Engaging Students Through In-Class Technologies

Even though I am offically on my summer holidays now until September (ahh the wonder of scheduled posts!) there is just time for me to mention a new Special Interest Group I’m involved in.

Engaging Students Through In-Class Technology (ESTICT) is a UK network of education practitioners and learning technologists interested in promoting good practice with classroom technologies that can enhance face-to-face teaching.

The ESTICT banner will over arch inter-related Special Interest Groups (SIG). The first of these SIGs is “EVS and Beyond” where EVS stands for Electronic Voting Systems.

The aims of the “ESTICT: EVS and beyond” SIG are:

• To promote the use of EVS in teaching and learning (through models of good practice, events, case studies, networking face to face and online)
• To disseminate and promote EVS practice with respect to conducting evaluations and research
• To encourage collaboration between all stakeholders within and across institutions and promote a community of practice (includes students, practitioners and learning technologists)

Join our ning community http://estict.ning.com/

Once registered on the ESTICT site you will be able to find further details of and register for our first free event to be held at the University of Leicester on Thursday 26th November 2009.

The aim of the day is to share best practice in the use of in-class technology, with a particular focus on the pedagogic uses of electronic voting systems (also known as ‘clickers’ audience response systems ARS, personal response systems PRS). This event is aimed at those both those with experience of EVS who wish to share their best practice and those with an interest in the technology that would like to know more. Both experts and novice users are welcome.

Our keynote speaker will be Dr. Steve Draper, Senior University Teacher, Dept of Psychology, University of Glasgow. Steve is an acknowledged expert in the field of EVS and has published widely on it’s use in Higher Education. The title of his talk is: Ways to improve learning with EVS: some deep procedures for teachers, and what software features matter for these.

Places are limited so don’t delay.

Thinking about electronic lab books

credit: flickr S.S.K.

My better half is a lecturer in bioinformatics and tries very hard to fit his bench research along all the other things he has to do as a lecturer. About a year ago, he started to use a campus learning objects wiki within our VLE, Blackboard, as an electronic version of his lab book. Much of the data that he produces comes in electronic format (DNA sequences, digital photos of gels, phosphor images for autoradiography), so it seemed daft to be printing these out to put in a paper lab book. He opened the lab wiki with the following reasoning:

He has used this system with undergraduate and postgraduate project students working in the lab, and we are writing up these experiences as a short communication for a journal. As part of the background research for this, I sent a brief email to our staff in the School of Biological Sciences to see if there was anyone else experimenting in this way. There was  a range of interest from a wide variety of staff. It appears this is a topic that people are thinking about more and more and a potential research area for the future.

A couple of comments were:

‘I’m looking at openwetware‘

one colleague said he kept everything electronically but didn’t use a specific system to link everything together. He raised the thorny issue of proof of ownership/ authorship for patent applications and storage (large images at 1 GB a time).

iDaily diary though the colleague that paid for this did point it that it did not transform his notebook practice (I guess if you aren’t good a keeping notes anyway, going electronic probably won’t help!)

on twitter, a colleague said they used DEVONthink (Mac only) which allows the insertion of images (include editable PDFd LaTex equations)

This is an interesting area and one which I’m sure we will come back to, not just as a project for the more effective supervision of students, but as a tool for assisting research scientists to bring their practices for recording data into line with the already innovative generation of that data.

HEAT3 iPod Touch project

We were fortunate to be given some funding from TechDis from HEAT3 scheme to buy 10 iPod Touches for use with students. A summary of our findings were presented at the HEA Annual Conference in Manchester on 2 July through a poster and short slide show, copies below.

Student Microblogging And Recording Timelines (SMART)

View more OpenOffice presentations from Jo Badge.

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