intro to second life in education

Educause's latest "7 things you should know..." leaflet is about Second Life and its educational potential. It's available here.

Collection of free educational media

The Openculture blog has an expanding listing of open access university course materials and is a handy way of finding some examples rather than being over-reliant on one provider, such as iTunes, for example.

Live Conference Presentations from Princeton

The NMC (New Media Consortium) annual conference is under way in Princeton with over 600 participants. As you might hope for such a technology organisation, the keynote presentations are being made available as live streams. The events (in Princeton time!) are as below and you can access them here.

• Opening Plenary Keynote Presentation: “Technology and the Global Commons” Diana Oblinger, President, EDUCAUSE
  Thursday June 12, 8:30am-9:45am EDT
• Noontime Plenary Presentation: “Motion and Emotion, Multi-media Storytelling on the Web” Bill Frakes, Sports Illustrated
  Thursday June 12, 12:00pm-12:45pm EDT
• Keynote Presentation: “New Frontiers in Nanotechnology” Wole Soboyejo, Princeton University
  Friday June 13, 12:00pm-12:45pm EDT
• Center of Excellence Awards and Five Minutes of Fame, NMC
  Friday June 13, 2:45pm-5:00pm EDt
• Closing Plenary Keynote Presentation: “What Would Herman Melville Say to Soulja Boy?: Remix Culture and the New Media” Henry Jenkins, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  Saturday June 14, 10:15am-11:45am EDT
• Note that we are also hoping to have Henry Jenkins' session also streamed into Second Life on Princeton's SL version of the actual venue, Alexander Hall

Trinity College Dublin on iTunes U

As reported today in the Education Guardian and on the BBC website, TCD is now on iTunes U, giving access to audio and video materials, at http://itunes.tcd.ie
At the moment there are some promotional materials and public lectures from distinguished visitors. There are also some recorded lectures in immunology, computer science and education. Together with UCL and the Open University, this marks the first time that European universities have featured on iTunes U.

For more information, see the press release Trinity College Dublin Launches iTunes U Site.

Get into a huddle to collaborate

Huddle is growing as an application for document sharing and group work, paticularly given that is free for charities and relatively low cost for others. It's a simple enough tool and very easy to use. Useful for group projects and collaboration. It links to facebook and blogs and it will be interesting to see how it compares with the various google and yahoo tools that are out there but riddled with ads! Speaking of which, if you are using Firefox, remember that you can clear the commercial clutter on your browser by installing and activating Adblock or Adblock Plus.

Online Engineering Lectures from India

The Indian Institute of Technology and Indian Institute of Science have released over 1,650 lectures on YouTube and made them freely available to anyone studying a range of technical and engineering related topics. You can access them here. Be prepared for a couple of minutes theme tunes and titles in some cases. The project arises from the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning and its main website is here.

Microsoft demos 'touch Windows'

The BBC website reports on the next Windows OS, with a multi-touch interface instead of a mouse. With beta testing starting later this year, and a 2009 release scheduled, Windows 7 will have to do better than Vista.

Turnitin and International Students

At the 2nd meeting on Institutional Policies and Procedures for Dealing with Plagiarism at Oxford Brookes University last week, I listened with interest to Dr. Niall Hayes of Lancaster University. Niall is involved in a Student Diversity and Academic Writing project, funded through HEFCE. He challenged the notion that using a Plagiarism Detection Service (PDS), such as Turnitin, in a pro-active screening approach, is fair to all students.

His argument is that students patch write (i.e. pick and copy from different sources) when they are trying to come to terms with a new language, when they are new to a discipline, when they may be inexperienced in new forms of assessment or are uncertain about expectations. Reusing sample language structures and common phrases is natural to international students and, where feedback is constructive, supports their learning of the appropriate academic practices. But these are exactly the practices highlighted by a PDS and labelled as plagiarism.

Here at NUI Galway, we have been piloting Turnitin for almost 2 years and are starting to develop good practice guides for its use. Following Niall's presentation, challenging the neutrality assumption, I'm starting to think about a more formative use, where the Turnitin "originality" reports could be used to guide the students, rather than make plagiarists out of them.

RSA Vision

I'm pleased to see that the RSA (of which I am a fellow) is now providing video versions of many of their fascinating lecture series. They have already been podcasting for some time, but their new website, social innovation network and video series all look really promising.

One of the videos is Jonathan Zittrain (Chair in Internet Governance and Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute.) who spoke on the themes of his recent book "The Future of the Internet and how to avoid it."

New Media Consortium

NUI Galway is now a member of the New Media Consortium, the first in Ireland and one of only a few in Europe. We look forward to participating in events and in fully utilising the NMC Campus in Second Life. The contact point locally is CELT, for anyone who wants further information. Some basic info from the NMC website:

"The New Media Consortium (NMC) is an international 501(c)3 not-for-profit consortium of over 260 learning-focused organizations dedicated to the exploration and use of new media and new technologies.The consortium serves as a catalyst for the development of new applications of technology to support learning and creative expression, and sponsors programs and activities designed to stimulate innovation, encourage collaboration, and recognize excellence among its member institutions. "

Second Life Campus
Over the past two and one-half years, the NMC Campus project has grown to be the largest educational project in any virtual world, one that involves hundreds of institutions and over 7,500 educators and students working and learning in the virtual world of Second Life.

Yves Behar - designer of the $100 laptop

Another great TED talk! Yves Behar, who designed the XO laptop, talks about how he hates the Num Lock key, and demonstrates some of his beautiful, creative designs, including the $100 laptop.



View the video and make a comment on TED.com.

Online Film Festival winner

Congratulations to Brian Deane from NUI Galway's Huston School of Film and Digital Media who has just won an award at Cannes, presented by Spike Lee. Brian's short film can be seen below. The Huston School provides a range of exciting programmes related to film, digital media and public advocacy & activism.