Great presentation by Steve Wheeler from the EDEN Research Workshop, 2010.
I have been paired together with Alec Couros as co-keynotes at the PLE Conference in Barcelona, Spain, July 8-9. The organizers have recently asked us to do something different than a typical keynote, so we have been thinking about an unKeynote format. In keeping with the theme of the conference (PLEs), we’re hoping that individuals in our network would be willing to help us frame what this might look like. We would like you to write your ideas in the shared Google document. We will review all your ideas, come up with a format and then once more invite your inputs.
The document is open and can be accessed by clicking this link.
These are the slides from my presentation from the excellent session on Digital Identities at the Online Educa Berlin conference held earlier this month.
Some great presentations at Online Educa Berlin. And over the next ten days we will be bringing you some of the slides and videos. This presentation, by Cristina Costa looks at Digital Storytelling.
Last week I made a presentation at an Evolve Open on-line seminar about Personal Learning Environments. The seminar was very well attended, with a great presentation on e-Portfolios by Sigi Jacob and a lively debate.
As ever I promised I would post my slides on Slideshare. Trouble is I promise and don’t always do. There are two main reasons. The first is the struggle to make sure I acknowledge all sources – especially the photos. And the second is that my slides do not really make sense without audio. They are designed as an extra and complementary channel of communication. I see little reason to write on a slide and then read it out verbatim. Rather they illustrate what I am talking about. And thus on their own they make little sense. Of course I could record my presentation live and add that soundtrack to the slides. But I find that live presentations do not necessarily work as a recording. In general I think recordings – or slidecasts should be short and preferably under ten minutes. This mean re-recording the sound track and then syncing with the slides. It is not difficult but it takes time.
Anyway I have kept my promise and I hope you find it worthwhile.
This was recorded live at the EduMedia conference in Salzburg. Many thanks to Andreas Auwarter who recorded the audio and did the post processing.
As promised more on the Training of Trainers. The presentation is based on research we are undertaling through the TTplus project. The project aims to support and improve the continuing professional development of trainers and has been examining the context in which training takes place in enterprises and the effectiveness of present policies and provision for the training of trainers.
The project is developing a framework for the continuing professional development of trainers and examining different measures and mechanism for implementing the professional development framework.
The research undertaken by the project showed that the number of trainers in Europe has increased. These ‘trainers’ include full time trainers, people with a formal training responsibility and all those for whom supporting the learning of others is part of their job. It also concluded that many of these people do not have effective or adequate access to continuing professional development opportunities or support or recognition for their own learning.
It is clear that if the standards of training are to be raised, improving the training of trainers must be a priority. However, given the heterogeneous nature of the group and the range of sectors and occupations in which they work, it is difficult to see how this could be standardised, or indeed whether it is desirable to do so. Certainly some sort of common framework would have advantages. It would provide a degree of coherence to what is a very fragmented field. It would increase the visibility of trainer training and in so doing, increase awareness. It could also stimulate the establishment of communities of practice between trainers.
The TT-Plus project has the objective of designing a framework for professional development for trainers in Europe. One approach to this is to develop an accreditation framework. Educational accreditation is a type of quality assurance process under which an organisations’ services and operations are examined by a third-party accrediting agency to determine if applicable standards are met. Should the facility meet the accrediting agency’s standards, the facility receives accredited status from the accrediting agency. Such accreditation often takes the form of a ‘kitemark’ or quality mark designed to show that the organization has met the standards.
The challenges in designing an accreditation system for trainers are three-fold:
Firstly, how can a framework reflect the TTPlus project research findings and be –
Secondly, how can a framework incorporate the best features of previous approaches whilst minimising their disadvantages. Specifically how can a framework:
Thirdly, how can a single framework be flexible enough to allow sectoral, local, regional and national variation whilst still maintaining transnational coherence and a shared European approach?
In short, how can standards be improved without standardization?
The project has produced a consultation paper outlining a possible solution based on a set of common or shared elements and another set of elements where there are choices or divergences to be made at country, organizational or individual level.
The paper elaborates on six ‘components’ of the frameworktogether with linking mechanisms.
The full consultation document can be downloaded here – Framework for the Professional Development of Trainers.. If you are involved in the training of trainers – or are just interested in te topic we would like to hear your views on the Framework
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Terry Friedman is planning to publish a new version of the popular Coming of Age book.
And along with Leon Cych, he is planning a 24 hour telethon in which the contributors to Coming of Age are “on” for up to 20 minutes, either talking about their contribution or being interviewed about. I thought I would produce a short video (or slidecast) for the occasion. And by short I meant short. I always set out with good intentions but they always end up 25 minutes or more. I am proud of myself. This one is 6 minutes and I think it gets the key ideas across.
If you don’t like cartoon strips or prefer reading to watching a video or just want to find out more, you can download my contribution to the book below.
I’m doing a presentation on Tuesday on Learning and Knowledge Maturing. It is a bit of a mash up – some older slides from me plus some slides from Steven Downes. And it comes with full audio – I used slidecast for the first time. So trun up your speakers and press the green button (warning – about 20 minutes long). A longer post about making this will follow.
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2012 Horizon report
An advance copy of the the NMC Horizon Report 2012 K-12 Edition, due to be launched on June 14, identifies mobile devices and apps and tablet computing as technologies expected to enter mainstream use in the first horizon of one year or less. Game-based learning and personal learning environments are seen in the second horizon of two to three years; and augmented reality and natural user interfaces emerged in the third horizon of four to five years.
OER Quality
A new project is attempting to define quality standards for open educational resources in higher education; this is part of the OER Quality Project, a joint research between the universities of Barcelona, Santiago de Chile and the University of London.
The researchers for this project are lecturers and academic librarians and aim to define a set of quality standards and develop a good practices guide both for content design and for indexing open educational resources in institutional repositories.
They are looking for university lecturers, readers or professors (distance learning lecturers welcome too) willing to answer 2 surveys (20 minutes each) and to evaluate a set of OERs, according to certain guidelines and criteria, which will take 30 minutes to answer. To participate, please register here.
Hangouts on Air
Personally I am not a great fan of Google+, although as Google increasingly integrates its different services it is hard to avoid. But, as Stephen Downes points out in the ever valuable Oldaily, citing an original blog post by David Andrade, “by far and away the best thing about Google+ is the Hangout feature, essentially a way to have a videoconference with ten of your friends. This latest upgrade allows you to broadcast your Hangouts to as large an audience as you want. “With Hangouts on Air, you will be able to broadcast yourself publicly to the entire world, see how many viewers you have, and even record and reshare your broadcast. The public recording will be uploaded to your YouTube channel and to your original Google+ post.”
With free skype video calls limited to two people and the increasing cost of proprietary synchronous elearning platforms like Blackboard Collaborate, Hangouts could become the system of choice for open online courses.
Gadgets and widgets
The Dutch SURFnet have announced the ‘Edu-Socializing Seminar’, to be held in Utrecht, the Netherlands, on June 12th and 13th. They say “Gadget and widget technology is gaining momentum in the Research and Educational community. Projects like the Role Project, Apache Rave, Sakai OAE and OpenConext implement and deploy these technologies, showcasing the possibilities and benefits of such loosely coupled and distributed environments. The projects address a wide variety of needs from within the community like, among others, personalized learning environments, mashing web and social content, distributed learning and online collaborations.
The event seeks to explore trends and foster these developments internationally, by bringing together experts from different fields into one event and joining them in a community. With interactive sessions the workshop wants to enable sharing of ideas and knowledge. At the same time the event wants to trigger new developments. With dedicated breakout sessions, common challenges can be addressed and solutions can be targeted.”
More details on the seminar wiki page.
The keynotes, videos, radio shows and interviews from the ECER 2010 Conference in Helsinki:
Here you find the Taccle handbook for teachers order form.
Watch the Pontydysgu Videos
Our Wikispace for teaching and learning
Join our Sounds of the Bazaar Facebook goup. Just click on the logo above.
Our next programmes will be live from the German Moodlemoot in Emsden. Full details coming soon
