CLIPP Board

ALT-C 2011 musings

Miguel Brechner opened the conference by discussing his 1 laptop per child project (Plan Ceibal). This had the desired effect of inspiring us to think about the positive effect technology can have on learning, and also managed to focus our minds on “doing more with less” in this challenging climate.
Various sessions were live streamed, and delegates interviewed for sound bites during the conference . Inevitably, the twitter back channels kept those peeking in, informed of our thoughts.  Brian Kelly (UKOLN) and Martin Hawksey (MASHe)   helped to archive the tweets using Twapper Keeper. The associated Summarizr makes a neat job of aggregating and displaying those archived tweets.
As you can expect, after not attending ALT-C  for a few years, I was keen to fill up the days with interesting sessions.  My highlights were:

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ALT/eLN free webinar – How to run a virtual classroom session

At the beginning of next month ALT will be running a free online seminar about effective practice when running a virtual classroom session. The session takes place at 12:00pm on Monday 2nd August. We have just extended our Eluminate license and plan to have Blackboard integration running for the start the start of the next academic year, so if you plan to use it I would suggest that this workshop would give you a good grounding in how to run a successful session.

More and more education and training providers are making use of web conferencing as a way to bring learners together for events that would have previously been conducted in the classroom, or which may not previously have been practical or economic on a face-to-face basis. Effective virtual classroom sessions go way beyond webinars or online meetings to involve all participants as much as or more than the physical classroom, through the use of a wide variety of multimedia and interactive techniques. In this session, Clive and Barry will share the benefit of their extensive experience with virtual classrooms to help you both assess the potential for the greater use of live online learning in your organisation and ensure that the sessions that you do deliver are as least as successful as your face-to-face events.

For more information about the session including bio’s of the main speakers, check out the “How to run a virtual classroom session” workshop page on the ALT web site.

The workshop will be run using Eluminate. If you have never taken part in an Eluminate session or aren’t confident that you can “get it to work” I would suggest taking a look at the Eluminate computer checker, well in advance of the session so that you don’t miss any of the workshop on the day.

ALT-C: Day Two

A zillion years ago my first job in the BBC videotape library involved delivering very large and extremely heavy reels of two inch tape to the assistants in the “edit suites” who would load them onto a VT machine the size of a small van. Fast forward to Manchester 9th October 2009 and mounting the stage in the main lecture theatre is Jonathan Drori CBE, one time VT assistant and now invited speaker at day 2 of ALT-C. Perhaps it was this common heritage, or more likely his highly pragmatic approach that made Jonathan’s presentation a welcome breath of fresh air in what was threatening to become a rather stuffy event. Working through a top ten of why most pilot projects fail, Jonathan highlighted the frequent over- emphasis on meeting the requirements of funding authorities and peer review panels and not enough focus on what is actually required to deliver something tangible to meet identified customer needs. While many pilots have very effective project managers this does not equate to sound editorial leadership – or as Jonathan put it – someone to point out when the pilot outcome is just “a little bit crap”. While this was somewhat provocative given the nature of the predominantly academic audience (hooray) the recording of Jonathan’s presentation should be compulsory viewing for anyone planning a pilot project in the near future

If Jonathan brought a breath of fresh air, today’s keynote conjured up a hurricane. Fresh from a senior role at Microsoft (so the glowing apple on the macbooks in the audience still had a kryptonite effect on him) Martin Bean is just two weeks away from taking us his post as the OU’s 5th Vice Chancellor . The span of his discourse was so vast – and so relevant – that I recommend everybody interested in the future use of technology in the HE sector to watch his presentation. If you really don’t have time then the broad conclusion was that sound pedagogy and practice should always come before the application of technology – perhaps not revolutionary but fundamental and, in my experience, frequently overlooked.

Helped by these two star turns the conference really seemed to get underway today with most other events I attended producing some interesting examples of practice and thought provoking debate. There was little truly innovative but a lot of reassuring sharing, mutual support and sunshine (a very rare resource in Manchester).

First Day at ALT-C

With 650 delegates spread attending 7 sessions with up to 9 concurrent presentations, some featuring up to 4 papers, Day One of ALT-C is not for the faint hearted. Just as well that we were eased into things with a characteristically inspired first keynote session from Michael Wesch, the instigator of the iconic “A Vision of Students Today” video that’s had more than 3.3million viewings on YouTube and spawned multiple imitations across the globe. In case you are not one of the 3.3m take a look now but, while doing so, consider that this is just one of over a million videos now uploaded everyday. Michael’s presentation covered a whole range of topics and is well worth watching in full when made available on the ALT website.

During his presentation Michael kept switching back to the wide shot of the anthropology class that “stars” in the video which appeared almost like a mirror image (although a bit scruffier – Manchester University Place is an impressive venue) and, for me, set the tone of the event. Here was a room full of predominantly older people looking at and trying to understand the learning requirements of a room full of younger people in a world where the rate of technological change is exponential. But then I guess that’s what we’re all in Manchester to figure out.