This week saw me at the Open University contributing to the AUA professional development programme. They’ve already been looking at Professionalism, Careers and Personal Branding, they invited me to come in and share some thoughts and lead a discussion around what social media might add, in terms of both risk and reward.For the benefit of…
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Is Digital Different: A discussion at SEDA Summer School
This year I was invited by SEDA to talk to delegates at their annual summer school about the idea of digital in an academic setting. As I’ve previously posted, I’m not a huge fan of the language in this area or the way I feel that technology is sometimes pushed over practice. I decided that…
Read moreIncremental or Radical Change
I’ve been working with some of the new JISC Transformations Projects and looking back at the previous Building Capacity Projects, both of these programmes are based around deploying JISC resources to bring about organisational change. Following a conversation with a someone from Gartner late in 2011 it got me thinking about some of the peripheral…
Read moreLeeds Learning and Teaching Conference 2009: Keynote Gráinne Conole
At the Leeds teaching and learning conference today, two of the U&I projects are presenting Reflect and Awesome. But the keynote is by Gráinne Conole, Towards Technology Renaissance. Renaissance – revival or renewed interest, repurposing or rethinking. How does this apply to e-learning. What are the technology trends? Grainne talked about the increased complexity of…
Read moreQR Codes in education: watch this space
A QR (quick response) code is a two dimensional bar code that can be read on a mobile device, such as a camera phone. Once the device decodes the information then it will enable an action to be undertaken. For instance, this might be accessing a web page, displaying text information or subscribing to an…
Read moreEdupunk?
There’s a nice debate going on out there, this posting is just my own perspective and a signpost, if you want to engage more fully take a wander over to the funnymonkey posting and follow the trail. “Punk-related ideologies are mostly concerned with individual freedom.” Looking at the wikipedia entry for punk it identifies a…
Read moreSolstice 2008 and Exit Strategies for VLEs
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 moreResearch 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…
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