PAISAGE: plurilingualism and cultural awareness in language learning

On Monday afternoon, the European Day of Languages, we were invited along to the launch of PAISAGE, an Irish/Spanish project for the teaching and learning of both languages. PAISAGE stands for Portal Audiovisual Intercultural sobre el Aprendizaje de Gaélico y Espanol. It is a NAIRTL-funded project aimed at linking linguistic and cultural learning in Irish and Spanish, carried out by Dorothy Ní Uigín (Acadamh na hOllscolaíochta Gaeilge) and Pilar Aldarete (Spanish), both academic staff members at NUI Galway.

Dorothy and Pilar have developed a range of resources including videos in both languages showing aspects of NUI Galway and its surrounds; interviews with Spanish students living in Ireland and Irish students living in Spain; interviews with professionals working in both languages and cultures; grammar explanations contrasting both languages; grammar exercises to accompany the videos. All resources are linked to the levels in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.

The videos are being made available on YouTube under the gaeilgespainnis channel. More videos are to be added, pending permission from the interviewees. The accompanying exercises are hosted on google docs, and you can contact Dorothy or Pilar for access to these.

In this video (level A1) Universidad de Galway, Pilar voices over a video showing the NUI Galway campus.



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Blogtalk Galway 2010 (Day 2)

It has now been 2 weeks since the second day of Blogtalk 2010, but some of the themes have been mulling around in my brain since then, even though I haven't had time to write about them. As before, most of my comments will be from a teaching and learning in Higher Education perspective.

Unfortunately, I missed a lot of day 2. But I was lucky to be present at the first keynote of the day, given by Stowe Boyd. This was the highlight of the conference for me.

Stowe Boyd (keynote) Social media blur: blogs, networks, streams
Stowe Boyd talked about the development of blogging and social media over the last 10 years and also gave us a glimpse of a possible future. The blog culture has changed and people are not blogging as much any more. How many blogs do you know where the most recent entry is 3 or 4 months ago and the message is "I must get back to blogging"? People like the immediacy of social networking and social conversations such as twitter. Where people are blogging, they are linking this into their "streams", directing people to blog posts. Boyd also pointed out that comments on blogs are not social conversations, but people are using social streams (like twitter) to comment on blogs.

I found this interesting from my own work perspective in two ways. First, my blogging habits have definitely slowed. When I do write, my posts are more thoughtful. Quick links and pointers I leave to my twitter persona.

My second observation, though, is that the use of social media in teaching and learning is a long way behind the trend indicated in Stowe Boyd's talk. In supporting academic staff use of learning technologies, we are still moving people along from discussion boards, to using student blogs for reflection and wikis for collaboration. For the majority of staff, these are new and exciting ways to engage students. The use of facebook or twitter in teaching and learning, while happening, is still unproven for the majority of teaching staff.

As for the future, I was relieved to hear that it is not facebook. In the future, the "like" button will be part of the operating system. The next generation of operating system will contain social interactions as primitive; users will take this as a given.

I missed most of the rest of the day, including the keynote by Deanna Lee from the New York Public Library. (Deanna Lee keynote) However, I did manage to get back in time for the afternoon panel session.


Panel Session on The rise of location-based media sharing and social networks
This was chaired by Mark Cahill (Social Bits), and involved Laurent Walter Goix (Telecom Italia), Fergus Hurley (Clixtr) and Ronan Skehill (Cauwill Technologies).

I'll be honest, I don't get location-based social networking. Maybe I'm too old - I'm certainly older than Fergus Hurley's sister! I hate to think of people being able to track my every movement. So, this was an interesting session for me. Mark Cahill gave a good case from the marketing point of view, but I don't want to be such an easy target.

Mark asked the questions "Why do people check-in? What is the value of a check-in?" I can see the use if you are a stranger in a foreign land looking for recommendations of where to go and what to do. There was some discussion about whether people would check-in (clock-in?) at work, or if it is because people want to be "seen" in a particular location. The consensus seemed to be that you check-in if there is some benefit for you, and Foursquare has not (yet) found the right application.

So, I'm wondering, what would entice a student to check-in to a lecture? We're having this discussion at the moment as we support the launch of a College of Science PRS "clicker" initiative. The focus of the initiative is to engage students, but there is a fear (among students) that the devices will be used to track attendance. Maybe we can introduce a reward scheme for lecture attendance, such as "Mayor of the O'Flaherty Theatre", or it could show up in their twitter feed "I'm at the Kirwan Theatre w/300 others". I don't think so.

I also got to hear talks from Gabriela Avram and Brian O'Donovan, Who am I: social identity in enterprise social networking, and Ted Vickey, Social media and LinkedIn for business. Both of these were interesting and enjoyable, though probably less relevant for T&L in HE.

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Blogtalk Galway 2010 (Day 1)

Last Thursday and Friday I attended some of Blogtalk 2010, taking place on the campus here at NUI Galway. Of course, attending a conference on campus means that you get called away to meetings and try to keep up with email and issues as they arise during the day. So, I didn't get to as many sessions as I'd have liked. But I did very much enjoy those sessions I did see.

The conference was very well organised by John Breslin, leader of the Social Software unit at DERI, co-founder of boards.ie and member of staff in the Electrical and Electronic Engineering discipline at NUI Galway.

Unlike some of the other bloggers who have written about the conference (Mark Cahill, Emer Lawn), I was there very much from a teaching and learning in Higher Education perspective. So any of my comments will be from that angle.

DAY 1

Darragh Doyle (boards.ie) who we are, what we do, where we are going
This was a great talk from Darragh Doyle about boards.ie which is quite unique, there is nothing else like it in Ireland or the UK. It is the most popular forum in Ireland and Darragh suggested that it has replaced the town hall in the community. What I find interesting is the social networking going on in the NUIG forum, with students asking questions about their courses and college life before they even arrive on campus. Everyone is welcome and every question is answered, sometimes helpfully, and other times with a large dose of mis-information. It's a lesson for those of us who spend so much time trying to get accurate information out to students.
Anyway, Darragh's talk has inspired me to actually register with boards.ie, though I haven't posted anything yet, I'm doing a bit of lurking.

After the first talk, I had to attend meetings and follow up on a couple of small crises before they got any bigger. So I didn't get back to the conference until lunchtime.

Dan Gillmor (Keynote) A new kind of media literacy
Dan Gillmor is director at the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship and a respected American technology writer. He raised some interesting points around the question "what is journalism" in this world where everybody can easily report on what is happening around them. I was particularly interested in his point that consumers need skills in judging the credibility of news. They need a "credibility scale", which should include negative points. Of course, this is something that we've been aware of for a long time in HE, with many major initiatives around information literacy for students. Wikipedia is the least of our worries.
Gillmor wants to persuade consumers to be "active media users", to be sceptical of everything. This is an extremely important life skill, which should be addressed not just in higher education, but also at first and second level.
Finally, Gillmor spoke about principles for journalists (accuracy, thoroughness, fairness, transparency, independence). He asked why there isn't a revision history for journalism; at least with wikipedia we can trace where the information came from.


Charles Dowd (Facebook) The Facebook Platform
Charles Dowd has the "best job in Europe", as manager of platform operations in Europe. He described how popular facebook has become, particularly in Ireland where there are 1.4 million monthly active users (and I am one). He spoke about the "like" button and how it works - just 5 "friends" liking something is a magic number.
After this, though, things got scary, as Dowd spoke about the facebook future and the ways that applications will be able to interface with our data. I know I wasn't the only person in the room with concerns, but probably among the minority. Sure, we can set our own privacy levels, but there are also social norms involved and I'm not sure that these are being considered.

Panel Session on Social networks versus conversational networks
This was chaired by Ade Oshineye (Google) and involved Charles Dowd (Facebook), Blaine Cook (Osmosoft) and Darragh Doyle (boards.ie).
Ade presented a nice social network spectrum with social at one end (Facebook) and conversational at the other (Twitter). The classification was interesting, and reflects my own use of the tools, but is an oversimplification. The lines are definitely becoming blurred and, as Darragh Doyle put it, what about social conversation?
There was an interesting conversation about authenticity. Apparently Facebook supports authentic identities and connections, reflecting the real world. Hmmm.

At this point, I had to get back to work and so missed the final keynote of the day from Bill Liao. By all accounts it was excellent, so I'm looking forward to seeing the recording when it becomes available.
(Update: here it is Bill Liao Keynote)

Post about DAY 2 to follow....

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My iPad: An Obituary

On Saturday 31st July, encouraged by reports from @vonprond, @klillington, @catherinecronin and @jamesclay, I went out and bought myself an iPad. I knew more about it than the sales guy in Curry's, Galway. I took it home and from the first moment I held it in my arms and connected it to iTunes, it was love.

I should explain that I never, ever, have done anything like this before. I don't buy expensive gadgets for myself. This was a completely irrational move for me. Even my trusty iPod, now 4 years old, was bought as a present by my husband, after much hinting.

For the next week, I proudly showed off my new purchase to family, friends and colleagues. I spent time considering apps, reading reviews, thinking about how I could use it for teaching and work, as well as having a bit of fun. I installed not one but four twitter apps: twitterific (good), tweetdeck (not great), osfoora (very nice) and flipboard (fantastic). I started to use it for reading (iBooks and Kindle) and was looking forward to my first train journey. I bought productivity apps Keynote and Pages, and started thinking about how to use them. I even began playing with iNow and enjoying the little emails telling me how much I'd got done during the day.

Then, on Tuesday evening, 10th August, a mere 10 days after the iPad entered my life, disaster struck. While showing my mother-in-law our holiday photographs (all 477 of them) the screen froze. I can't even blame my mil, I was closely supervising her at the time. After some time, the "connect to iTunes" screen appeared and, like a concerned parent when her child is ill, I immediately followed instructions.

iTunes told me it had "detected an iPad in recovery mode" and that the poor darling needed to be restored. Ok, I've only had it 10 days, it's not a big hassle. But then, during the restore process, I got the dreaded error 1611 and was directed to a page full of diagnostics. I sat up until well after midnight, restarting the machine, trying different usb ports, even creating a new user on the pc to get a clean iTunes profile. No improvement.

After a fretful night, I contacted Apple Technical Support during lunchtime on Wednesday. A brusque chap named William, who sounded straight out of the US military, and kept calling me Ma'am, told me I'd done a good job with the diagnostics, but that I had omitted to un-install my anti-virus software! Not likely to happen while on the university network, but I said I'd give it a go at home. He also talked me through some complicated holding down of buttons while connecting to iTunes, but none of this solved the problem.

That evening I again rang support, this time talking to a young lady whose name I didn't catch. She wasn't much help at all and seemed incapable of reading the notes left by William. She suggested that I un-install iTunes, and all its associated programmes, then re-install and try again. She then hung up. I did all this (it took an hour) but still no improvement.

Finally, yesterday morning, I got through to a very understanding young man named Peter. He very gently told me that we'd tried everything, but we couldn't restore the iPad. He explained that he would send a courier to take my iPad away in a box, and that I would receive a new one within a few days. He also asked if I'd dropped it, but I explained that it had been (almost literally) wrapped in cotton wool since the day I brought it home.

So, here I am, waiting for the courier to call. The darling device is back in its original box and I'm feeling a hole in my life.

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Update (19th August, 3.30pm): My replacement iPad has just been delivered. Oh joy!

CELT supports the Rahoon Youth Project Multimedia Camp

Fiona Concannon and I were delighted to participate in the Rahoon Youth Project Multimedia Camp which was held in NUIG Galway from July 19 - 23.

Coordinator Kerry E'lyn Larkin kindly asked if we could facilitate a Web 2.0 session as part of an action-packed schedule incorporating audio, video, digital literacy and safety, as well as working with NUIG's Flirt FM.

The 13-15 year-old students were amazingly talented and motivated (thanks to the programme and support offered by Kerry and her team), and we were delighted provide the students with a chance to use clickers, flip cameras and post to a private blog online. We also gave them a whistle-stop tour of the CELT recording and production facilities to add a bit of 'wow' factor to the proceedings.

Well done to one and all involved. We are looking forward to next year's Multimedia Camp already!

Using Turnitin with large classes to support student writing

Back in June I gave a presentation at the 4th International Plagiarism Conference on using Turnitin with large classes to support student writing. The full paper and the powerpoint presentation are now available on the conference website.

The paper describes a pilot study in 2008-2009 involving 3 case studies with large undergraduate student groups, from 120 to 600 students, and addresses the use of Turnitin to support student writing and offer formative feedback, rather than focus purely on plagiarism detection.

Using Turnitin with such large student groups (in 2009-2010 we successfully used it with a class of 950 students) really requires that Turnitin be integrated into the VLE, allowing the students self-submit their work. At NUI Galway, we are using Blackboard, which in turn is integrated with our student records system, thus reducing the administrative overload for staff.

We found that Turnitin can be used to support academic staff in their teaching and assessment. Some of the initial motivation for using Turnitin was that staff were concerned about perceived levels of cut-and-paste plagiarism and collusion within the student groups. With multiple tutorial groups and large numbers of postgraduate tutors, this can be difficult to manage across large cohorts of students. The case studies found that, using Turnitin, tutors were able to identify problems with referencing, to support plagiarism detection, to identify excellent work, and to raise issues generally around student writing. For course co-ordinators there was better visibility into the student group as a whole.

In one (first year) student group, where students were given access to their originality reports for draft submissions and could use them to improve the final versions of submitted work, Turnitin was found to be particularly useful to highlight the importance of originality, and as a way of helping students understand what is expected of them at University level.

The role of the teaching team in each of the case studies was vital to the success of the intervention. Each case-study was academic-driven, brought into the classroom as part of the assessment practice, and not treated as an add-on to teach literacy skills. In each case, teaching teams were brought together to agree a consistent approach to dealing with academic integrity within the discipline. In this way academic honesty became a shared value across the teaching team, giving a consistent message to students.

We found that the best results followed where Turnitin was not being used purely for plagiarism detection. In fact, contrary to our initial expectations, there was little evidence to suggest that its use was a successful deterrent. Rather, it supported the discourse around good writing skills and gave an opportunity to raise awareness of academic writing within the classroom.

I am now interviewing academic staff who used Turnitin in 2009-2010, in the second year of the study. Some of these were involved in the original case studies, and it is interesting to get their perspectives after a second year.

I'm hoping to update the case studies and also describe how Grademark has been used within the discipline of English to facilitate online grading of student work. Cath Ellis has written a very good post of her experiences with Grademark. Her observations certainly match with our experiences here.

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Round-Up: Call(s) for Papers and Webinars

Call for Papers: NAIRTL / LIN Annual Conference: Flexible Learning
Deadline: 18th June 2010
Information: www.nairtl.ie/conference

The NAIRTL / LIN Annual Conference will be held on the 6th and 7th of October 2010 in the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, Dublin. The title of this year’s conference is Flexible Learning and we aim to encourage and support HEI staff to undertake innovative approaches to their curriculum design and course implementation to meet the challenges of flexible learning.

Interested participants should submit a 300 word abstract for a paper, workshop or poster (including interactive poster), webinar and other suitable formats based on one of the following themes:
• Technology Enhanced Teaching
• Integrative Learning
• Innovation in Integrating Research, Teaching and Learning

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Event: Free Mahara Webinar - How ePortfolios represent a new wave of technology in Education
Deadline:29th June 2010
Registration: www.enovation.ie/index.php/component/seminar/ and click on the title of ePortfolio Webinar

ePortfolios represent a new wave of technology in education that allows students to build online resumes to show reflection, evolution of thought and continued professional development.
This session covers: (1) What is an ePortfolio; (2) Learning Management System v’s ePortfolio; (3) Why ePortfolio’s; (4) Use of portfolio; (4) Mahara Overview

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Call for Papers: ICERI2010 (International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation)
Deadline: 15th July 2010
Information: http://www.iceri2010.org/

The ICERI2010 (International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation) will be held in Madrid (Spain), next 15th, 16th and 17th of November 2010. This third annual event brings together professionals in the field of Education and Technology. It will be an excellent opportunity to share your experiences and projects with educators and professionals from all parts of the world.

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Call for Papers: MEDEA Awards 2010
Deadline: 31st July 2010
Information: www.medea-awards.com/home

The MEDEA Awards competition is all about recognising, encouraging and rewarding excellence and creativity in media in education. MEDEA aims to highlight the educational environments that reflect the media-rich world in which our learners live nowadays.

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Call for Abstracts Closing 8th June: The 2010 International Conference on Engaging Pedagogy

The ICEP 2010 (The 2010 International Conference on Engaging Pedagogy - http://www.icep.ie/) abstract submission is closing soon (see below). We would be delighted to have you participate in this year's conference by submitting a paper describing your pedagogical research and practices.

This year's conference is to be held in the National University of Ireland, Maynooth on Thursday December 2nd 2010. The theme of the conference is Engaging Pedagogy: research and practices for a new decade.

Relevant topics include but are not limited to:

• 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

Submission information:

• Abstracts should be no more than 200 words in length in Microsoft Word or PDF format and should be submitted at info@icep.ie by Tuesday 8th June, 2010
• Intermediate feedback will be available to authors on or before the 22nd of June.
• Final papers are due Monday September 20th, 2010.
• Notification of acceptance will take place before or on Monday October 18th, 2010.
• Paper formatting instructions are available at http://www.icep.ie/.
• Questions may be sent to info@icep.ie

Kind regards
The ICEP 2010 Conference Committee

EDIN AGM Thurles May 6th

I was delighted to be invited to the Educational Developers in Ireland Network (EDIN) AGM at Tipperary Institute in Thurles last week as one of four presenter to discuss the topic 'eLearning: A Marraige of Convenience or Made in Heaven?'. My fellow presenters were Dr Kevin O'Rourke of the LTTC DIT, Catherine Bruen NDLR Project Manager and Morag Munro Acting Head of the Learning Innovation Unit at DCU.

The summary themes that I took from the discourse were:

(1) 'eLearning developers' are also 'educational developers' by default - these are not mutually exclusive roles and it adds little to the debate by imposing artificial demarcation lines;

(2) technology-enhaced learning tools must be driven by the value-added they bring to the teaching and learning experience e.g. facilitating geographically distributed students working on a group project. Pedagogy first - technology second!

(3) Ireland's competitive advantage is that we have a relativeley small educational developerment community. However, we should be more pro-active in sharing stories and strategies to support common goals - this can be facilitatied by technologies such as the ILTA web site.

Thanks to Martin Fitzgerald and Tipperary Insitiute for hosting the event, and to Marion Palmer (EDIN Chair) and the team for inviting us to the AGM.

Further EDIN information can be found at http://www.edin.ie/

EdTech2010 - Huge Contribution from NUI Galway

The EdTech2010 conference is being held on May 20-21 in Athlone Insitiute of Technology.

This event is the main annual technology-enhanced learning conference for the Irish user community and once again a wide diversity of NUI Galway initiatives will be showcased at the event.

NUIG has seven papers/presentations across practitioner, research, Pecha Kucha and Technology in Action strands - the largest representation from any Irish university or IoT. So congratulations to: Peter Cantillon; Mary Flemming; Fiona Masterson; Mark Campbell; Niall McSweeney; Oisin Keelen; Andrew Flaus; Mary Dempsey; Paul Gormley; Liam McDwyer; Tony Hall; Bonnie Long, and Sharon Flynn.

We look forward to seeing innovative uses: of Turnitin to support student writing and feedback; the uses of wikis with Irish and German operational engineering students; mmolecules and movies in biochemistry; and the use of online meeting rooms to facilitate primary care clinicians' teaching and learning (to name but a few NUIG highlights at the event).

Registration for EdTech2010 is now open, and looks like being an inspiring 2-day event. Registration details available here.

Celebrating the Jennifer Burke Award for Innovation in Teaching and Learning

I was honoured to chair the judging panel of the second Jennifer Burke Award for Innovation in Teaching and Learning in DCU's Helix recently. The judging panel consisted of Karlin Lillington (Irish Times), Muiris O'Connor (HEA), Sheila Porter (IBM) and Brendan Tangney (TCD).

John O'Connor (DIT) won the award for his Second Life project 'Virtual Environments: Is one life enough?'. The four other short-listed projects were all truly innovative and captured the spirit of the Award perfectly. More information on the finalists and the process is available from the Award web site.

From a judging perspective, the decision making was very difficult due to the high standards set by the finalists. We thoroughly enjoyed the experience and Karlin has written about her take on the process in a lovely article in the Irish Times.

John will be presenting his project at the EdTech2010 conference in Athlone IT on May 20-21, and will be presented the Jennifer Burke Award for Innovation in Learning and Teaching to close the conference. Registration is now open for EdTech 2010. Click here for details.

Call for NDLR LInCS (Learning Innovation Community Support) Project Funding 2010

The NDLR (National Digital Learning Resources) is delighted to announce the call for applications to fund projects supporting the development of learning resources /materials for the NDLR Users over the next eight months (June – November 2010).

Further details and the application form are available from the newly launched NDLR website. The deadline for applications is the Friday 28th May 2010.

Funds will be available from 18th June to:
(a) Support projects that will create learning resources and
(b) Generate use and activity around these learning resources and the repository and portal.

The outputs of these projects will be showcased at a major NDLR event at the end of 2010.

Bids should focus on short, practical projects with clear identifiable outputs (i.e. resources and examples of use and reuse). The outputs of these projects should aim to actively progress and support the realisation of the new and dynamic streamlined SMART CoP model ( new CoPs and/or mergers between existing CoPs) over the next six months.

FAQ and a screencast with details for completing these forms are available on the NDLR portal (http://www.ndlr.ie). If you have any queries about the application form or the process for completion, please do not hesitate to contact the NDLR team at info@ndlr.ie.