Archive for August 13th, 2008

Finding out about trainers – your help needed

August 13th, 2008 by Graham Attwell

I woudl be very grateful for your help in filling in a survey (yes I know – another one :) ) It will take about ten minutes and has been developed by the Network for Trainers in Europe in which Pontydysgu is a partner.

The Network of Trainers in Europe is a European Commission sponsored project aiming to:

  • Provide an opportunity for exchanging experiences and knowledge though an easy to use web portal. Enable policy makers, managers and trainers to access ideas, materials and opportunities for professional development.
  • Undertake a small-scale survey of the work of trainers and their professional support.
  • Provide access to research and ideas through the organisation of workshops and on-line conferences.
  • Enhance the quality of support for trainers by sharing effective practice.
  • Stimulate new approaches to the training of trainers related to the concept of lifelong learning, knowledge sharing and peer learning.
  • Encourage researchers and trainers to share information and materials based on practical experience.
  • Bring together research and practice from different projects and initiatives throughout Europe.will implement a survey on the work, situation, qualification and status of VET trainers in the 32 European countries.

The survey is designed as a a tool to assess the situation of trainers and project future trends as well as recruitment and qualification needs.

It is available as an on-line version in English, French, German, Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.

The English language version can be accessed here. For other versions please go to the survey page on the network web site.

Join us at the Fringe

August 13th, 2008 by Graham Attwell

Josie and Scott have been putting some work into the F-Alt 2008 events – the Fringe at the ALT 2008 conference (please note this is not associated in any way with the official conference etc).

Why have a fringe? Well my personal take on it – given there is no offical organising committee – is that we want to build on those out of session happenings which always seem the highlight of conferences. And I want – selfishly – a quickk fure consultation with colleagues – on he issues which are bothering me in my work. Hence I have signed up for th e-Portfolio WTF session – see proposed session below. I am increasingly caught between the dilemmas of trying to provide structured ePortfolio spaces whilst learners are usning all kind sof different social software to discuss and presnet their work. I hope to get other peoples ideas on this. And I like the idea of quick fire sessions. And of sessions being participant organised and led. Social software and especially Twitter has great potential for letting us do this.

And I don’t think that the humour on the F-Alt wiki should take away from the serious nature of such discussions. Serious fun is one of our memes at the moment – and one i take seriously :) . Sessions are being scheduled outside the main conference times – we do no want to take away form thse who are presneting in official paper sessions. So if you are coming to Alt-C – ad are looking for some serious fun, please sign up on the wiki. Better still offfer to moderate or speak at a session.

The line up to date:

  • e-Portfolios: WTF?

Facilitator: Josie Fraser
Speakers: Graham Attwell

  • Learning Objects: WTF?
Facilitator: Scott Wilson
Speakers
:
  • Second Life: WTF?

Facilitator: Nicola Whitton
Speakers: Scott Wilson

  • Edupunk: WTF?

Facilitator: Graham Attwell

Speakers:

  • Microblogging WTF?

Facilitator: Su White
Speakers:
Josie Fraser

  • Not not re-thinking the Digital Divide

but thinking about the digital divide, using gender as a lens

Facilitator: Josie Fraser

Speakers: Frances Bell, Helen Whitehead

PLEs – Designing for Change

August 13th, 2008 by Graham Attwell

Yesterday I read “Designing for Change: Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments” by Fridolin Wild, Felix Mödritscher and Steinn Sigurdarson, who are working on the EU funded iCamp project. Thi is interesting stuff.
At the core of their arguement is the idea that “by establishing a learning environment, i.e. a network of people, artefacts, and tools (consciously or unconsciously) involved in learning activities, is part of the learning outcomes, not an instructional condition.”

They go on to look at AI and adaptive approaches to learning environments.

“Adaptive (educational) hypermedia technologies all differ”, they say, but “they share one characteristic: they deal primarily with the navigation through content, i.e. the represented domain specific knowledge. Information processing and knowledge construction activities are not in the focus of these approaches. Consequently, they do not treat environments as learning outcomes and they cannot support learning environment design.”

Their approach goes beyond personalisation.

“Considering the learning environment not only a condition for but also an outcome of learning, moves the learning environment further away from being a monolithic platform which is personalisable or customisable by learners (‘easy to use’) and heading towards providing an open set of learning tools, an unrestricted number of actors, and an open corpus of artefacts, either pre-existing or created by the learning process – freely combinable and utilisable by learners within their learning activities (‘easy to develop’). ”

They go on to explain a set of tools beng piloted by the iCamp project:

“In this section we describe the development of a technological framework enabling learners to build up their own personal learning environments by composing web-based tools into a single user experience, get involved in collaborative activities, share their designs with peers (for ‘best practice’ or ‘best of breed’ emergence), and adapt their designs to reflect their experience of the learning process. This framework is meant to be a generic platform for end-user development of personal learning environments taking into account the paradigm shift from expert-driven personalisation of learning to a design for emergence method for building a personal learning environment.”

The tools and platform they have developed are based on a learner interaction scripting language (LISL) leading to a Mash-UP Personal Learning Environment (MUPPLE). I do not fully understand how the platform works (does it require users to understand the scripting language?) but it appears to be based on users describing a set of activities they wish to undertake. These activities then allow them to access a set of tools to undertake those activities. The focus on activities rather than tasks seems to me interesting.

I very much like the idea that the learning platform is seen as an outcome of learning and think the approach has great potential. I woudl be interested to hear what others think of the approach. I hope to get a look at the platform and will report back.

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    News Bites

    From a Jisc press release:

    Over 14,000 items of archived TV footage from 17 European countries are now available via the EUscreen online portal for teaching, research and general interest.

    EUscreen – the result of a collaboration between 36 partners across Europe – provides a rich insight into Europe’s television heritage with content dating from the 1920s to the present day.

    The portal includes rare footage and commentary on key events in history, including a 1962 interview with Martin Luther King about racial discrimination in the US.

    John Ellis, Professor of Media Arts at Royal Holloway and principal investigator on the EUscreen project, said: “This is a valuable resource for anyone interested in social history or indeed TV history, as it brings together tens of thousands of clips from across Europe. The portal is available to anyone (not only academics) and it is very easy to get absorbed and spend hours browsing all of the footage.”

    The expansive footage has also proved popular as a learning aid for foreign language students, with clips available in 14 languages.

    By the end of September 2012, there will be around 30,000 items of digital content freely available on the portal as the European providers continue to add carefully selected material.

    Explore the EUscreen footage


    Open online seminar

    Jisc are hosting an open, online seminar on ‘Making Assessment Count (MAC)’ on Friday 3rd Feb – 1-2pm. The presenters are Professor Peter Chatterton (Daedalus e-World Ltd) and Professor Gunter Saunders (University of Westminster).

    The mailing for the seminar says” “The objective of Making Assessment Count is primarily to help students engage more closely with the assessment process, either at the stage where they are addressing an assignment or at the stage when they receive feedback on a completed assignment. In addition an underlying theme of MAC is to use technology to help connect student reflections on their assessment with their tutors. To facilitate the reflection aspect of MAC a web based tool called e-Reflect is often used. This tool enables the authoring of self-review questionnaires by tutors for students. On completion of an e-Reflect questionnaire a report is generated for the student containing responses that are linked to the options the student selected on the questionnaire.”

    You can find out more ans sign up for the seminar at  http://jiscmac.eventbrite.co.uk/


    EC-TEL 2012

    The EC-TEL 2012: Seventh European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning 21st Century Learning for 21st Century Skills takes place on 18-21 September 2012 at Saarbrücken in Germany.

    The focus for the conference includes:

    - How can schools prepare young people for the technology-rich workplace of the future?
    - How can we use technology to promote informal and independent learning outside traditional educational settings?
    - How can we use next generation social and mobile technologies to promote informal and responsive learning?

    The deadline for proposals is April 2.


    Visitors and Residents

    David White (University of Oxford) and Dr. Lynn Silipigni Connaway (OCLC) have been attracting quite a stir with their JISC-funded work on Visitors and Residents: What Motivates Engagement with the Digital Information Environment?, being undertaken as part of the Developing Digital Literacies programme webinar series.

    Slides, audio and a recording of the Blackboard Collaborate session where they presented some of the findings of their work can be found at http://bit.ly/jiscdiglitvr.


    ECER 2010

    The keynotes, videos, radio shows and interviews from the ECER 2010 Conference in Helsinki:

    On the ECER 2010 website.

    Taccle handbook for teachers order form

    Here you find the Taccle handbook for teachers order form.

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