in the media and communications department to listen to. I hope they can rise the challenge and embrace these new connections and spaces.

I think Clay Shirky’s recent TED talk about twitter sums it up nicely: this represents a a new way of communicating, the many to many conversation can now be supported.

#SLTC09

Nine of us from Leicester attended the third Science and Learning Teaching Conference 2009 . Having got up far too early in the morning for my own good, we were rewarded with breakfast on arrival.

We attempted to amplify the conference as best we could, but with only two non-leicester people twittering, there were limited opportunities for outside interaction (though I think we kept Moira happy!). this was the first conference that I didn’t take notes at but tweeted instead. I have come to think that there is enough online and printed material for me to just try and absorb and reflect whilst twittering rather than writing notes to not use afterwards.  So what follows are edited highlights of my relfections on the conference.

Learning by Experience?

Professor Dave Barclay, Robert Gordon University, a Forensic scientist

The first keynote was fascinating and I learnt perhaps more than I wanted to know about where to look for DNA evidence at a crime scene. The learning resource for forensic science that Prof Barclay demonstrated at the very end of his presentation looked really interesting,especially the way that it was possible to revisit exercises at different levels (simple structure for first years, more detailed and open questions for third years). This system enabled a series of hyperlinked labels to be added to photographs which led to other evidence, written documents, more photos, lab reports.

Prof Dave Barclay

First-year student transitions: engaging with the ‘whole’ student experience

Paul Green, GENIE CETL, Leicester University
This is actually a Leicester Project, but I haven’t been involved with it much since it started and I knew there was some very rich data here and was really keen to hear what Paul, a social anthropologist had brought to the project. The presentation was excellent and it was clear that the audience empathised with the students in their video diaries, perhaps having had similar experiences themselves. Paul has brought some theoretical contextualisation to the project which is really helping to struture it’s direction and research questions.

In the afternoon, the session that stood out was a presentation by Nicholas Freestone on ‘the perils of pedagogy’. Nicholas outlined some of the challenges faced in having the scholarship of teaching and learning recognised as a worthwhile pursuit and spoke a lot of sense.

David Sands presented an interesting way of using vpython to get students to think about classical mechanical physics through visual modelling. I wish he had included a demonstration of the software at the beginning, as it illustrated his point beautifully. Students had to work with the formula and parameters in the software to get balls to bounce up and down or springs to recoil correctly.

The highlight from day two (apart from Alan’s presentation of course!) was Stephen McClean’s HEAT3 project using a youtube cloned site to have students share videos about their practical classes. Slides available on slideshare.

A successful conference with much networking and some good twittering (archive on friend feed).

iTouch voice memos

CC: flickr jschneid

I’ve just upgraded to OS 3.0 on the iTouch and tried the new voice memos app. It’s a neat and simple recorder, you can even do simple trimming of the audio files. The interface is good and sharing by email is a doddle. This means that by a simple email to posterous I can post the file online in one easy step.

Perhaps we could give student feedback this way – quick and easy to do, posterous could allow students to comment back. Not a private conversation, but maybe we can think of a way round that?

Download now or listen on posterous

Idea.m4a (462 KB)

Posted via email from jobadge’s posterous

#SLTC09

This week I will be mostly attending the third Science Learning and Teaching Conference in Edinburgh. There are nine of us with a bunch of assorted iPhones, iTouches, macbooks and netbooks going up from Leicester, so most of us will be trying to amplify the event for those who can’t attend (yes, including you Moira!) with the tag #sltc09. The easiest way to pick up all the tagged feeds will be through FriendFeed SLTC group as this will include tagged delicious, flickr, blog posts and tweets in one place.

We are getting better at this kind of amplification now, so I will be setting up futuretweets which include the tag, explain how to use it and direct followers to the webpage for the conference programme. This helps encourage others to join us and helps to explain to our followers that they won’t have to put up with the extra noise for long if they don’t want to listen in.

Let’s hope the wifi can cope with us all!