CLIPP Board

Fifth European First Year Experience Conference

Anne Wheeler, Baljit Gill, Ellen Pope and Matt Daley attended the 5th EFYE conference at Plantijn University College in Antwerp, Belgium from 26 – 28 May 2010. The conference presentations covered a range of topics that influence the student first year experience, including: transition issues, inclusive L&T, student support, appreciative inquiry, retention, effective assessment, etc. Ellen, Matt and Anne also presented their poster at the Open Space session on ‘Appreciating and Enhancing Student Skills: 1st Year student perceptions’ which focuses on the work of the Learning Development Centre.

The conference provided the team with an opportunity to hear about, and take part in workshops, on facilitating students transition to HE, and in supporting and enhancing their learning on arrival at University. The conference also provided the team with time to reflect and discuss ways in which we can incorporate some of the initiatives, in a coordinated manner, into our working practice at Aston.

A few weblinks to consider

Here are a few links that may interest you, which I have come across on my travels around the interweb.

100 Business Blogs

Popular Science‘s Entire Archive online and free

Active Map of UK Universities & Institutions

TeacherTube

Internet For Image Searching (JISC)

The Guardian Guide to Making Video

SCHOMS – AUDE Learning Environment Design Workshop 24th and 25th May 2010

Associate Professor Peter Jamieson from the University of Melbourne brought some Aussie sunshine with him to kick off the first day of the third in his series of UK workshops, this time held at the University of Birmigham. Despite the sweltering heat, he led a diverse group of academics, architects, learning technologists, researchers, support and Estates staff on an intensive quest to try and define how we can formulate the right questions, document and disseminate the complex issues surrounding the provision of effective learning spaces.
Right from the start it was evident that there was rarely an identified and accountable stakeholder for learning space design projects with architects often being called in before any well defined brief had been formulated. Moreover it became equally evident that such designs are rarely aligned with institutional learning and teaching strategies.
Peter did his PhD in the use of technology in HE but concluded that physical space was the most important “piece of technology” available but was harder to define and manage. I certainly agree with him but, over the course of the workshop, realised how important it is to differentiate between learning spaces and teaching spaces. The former increasingly offer less formal and student-centric environments for unsupervised self and group study while the latter are developing to accommodate more problem based and collaborative learning which brings major challenges – and sometimes conflict – in terms of efficient space utilisation. Traditional ownership of such spaces (Library/Estates) also needs to be challenged.
While it was never the intention to come up with any definitive answers, by the end of (a much cooler) day two, I think we all felt we had moved considerably closer to understanding the issues and all had some useful lessons to take back to our workplace. Together with representatives from SCHOMS, AUDE and JISC, Peter will sift through the outcomes from all three workshops in an attempt to formulate a common framework for assessing and fully understanding the motivations, implementation and outcomes of learning environment design projects. All attendees are encouraged to play a continued role in this process on-line with the ultimate aim of identifying a small set of case studies to be made widely available to the numerous departments, groups and individuals who inevitably play a role in this rather strange and unique process.
In other words, watch this space.

Having FUN with teaching technology

Mathew Weathers is a lecturer in Math at Biola University, California in the US of A.

He wanted to “April Fool” his Math class on the last lesson before the Easter break.

He succeeded! With one of the best videos I have seen in a long time.

It may not be a teaching aid, but as a way of entertaining his students and showcasing his skills, it’s superb.

Enjoy!

ADDITION

Here’s his Halloween video, and the video explaining how he did it.

Adobe Presenter Overview

Aston now has a site license of Acrobat Pro Extended, which comes with Adobe Presenter. I have started looking into using this piece of software  for a number of reasons and stumbled across this video which gives an over view of the features that it contains. I think this video would be very suitable for anyone who is wondering what it does. Its about 10mins long and is is definitely aimed at a user level and is not technical in any way.

UPDATE:

Just found another version of it that is a lot more readable.

https://admin.adobe.acrobat.com/_a227210/getstartedpresenter/

Aggregated

I attended the inspiring talk by Professor Phillip Long this week, so I thought I’d share a few of the many nuggets of information he discussed.   As his talk suggested, Phillip concentrated on the way that Web 2.0 tools and communication/collaborative working is being enhanced by a plethora of technologies that  are making sharing and collaborating much easier, and indeed pushing us into a 21^st C way of being.  His talk resonates with the published work surrounding the connectivisim pedagogy – whereby we are learning in a networked world from peers and from the terabytes of information at our networked fingertips. Of course, this means we still need to filter and evaluate, but that’s a whole other story. Phillip argued that the rise in social media (facebook, mysapce, bebo, etc) is a transformative revolution, set to mould our way of living and connecting with others.   BTW, the video link above is a similar take to the very good Shift_happens vid created recently.

Phillip also made a very valid comment about the vast quantities of information on the interweb.  “We are struggling with semantics and taxonomies of aggregating data, which at present feels chaotic.”  How true, and I for one am trying to cope with ways of filtering blogs, wikis, tweets, emails, RSS feeds, etc… And read from paper – in an efficient manner.  RSS feeds can help – more of that later.

Back to the meat of the links.  Phillip covered so much; all I can do is pass on the links I took down so you can try some out for yourself.

• http://timkastelle.org/blog/ – is developing the aggregate, filter, connect model with Phillip Long.
• Deloitte Centre for the edge – tracking shifts in use of media
• Google Labs RSS visualizer?
• The new Microsoft Office on the Web – Like google docs
• Always use Delicious or diigo to store and share web links – it makes sense
• Shorten your long ULRs with http://bit.ly – also has stats counters
• Filter tweets with Tweetdeck , tweetalarm or Twitterfall
• Use RSS feeds to push the web to you , by using Yahoo pipes, rightload, or use RSS feeds to create a newspaper or magazine on the fly with your selected web articles.
• Read it later – save web pages to read later!
• Connotea – an alternative to Endnote
• http://vue.tufts.edu/ – The Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) is an Open Source project based at Tufts University

Phillip was keen on sharing educational (Open Access) content, here’s his list of repositories of Open Educational  Resources;

• www.doaj.org – The Directory of Open Access Journals
• http://www.oclc.org/oaister/ -  Millions of digital resources
• http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm – MIT OpenCourseware
• http://cnx.org/ – Connexions is a place to view and share educational material
• http://openwetware.org/wiki/Main_Page -  Sharing research information
• http://www.labspaces.net/ – sharing research
• http://igen.org/ – collaborating on genetics research