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.

We are holding our first event on  Thursday 26th November 2009 at University of Leicester.

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.

Programme
Thursday 26 November 2009

09.30 – 10.00 Registration and coffee
10.00 – 10.15 Welcome and introduction
10.15 – 10.30 Networking event
10.30 – 11.15 Keynote : 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.
Title: Ways to improve learning with EVS: some deep procedures for teachers, and what
software features matter for these. Abstract.
11.15 – 11.30 coffee
11.30 – 12.00 Mark Goodwin, Teaching Fellow, GENIE CETL . ‘Teaching bioethics using electronic voting technologies’
12.00 – 12.30 Mark Russell, National Teaching Fellow and Principal Lecturer, School of Aerospace, Automotive and Design Engineering, University of Hertfordshire. ‘Tracking student progress with EVS’
12.30 – 13.30 Carvery lunch
13.30 – 14.30 Workshop : exploration of the pedagogical models which can be used EVS
14.30 – 15.00 coffee
15.00 – 15.30 Reports from workshop groups
15.30 – 16.00 The future and aims of the ESTICT community

To register for your free place on this event, join our Ning  community http://estict.ning.com/
where you will find full details of the event and a registration form. Deadline for registrations 6 November.

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!

Sounds like one of the myriad of TV shows that grace our screens in the that weird period between Christmas and new year when they aren’t sure what to put on, but yes, it is time to look back and see what on earth I have done in the last year.

Technology

Overall this has been a year of trying new technology on and offline. Web 2.0 has transformed the way I work. I have lost count of the number of services online I have signed up for (I have 35 listed in my clipperz account, but that is only a fraction of them!). Some have come and gone, others are now part of my daily life:

Twitter: I now have a community of twitterers to help me. My first tweet was in December last year, but it was March before I started using it seriously and June when it became obvious that twitter had become a major channel of communication for me. The experience of a lively twitter back channel at a social Learn event for the OU was amazing. Tweetstats shows your usage over time (my stats are here) – you can see the impact of school holidays.

Blogging: I’ve started two blogs this year, this one and one for the School of Biological Sciences.

PLE: as part of our research project on personal learning environments, my own PLE has undergone quite a shift over time since January 08 and now looks something like this.

PLE version 3

Delicious: (jobadge) I’ve been using delicious much more over the last year.

Publications 2008

Badge, J. L., Dawson, E., Cann, A. J., & Scott, J. (2008). Assessing the accessibility of online learning. Innovations in Education and Training International, 45(2), 103-113.

Bevan R, Badge J, Cann A, Willmott C and Scott J (2008) Seeing eye-to-eye? Staff and student views on feedback Bioscience Education E-journal 12-1

Willmott C and Badge J (2008) Ethics and Plagiarism: helping students write right The Biochemist 30:12-15

Conferences

Suffered from overkill in conference season this summer. Still, made a good impact and put Leicester on the teaching and learning agenda nationally

list of conferences attended and presentations made

Badge, J. L., & Scott, J. (2008). Plagiarism policies: Looking for intra-institutional consistency. Higher Education Academy Annual Conference, Harrogate.

Badge, J. L., Yakovchuk, N., & Scott, J. (2008). Consistent policy into consistent practice: A case study from leicester University . Keynote Paper presented at the Second Meeting on Institutional Polices and Procedures for Dealing with Plagiarism, Oxford Brookes, May 2008

Badge, J. L., Yakovchuk, N., & Scott, J. (2008). Academic culture in transition: Are honour codes a viable solution? Paper presented at the Third International Plagiarism Conference, Gateshead.

Badge, J. L. (2008). Electronic detection of plagiarism. Paper presented at the Preventing and Designing Out Plagiarism HEA Centre for Bioscience, 8 April 2008, University of Leicester.

Grants

lots of success this year with Alan Cann

HEA Centre for bioscience departmental grant: £15k to revolutionise the way we teach first year undergraduates about IT and numeracy using web 2.

TechDis HEAT 3: 10 iPod touches

Roberts fund: small world networks for postgraduate students.

Academic Integrity: continuation funding for research assistant to March 2009

Support

All about the voting this year! Lots of problems with using the electronic voting system on cfs. now time to get it publically written up and move on to embed it’s use in the first curriculum. Interim report from first year of implementation.

The 3rd international plagiarism conference in Newcastle was OK. I am trying to summon up more enthusiasm than that, but can’t quite manage it. I enjoyed it, met some great people, it was well organised and so on (apart from the horrible lack of sockets for my poor eeepc!!) but I wasn’t as inspired as I have been at previous conferences. This could be because the field hasn’t moved on much since last time but I suspect it was mostly to do with web 2.0 discussions.

There were several speakers who tried to address the issue, Jamie O’Connell from Acumen PI (thestudentroom.co.uk) showed the Micheal Wesch video on hypertext, which admittedly, not everyone had seen, then actually mentioned that communication was changing (yes!) and ‘lots of people’ were using twitter (hurray!!). However, when I shouted out and asked him for his twitter ID, he said it was MrBeaver.

The message about online identity management still has a long way to go then….. Jamie, this stuff isn’t just for you young funky people – I thought that was the point of the presentation?!

Gerry McKiernan, Iowa State university, gave a great presentation about disruptive technologies (re-mix, re-use, re-new), including lots of stuff from horizon 2008, but just as he was getting going, he stopped short of what for me is the real message – will we care about plagiarism when web 2 really takes over? Who should we attribute in the traditional way when 10 people have collaboratively authored a document online? How will students who work collaboratively be assessed individually?

it’s fine to talk about web 2, but I still feel that it is an experiential technology, and I am not sure that either presenter demonstrated that they were under the skin of these things. Garry Allen was closer in many ways. He admitted to finally getting a facebook account when he realised that RMIT Melbourne’s internet traffic bill had doubled in the last academic year and the largest proportion of that traffic was going to facebook. He recognised that experience was key to understanding.

And for our next conference, not only are we being charged for the reception, drinks, dinner, accomodation on top of a £385 conference fee (3 days, no speaker discount, all authors must be registered) but now a little extra if we want to work while we are there …. looks like I’ll be walking up the road to Starbucks or McDonalds!