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.
The keynotes, videos, radio shows and interviews from the ECER 2010 Conference in Helsinki:
At the risk of restating the obvious, would you say PLEs are more about conversation as learning (i.e., knowledge building)? If so, then is organizational learning an additional node in one’s PLE? Or is organizational learning a separate entity/endeavor? This also leads me to wonder about individuality in light of a post-modern sense of ontological pluralism (although I try to avoid dwelling here too long!).
Recently, I have been thinking about the seeming paradox that allows learning with new digital media to be at once individual yet more social. This led me to “PLE and intentionality” (or is it PLE as intentionality?) — this triggers several Nietzschean thoughts for some reason. Why are we using PLEs? Is learning about satisfying our individual curiosities or solving a collective problem? (e.g., The Me-First phenomena — how I look to serve my own needs first which actually ends up serving a larger need or goal.) Is such a model of PLE sustainable?
Other ideas:
The PLE as a gateway or as a mirror (or better yet, as both).
The PLE and crowdsourcing
My PLE as a playground or as a factory?
The learner as bricoleur clearly seems to fit as a way to describe the affordances of one’s PLE and I am keen on seeing this idea advanced as a learning theory. The more I study connectivism, the more I’m convinced it’s simply another way of saying distributed cognition. I.e., there’s nothing new here, keep moving. Various literary critiques have yet to be mapped onto new digital media and learning which I believe has some real potential. Yet, it seems this could be a slippery slope if one’s network(s) are small and limited in scope–a potential result of PLEs in general. In what ways can we insure our learning environments and networks provide us balance, a middle way, if you will. Or is that not what learning is about?
Thank you for taking the time to share. I truly enjoy you’re thinking about these topics.