Britain goes Open

JISC, the Higher Education Academy and England's Funding Council (HEFCE) today launched the new Open Educational Resources porgramme. The programme, which builds on earlier work and combines initiatives such as Jorum, CETIS and InfoNet, has ambitious but achievable aims.

"The programme will make the equivalent of 5,000 undergraduate modules of existing learning resources freely available online. Projects will be working towards being able to sustainably release a much larger pool of resources over a longer period.

The funded projects will run for 12 months and will end on 30 April 2010."

More info is available on JISCs website.

EdTech 2009 Conference Review

We all had a great 10th anniversary EdTech conference experience at the National College of Ireland on May 20-22. The programme was action-packed with 50 papers presented by Irish and international researchers and practitioners around the theme '2020 Vision: Changing Learning Futures Through Technology'.

Keynote speakers included Niall Sclater of the Open University; Theresa Hagan of HMH; and Richard Katz, Vice President of Educause. A really interesting feature of the conference was the use of Twitter, especially in the closing panel session where conference Tweets were visible throughout the open floor discussion.
Other highlights included the pre-conference launch of the NCI NELL usability lab by Leo Casey, and the presentation of inaugural Jennifer Burke Award for Innovation in Teaching and Learning to the TCD outreach programme 'A Bridge to College'.

NUIG had a high profile presence at the conference with 5 practitioner and 1 research papers featuring in the programme. Well done Sinead Hahessey, Michael Campion, Mary Dempsey and Elaine Wallace for flying the flag for NUIG.

CELT staff were highly involved in the organisation of the conference with Michelle Tooher sitting on the ILTA Working Group, while Fiona Concannon and Paul Gormley served on the EdTech 2009 Organising Committee. I was also delighted to be voted in as the Chair of the Irish Learning Technology Association (ILTA) for the forthcoming year.

...and Sharon Flynn got voted the Twit of the conference - for non-Twitterers, this is a compliment!

Broadcasting the Volvo Ocean Race

Just back from a fascinating lecture on "Broadcasting the Volvo Ocean Race' in the race village, where media crew members Anton Paz (TELFONICA BLACK), Gustav Morin (ERICCSSON 3) and Rick Deppe (PUMA) spoke of their experiences filming using high-definition television, on their respective boats. Climbing up the mast, getting hit at 30 knots by waves, and sitting on the bow crashing up and down were all in a day's work. All the while, these media crew members kept a plan or theme in mind and looked for stories and action to document on film or to blog and podcast. Then, below deck, it was time for digitising, compressing, editing and then uploading via the Inmarsat system via satellite, followed by a few snatched hours sleep before doing it all again. This all took place under conditions of keeping electricity usage low (running off disel on these weight conscious boats) and stopping cables and wires from corroding with salty water. Heroic tales!

Dr. Seán Crosson from the Huston School of Film welcomed this rare opportunity to meet these "embedded journalists", as part of the Huston School's two day symposium on Representing Sport. Each of the boats are fitted with five fixed cameras and a delay camera, which is activated by a button to record 2 minutes back and six minutes forward- useful for things that go bump unexpectedly.

One of the biggest challenges noted (aside from sailing around the world at breakneck speeds) was the condensation that builds inside the housing for the HDTV cameras. Gustav spoke of the frustration at lining up a good shot, and then having to stop and somehow open the waterproof housing to clear the condensation and then begin again. Solid state cameras might offer some longer term solutions to the problem, but are unlikely to be as reliable as the DV tapes for the adventure this time around.

You can watch some of the footage on http://www.volvooceanrace.tv/. The replacing of the PUMA rudder mid-Atlantic by Rick Deppe won a media award for the Boston-Galway leg of the race.

Marcus Hutinchson, the race communications director, spoke about the potential to develop a more pedagogic and educational approach to the race, with recognising the value in linkages for learning between stop-over cities for a younger audience. To date, however, the videos, the race viewer (my favourite!), the online game, the regular updates, the weekly TV broadcast, have all combined to give spectators an unprecedented insight into ocean racing. Congrats to all the media production people involved!