International Conference on Engaging Pegagogies - Call for papers

The International Conference on Engaging Pedagogies (ICEP 2010) will take place on 2nd September in NUI Maynooth. The theme of this year’s conference is Engaging pedagogy: research and practices for a new decade

Topics for the conference include:
* Novel teaching methods
* Educational technology as a means of engaging students
* Cultural diversity in the classroom
* Module and curriculum design for a new decade
* Assessment techniques
* Promoting student interest and participation
* Case studies

Abstracts (200 words) are now being accepted by email to info@icep.ie.

Update from the Conference Organisers: After significant feedback from potential authors and committee members, we have moved the conference date to December 3rd 2010 (still at NUI Maynooth).

Make the future

A video looking at ideas drawn from research commissioned under the Beyond Current Horizons programme, which considers the future of education in the light of social and technological change.

www.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk
www.visionmapper.org.uk

EdTech 2010 - deadline for abstracts approaches

The 10th Annual Irish Learning Technology Association Conference EdTech 2010 will be held in Athlone Institute of Technology on May 20th - May 21st 2010.

Keynote speakers include Elliot Masie, Jane Hart and James Clay.

ILTA invites papers from researchers and practitioners on a range of conference themes:

• Learning Technologies for Challenging Times
• Informing Policy and Strategy
• Industry/Work Based Learning
• Sustainable Models of Innovation
• Technology-Enhanced Learning and Society

Abstracts should be submitted online by the deadline of 22nd February, 2010.

What's the Buzz?

It seems that gmail has gone social.



Google has announced Google Buzz, a new feature in gmail allowing you to share your experiences with your friends in real time. Mashable has written a blog post describing the new functionality.

Gmail users in the US are already seeing Buzz appear in their accounts, but Google promises to roll it out to all users very soon.

Update: Buzz has now appeared in my gmail. If you don't see it, try logging out and then back in again.

Echo 360 Community Conference Europe 2010

On 5th February 2010, I attended the Echo 360 Community Conference in the University of Birmingham. I also presented a poster, with preliminary results from a survey of over 100 students (mostly in the School of Medicine) on their use of recorded lectures over a one year period.

Echo360 is growing by about 100 new customers in Higher Education every year since 2005, and has customers in 24 countries. Their commitment to the UK and Ireland was very much in evidence at the event, with strong representation by senior technical staff. Mark Jones, president of Echo 360, gave an initial presentation, introducing the members of his team and highlighting lessons learned during 2009.

During the day we found out about the latest release and plans for future releases. Version 2.5 (update 2) was released recently (though NUI Galway hasn't had a chance to upgrade yet) and promises a stabilised environment with improved reliability.Version 2.6 is scheduled to be released in July, with version 2.7 to follow in December 2010. Future features that are of particular interest to us include: a defined scheduler role and external LDAP authentication (2.6); devolved administration, improved user interface, calendar based scheduling and more (2.7).

Also of interest to us are two new products from Echo360. Both of these seem quite promising for our situation.

Podium Capture is software that sits on the fixed pc in a venue allowing visuals and audio to be captured, but no video, and processed as Echoes. The content is sent to the Echo360 server by ftp and recordings can be scheduled. This can be bought as a site licence and does not require purchase of an appliance.

Personal Capture can sit on a laptop or pc, allowing Echoes (with video from a webcam) to be recorded and processed (locally or on the server). It is being sold in bundles of 5 licences and each licence is associated with a person (rather than a venue).

Mark Jones also highlighted the new community portal, lecturecapture.com and announced the next round of the grants programme. The call will go out on 5th March, with a closing date of 2nd July. There will be 4 grants available, each worth $10,000. More information is at www.echo360.com/grantsprogram.

iPad overview

The iPad - watch more funny videos

We think

Steve Wheeler's Web 2.0 Wonderland

Any Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass fans out there (and I'll admit that I'm one), you definitely will enjoy this take on Jabberwocky by Steve Wheeler on his blog, Learning with 'e's.

Atmosphere

Whilst OEB are producing their own videos of the content of the presentations, here's a rough cut of some random scenes that capture some of the atmosphere of the event and the host city.

Podcasts, interviews, etc

Now that OEB do their own podcasts and interviews, and given how busy it is in the sessions, as with last year, I deferred to their work rather than stringing together a series of my own as I did in the early days. Here is the main link to the interviews plus recordings from last year - a really useful resource.

(photo: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Germany License.
Photographs by David Ausserhofer. All copyrights by ICWE GmbH.)

Stroll

Cold but clear day in Berlin, left just enough time to walk along the Tiergarten, past the Soviet Memorial, to the Brandenburg Gate, on past the American, French and British Embassies, down to Potsdamer Platz then along past the diplomatic area (filled with all the new embassies) back along the park, through to Wittenbergplatz, quick sneak into KaDeWe to see the Christmas displays before back to the hotel on Budapester Str. Great walk, probably a little too fast, but always love doing this. Normally, when I have more time, I go on along Unter den Linden all the way past Humboldt University, Museum Island and into Alexanderplatz, turning at Karl Marx Allee, but not enough time this year.

Berlin is a fascinating city and well worth a visit anytime.

Danger - if you're reading this online your brain is at risk

Well I'll admit to having been much worse at updating the blog this year at the event, but that's because I've been so engrossed in conversation and busy twittering away...quite apart from the outrageous socialising with all these nice people at one time or other associated with Humboldt University!

Anyway, today was a mixed experience, as with all conferences. Many folk twittering about sales pitch type talks, I didnt experience many of those, due to my choice of session probably. Closest to that was the one by Polycom, but they did it well by having a user to describe experience of using videoconferencing for music tuition and the issues in sound quality etc. They are doing a live link up with the Manhattan School of Music tomorrow to demonstrate.

The sessions were rounded off with a 'debate' on the proposal that the internet is destroying our children's minds. A motion led by Aric Sigman who shouted and attempted to scare everyone. His extremely aggressive style offended some, particularly those unfamiliar with him (the vast majority of the 2,000+ international delegates), but for others gradually seemed like a raving madman. He attacked the audience as being pushers of this mind-rotting technology..not a great debating tactic, but he gives the impression of a man who cares about nothing other than his ego which was bloated by the use of the video projection screens, sadly.

He then was robustly challenged by Donald Clark who did a great job and was happy enough to show some passion and contempt for the scaremongering. The next two speakers were less effective. Bruce 'the Brute' (see Private Eye) Anderson, a veritable caricature of a fleet street hack, his tie slung askew muttered along the lines of trying to support the motion but being 'reasonable' (the old good cop/bad cop pairing), then some guy 'from Silicon Valley,' Jerry Michalski gave a fairly anodyne response to that...his analogy of the development of the 'automobile' with the net currently being at Model T wasn't a good one for a European audience, as a bicycling Dutchman commented!

Anyway, what needs to be said to those unfamiliar with Dr. Sigman is that cherry-picking (ie selective use of some reports and wilfully ignoring of other contradictory findings) seems to be his speciality, as pointed out by Ben Goldacre who he seemed to have a pop at during the session. If you want more on this aspect and some examples then visit this link.