#Twittering CELT Learning Technologies Team

The CELT Learning Technologies team at NUI Galway (and this blog) is mentioned in Ferdinand von Prondzynski's President's Log in today's Irish Times, under the headline Why I've joined Madonna, President Obama and 14 popes on Twitter. The DCU President writes:

Does Twitter have potential uses in academic life? Absolutely. One group showing the way is the Learning Technologies team at NUI Galway (who also have an excellent blog, learntechgalway. blogspot.com). All of their key staff are active on Twitter, and if you follow them you will be able to share in their experience of using new teaching methods and online technologies, as well as their thoughts on other matters.

I've just created a Twitter list (more on this in a later post) collecting together some of the people from CELT on Twitter. You can find it at twitter.com/sharonlflynn/nuigcelt. Another list of people includes the academic staff taking the Learning Technologies module as part of our Pg Diploma in Academic Practice, who have just been introduced to Twitter. You can find that list at twitter.com/sharonlflynn/celt09.

Thanks, Ferdinand, for the mention!

New from Google

Google have just recently released on limited preview their new communications and collaboration tool Google Wave.

In their own words, "A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more". You can find out more here.

This is on limited preview, so you will need to request an invitation to fully explore.

Michael Wesch keynote at ALT-C

Recordings of the keynote and invited speakers at the 2009 conference of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) in Manchester (8-10 September) are now available on blip.tv.

Here is Michael Wesch's keynote. Some familiar themes (whatever!) but an enjoyable watch all the same - if you have a spare hour.

Asus ebook reader

According to the Times Online, Asus is likely to launch an ebook reader with two screens, sometime before the end of the year.
The two screens would enable a person to use the reader like a conventional book, displaying two pages at a time.
Alternatively, one screen could display the book text, while the other allows the user to surf the web at the same time.

This offering from Asus, known for its low-cost netbook, is likely to challenge other ebook readers from Sony and Amazon on price. A single screen version, according to the Times Online article, could cost less than £100.

Irish Human Computer Interaction 2009 Conference

Interested in Human Computer Interaction research?

The annual two-day Irish conference, called I-HCI 2009, will be held at Trinity College Dublin on the 17th and 18th of September. Some of the papers and presentations of interest will include research on online communities, and evaluation methods suitable for study in home, workplace and mobile settings. Check out their website on http://www.i-hci.org/

The History of the Internet

History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

"History of the Internet" is an animated documentary explaining the inventions from time-sharing to filesharing, from Arpanet to Internet.

New videos show how researchers use advanced technology

The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the UK has been funding a programme to look at exploring tools needed by researchers to do their research, interact with other researchers (who may come from different disciplines, institutions or even countries) and to make use of available resources and technical infrastructures. They call this collection of tools "Virtual Research Environments" or VREs.

Recently, JISC have begun to put some very useful videos on YouTube describing some of the projects that come under this programme. Four particular projects in phase two of this research programme include the following:

Collaborative Research Events on the Web (CREW): |Youtube video|Website|
myExperiment - a social networking site for scientists. |Youtube video|Website|
Study of Documents and Manuscripts |Youtube video|Website|
Virtual Environments for Research in Archaeology |Youtube video|Website|

Explore further on the JISC website to find out how Virtual Research Environments (VREs) can help researchers in all disciplines manage the increasingly complex range of tasks involved in carrying out research.

Augmented Reality - The Future of Education Technology

Augmented reality looks at augmenting the real-world with virtual reality in real time. It's a been around for a long time (the term first coined in 1990), and has become popularised in the public mind by the film Minority Report (2002). More recently, some interesting projects have been looking at mobile phone applications as avenues for new interest and research.

This video here illustrates an idea how augmenented reality could positvely work in an educational context. For me, it identifies the importance of reading - central to student learning - and paper as a tool to support it. The main character uses the individual reflective "alone" time to prompt ideas, that are then explored and expanded through digital interactions as he moves through the world. A simple spark of an idea unleases a curiosity that the student can then explore in an augmented way, on paper and his experience in world. The creator is Sorin Voicu, from the Valle Giulia faculty of Architecture, University of Rome, in Italy.

Check out also MIT's Adaptable Bus stop as part of their SENSEable City Laboratory,to see some other potentially transformative ideas in this space.

Oepncast expands

UC Berkeley has had a proud tradition of webcasting lectures, interviews and other content and we here in Galway have long been fans of their work which preceded the growth of youTube and iTunes. Now they have received funding to develop the OpenCast Matterhorn platform for lecture capture and video content sharing with an intended release sometime in 2010. If all goes to plan this will provide an Open Source alternative to the commercial solutions for lecture capture, although much of the development and sales effort from such companies in recent times has focused on providing resilient, simple, all-in-one hardware solutions and that might well still be an issue. Nonetheless, Matterhorn sounds really exciting and we are pleased to be part of its widening community. You can learn more from this overview and by visiting the project website.

Libraries of the future?

JISC has just released its video programe on "Library of the future". Depending on your perspective on these things it is either (a) inspiring and exciting; (b) depressing; (c) stating the obvious. However, it is worth watching and thinking about.

http://www.youtube.com/jiscmedia

The Online Student Experience

Following the tweets from the Blackboard World 09 conference taking place in Washington DC over the last few days, I came across this video. I don't think it represents the experience of the students involved in the various online and blended programmes offered at NUI Galway.

However, it does demonstrate very effectively that technology in itself will not improve the student experience.

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.