Archive for August 17th, 2008

Benjamin Zephaniah rocks!

August 17th, 2008 by Graham Attwell


Two weeks ago I was at the Cambridge folk festival. The highlight for me was The Imagined Village – a multi-cultural project spearheaded by Simon Emmerson and including Martin Carthy, Eliza Carthy, Billy Bragg, Sheila Chandra, Johnny Kalsi, Chris Wood, Francis Hylton, Andy Gangageen, Sheema Mukherjee, Barney Morse Brown and the Young Coppers. Taking the English tradition and interweaving contemporary sounds and voices, it explores Simon’s assertion that “Englishness is the final frontier of world music”.Don’t miss this brilliant video by BenjaminZephaniah.

What do we use to communicate?

August 17th, 2008 by Graham Attwell

Last week I undertook two days of interviews with staff from a large educational service company in the UK. The interviews formed part of a series of enthnographic studies being undertaken by the Mature project to look at how information and knowledge are developed within organisations. Obviously communciation is a key part of this and we talked to workers at all levels of the organisation how they communictaed, about what and with who.

I suppose I should not have been surprised by the results but I was. The main means of communication is email. Everone used email on a daily basis for communciating about all kinds of things – including when soemone brought cake into a district office. There appeared to be no policy on what should be communicated – it being left up to individuals to decide what should be emailed to who. And although most epople said they found i quite hard keeping up with the volume of emails all were adamant that it was critical to their work.

I guess it would be possible to move a lot of this traffic to another platform – an intranet or wiki – although there is a temptation not to tinker with soemthing which is not broken. But n or discussions on learning platforms, PLEs and the rest, I think we have fogotten how important email is to peoples’ informal learning and work.

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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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