'in world' or out of this world?

In response to some emails enquiring about Second Life:

Well, my Second Life (SL) avatar, Iain Wise, tells me that he has started up an official group in SL for anyone who was at the conference or who works at the university to join. The group is called, rather imaginatively, "NUI, Galway." If you want to join and perhaps meet up for an exploration and some 'in world' seminars and discussions, then please do. Second Life membership is free and the membership of this group is also without charge.

So why not give it a go? As you'll see there are many universities and other organisations within SL (Sweden even has an embassy!). Go to http://www.secondlife.com/ and follow the instructions. Once you get 'in world' and sort out your avatar's appearance, basic controls, etc, then click on 'search' at the bottom of the window and type in NUI, Galway and then choose 'join group'. Let's see if you can manage that.

It's odd at first, but honestly you'll get the hang of it. Iain, in the meantime, will try to contact some experts and arrange some sessions with them, as well as tours of various education locations (including, for example, Harvard University's Berkman Centre). Oh, there's a handy pub called "The Blarney Stone" in SL's version of Dublin city centre, just along from Trinity College, so if you fancy a virtual pint of Guinness and to try Irish dancing....

Related links:

• Interesting project from OU and others, is schome.
• Harvard Distance Learning courses in SL: example of Law, intro for students
• JISC (UK) online conference, Second Life session in YouTube. (I know, it's getting out of hand!)
• Sloodle - first attempts to integrate SL with a VLE, interesting project at University of Paisley & partners in San Jose State University.
• Article in Times Higher this week on campuses in SL.
  

serendipitous learning - academic on leisurely stroll makes interesting discovery!

How's this for an interesting by-product of the conference? Jana Tietze, of Humboldt University in Berlin, who was speaking at the conference (on attempts to introduce e-learning into Horticulture courses in her university) was wandering around our campus looking at the various trees (her particular interest) and discovered a really interesting looking, old oak near the "quad" of the university (the old building dating back to the 1840s). She photographed it and when she returned to her department consulted a colleague and they identified it as a very old example of Holm, or Holly, Oak (Quercus ilex) which originates in the Mediterranean Region, this species from Spain. This particular one seems to date to a period before the university building (and indeed shows on old maps as a large tree, according to local head gardener). The species was first introduced to England around 1600, thence to Ireland, and this one is likely to have been planted sometime in the 1700s!

The things you learn......

p.s. if you happen to be in Berlin next week (and why not?) then pop in to the Multimedia Days at Unter den Linden or Adlershof.

Presentations - update

Hi. Just in response to a couple of email queries - Yes, the keynote presentations will be available online via this blog! When? Well as soon as we can, we're a bit tied up with a small matter of a VLE upgrade and integration exercise this week! But we'll pop them up soon, probably in the next week. The key though is to either subscribe to this blog using our RSS feed (see the right hand side) or simply to visit us here often and experience the continued discussion and new items that appear almost every day!

Repositories and open content

Following on from the comments earlier by Niall, Fiona and Mary about repositories, whether you like 'em or not, funders seem to! There are many projects around the world developing repositories, some built on open-source platforms, others proprietary; some hosting free (or Creative Commons) content, others not so free; some holding basic text documents and or PowerPoint slides, some with rich, interactive multimedia; some publicly accessible, some not....

Certainly they can be useful in helping in the mad rush to find materials ahead of a deadline, or help with random browsing and sampling of content produced by others, but whether the 'learning objects' within will enrich the student experience or go the way of clip art collections, is up to how they are used (and any intrinsic value or 'affordances' for learning).

In projects such as Ireland's NDLR, much of the emphasis is now on building 'communities of practice' around subject areas to motivate teachers to share their materials with each other.

Anyway, for interest, some repositories and content collections that were mentioned in the conference and around the coffee were:

• Ireland's (fledgling) National Digital Learning Repository - donations of material welcome!
• The UK's Jorum
• Rice University's Connexions
• MERLOT - the big one in the US, collections of URLs more than objects per se
• MIT's famous open courseware
• The UK Open University's open courseware project OpenLearn
• The OpenCourseware Consortium
• Scottish Cultural Resources Across the Network (Scran) - membership but free for schools

Enjoy.

Acknowledgements

I'd like to thank a number of people who were instrumental in making this conference a huge success.

First of all, the conference office (Patricia, Kym and the others) who helped to make sure that registration, accommodation, catering, bag-packing (and other details) went smoothly.

The session chairs - Kelly, Iain, Kieran, Caoimhín, Paul, Labhaoise, Tim, Fiona, Marie, Máire Áine, Catherine, John and Éilis. Many thanks for volunteering your services, and keeping everyone in order.

Our fantastic Audio/Visual team - Pat, Tom and Garrett - who made sure there were no technical hitches.

Mike, in the bar, for the lunches. I think this venue worked very well.

Thanks to Alejandra, Ruth and Fiona, for being "official" photographers.

And finally, the CELT Learning Technologies team and the conference committee - Fiona, Gráinne, Paul, Labhaoise, Bernie and Mary - for doing all the real work. In particular, Fiona put together the book of abstracts, as well as helping with A/V and network arrangements. And Gráinne was responsible for the celtconf email, and dealing with any queries that came in. This conference could not have happened without your efforts.

day 2 - setting sail into the new century?

On day 2, Prof. Wim van Petegem (KU Leuven) who is the Chair of the Coimbra Group (of which NUI Galway is a member) Learning Technology Taskforce spoke about his own internal institutional structures, and very briefly highlighted the underlying educational philosophy of Leuven which is based on 'Guided Independent Learning.' His talk complemented that of Kieran Loftus, the Director of Computer Services, who introduced and chaired the session and allowed some focus on matters of operational service provision.

In the afternoon, following a delayed flight and a nail-biting wait for a taxi, we were entertained, stimulated and enlightened by Prof. Stephen Heppell (in the photo, doing what he loves best - sailing!) and his random walk through magnificent examples of technological innovation in education, with children designing their own schools, producing their own 'TV' stations and challenging preconceived notions of success and achievement. An excellent way to round off the event, even if we did all leave realising that the university 'as is' is potentially finished if it obsesses with the "1970s industrial production model"! Stephen's contention that the last 50 years of academia have been an aberration and we need to get back to engagement, creativity, transformation and, above all, the 'community of scholars,' rather than mass programmes of bureaucratic accreditation, was thought provoking. Discuss......(not via a 1500 word essay, of course)

• Be Very Afraid


• mental maths


• Glasgow Caledonian's Saltire Centre
  
• Learning spaces/school design

Ray Land in conversation

The opening keynote was given by Ray Land of Strathclyde University and was a fascinating perspective on the impact of some of the new "Web 2.0" technologies on higher education. In the time limit, Ray could only mention some of the issues briefly, so we asked him (on day 2) if he wouldn't mind popping into our studio for a more detailed chat on the very powerful idea of "threshold concepts".

Links

• Ideas in Cyberspace Education 3
• Cyberspace Education book (#1)
• Threshold Concepts & Troublesome Knowledge
• Beyond Understanding. Streamed video of session at the
  Thresholds Symposium, Glasgow 2006 - D. Perkins (Harvard)
• Enhancing Teaching & Learning - project website- useful publications & tools

Other seminars/presentations

James Morrison, editor of Innovate - the Journal of Online Learning has dropped an email to notify us of some forthcoming live internet seminars. These are presentations by authors in the journal and are run using Adobe Connect (which was previously called Macromedia Breeze, which was originally built on Macromedia Flash Communications Server - FYI!!). You can book a place on these, which will let you ask questions, but the number of spaces is limited. However, anyone can register to look over the archived versions. I've also added the RSS feed to Innovate on the side of this blog so we can keep an eye on recent papers.

• June 14, 2007 12:00 PM(US-East/5 pm in Ireland) Authors: Bill Gibbs and Erik Larson Using Video Conferencing in Lecture Classes
• 1:00 PM (6pm Ireland) Authors: Kathleen Roney and Mary Ann Davies Coaching and Mentoring on the Internet Highway
• 2:00 PM(7pm Ireland) Authors: Sarah Lohnes and Charles Kinzer Questioning Assumptions About Students & Expectations for Technology in College Classrooms
• July 11, 2007 12:00 PM (5pm Ireland) Author: Howard Wach Changing Needs, Changing Models: Instructional Technology Training at Bronx Community College
• 1:00 PM (6pm Ireland) Author: Donald Philip The Knowledge Building Paradigm: A Model of Learning for Net Generation Students
• 3:00 PM (8pm Ireland) Authors: Edward Gehringer, Luke Ehresman, Susan G. Conger, and Prasad Wagle Reusable Learning Objects Through Peer Review: The Expertiza Approach
• To Be Announced (Check the Innovate-Live Portal) Authors: Helen Sword and Michele Leggott Backwards into the Future: Seven Principles for Educating the Ne(x)t Generation

Thank you!

Thanks to all of you who attended, participated in and helped organise the conference. From the feedback thus far it seems to have gone well, with lots of food for thought. Now the extended plenary session begins using the technology we talked about - blogs, etc. So I've freed up the silly login requirement for posting, so that it should be easier for anyone to comment.

The conference presentations will also be up in due course, along with reports and supplementary material. In the meantime though, we'll take a wee break - for at least this evening!

Conference Photographs

Day 2

Day 2 it is, although admittedly by only a couple of minutes! Remember that this blog site will keep running after the conference. We'll be using it to link to the recordings of the keynote presentations and also to provide copies of PowerPoint slides from other sessions (where available). But, the important point is that its a blog with 'comments enabled' - so post away with questions, queries or points for discussion. An event like this can only really serve as a taster for some of the issues and that's what is so powerful about this technology; we can carry on the discussion, refine viewpoints and provide useful links. So go on, give it a try!

Links to topics mentioned in passing on day 1:

• 'PowerPointlessness'
• Second Life
• Second Life Education
• Proceedings of the Second Life Education Workshop
• Example of course at Harvard Law School taught through Second Life
• Drupal content management system
• Tyranny of the Moment- Fast and Slow Time in the Information Age
• Troublesome Knowledge and Threshold Concepts

issues and themes

Today, most of the keynote speakers talked about aspects of Web 2.0, touching upon what its implications are, or could be, for teaching and learning. We didn't get a chance to go into things in a great deal of depth during the rather short discussion sessions, but then the idea of this conference has always been to get that discussion happening informally in small groups over coffee, a drink in the bar or a walk on the prom.

Ray Land talked briefly about the ideas of "troublesome knowledge" and "threshold concepts" and raised the question about how these new technologies might align with (or not) these ideas. They are at the very heart of what is often held to constitute 'higher education' (indeed all levels of education, to be fair): that previously held knowledge and preconceptions need to be challenged, that students need to experience a disconnect of sorts, an uncomfortable, troublesome feeling in which they can't see quite how to reconcile this new information or new way of thinking with how they have previously, personally "understood" the subject they are studying. All academic disciplines have 'threshold concepts', fundamental ideas that must be grasped before the student can move on.

The question, then, posed by Ray and also raised again in the discussion after Michael Kerres' presentation, is how can Web 2.0 (or whatever we want to call it) technologies help in this personally transformative, intellectual journey? In the rush of 'fast time' how can students carve out space and time to think, to reflect, to face up to these conceptual challenges and to move to the next level? Surely the barrage of information, the bombardment of communication, all of these are in danger of pushing things aside? Perhaps this is an indicator of what the role of the teacher, the expert practitioner might then be in this new era: designing, shaping, guiding and focusing on the real 'learning', the processes of coming to know, to act and to "be" in the subject or discipline under study.

Bill McDaniel's enthusiastic embracing of new technologies shows that we needn't fear them, but equally we need to come to terms with this wider context in which more and more of our students are going to be inhabiting. That we need to be clear as to what constitutes learning, to focus a little more on the processes than the content is also part of the message of today.

Anyway, those are just first random thoughts at the end of a busy day. Keep up the discussion and get ready for more tomorrow.