Today I’m at the Solstice conference, this is now an annual e-learning conference, but creating a lot deeper thinking spaces for people to engage in discourse. The event is usually preceded by a research panel session and this helps to frame the discussions in the main conference. There were a lot of great sessions today…
Read moreAuthor: Lawrie Phipps
Research 2.0? Risks and Rewards of Using Emergent Technologies
This blog post supports a presentation at the UKGrad Yorkshire & North East Hub, E-Researcher Development Meeting, an e-learning day for trainers and developers. The presentation will open with a brief introduction to the JISC Users and Innovation Programme and discuss the importance of eliciting user needs. This section uses an image from a Flickr…
Read moreManaging Online Identity
This is a topic that is gaining a lot of coverage, and is extremely important in an academic setting. I’ll be facilitating a workshop next week at the Next Generation Environments event at Aston University with James Farnhill and trying to elicit some issues from both teaching and research practitioners. We’ll be running a couple…
Read moreImmersion or Augmentation: A culture or just another tool?
As well as developing technology and processes many of the Users and Innovation projects are also engaged in much wider debates, pushing our understanding of the role of technology in the wider education sector. The Habitat project is currently exploring the role of virtual worlds such as Second Life, which may on one hand be…
Read moreGuardian Article
There’s a great article in today’s Guardian “Tracking technology in the corridors of learning”, it reports on the use of RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) antennas and tags at the University of Washington’s computer science department. Rather than the Orwellian overtones you might expect, where the ‘evil overseers’ monitor our every move, the system is open…
Read moreEliciting Answers using web 2.0 tools.
Linked-In is a tool for maintaining and developing contacts – one of the features is the ability to ask questions of your network of contacts and the ‘public visibility’ of these questions. I thought it might be interesting to pose a question around web 2.0 and then see what sort of answers we got back.…
Read moreU&I Showcase: The Web2Rights Project
One of the joys of working as a programme manager at the JISC is working with a group of people that you can bounce ideas off, find gaps and then elicit solutions. Following a series of reports about IPR and Copyright issues around new and emerging technologies, we, (JISC, and the JISC Users and Innovation…
Read moreConnectivism at the Blackboard Users Conference
Last week I spoke at the Eighth Annual Durham Blackboard Users’ Conference (metaphors on a postcard!). The theme of the event was Connectivism and suggested reading prior to the event was George Siemen’s paper ‘Connectivism: a learning theory for a digital age’. I opened with a quote from Dave Cormier’s blog: Many of us have…
Read moreDigital footprints
Dotsam. Defined as: The wasteland of abandoned Web sites, Hotmail accounts, blogs, wikis, MySpace pages, etc., that their creators have ignored for months or years but which remain accessible. The word was coined in imitation of flotsam and jetsam; “flotsam” refers to goods that float in the water without having been thrown there, as after…
Read moreTowards digital exclusion?
Earlier this month I read a great article – Social networking: Not as inclusive as you might think! Some people will know that I have a passing interest in accessibility and that I have written a little on it in the past. So, when I saw the article it piqued my interest. I won’t repeat…
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