CLIPP Board

JISC funding- elevated

I noticed a recent article entitled ” How to make your JISC funding bid stand out from the crowd” on the CETIS news pages recently.  I thought it was nigh time that I posted a similar bid writing guide that Christa Appleton (JISC RSC West Midlands) and I crafted last year.  The Aston Research Support Unit have assisted us previously with the (TRAC) costing process of JISC bids – this aspect not to be underestimated!

Along with the above guide, JISC have also announced a new method of bidding for smaller project funds using their Elevator service.  The new service is designed for innovative projects that need to  gain funding up to £10K – without having to adhere to the strict criteria of their usual project funding programmes.

As Martin Hawksey has already Tweeted – it would be useful to see collaborative ideas with students pitching for funds.

JISC 2011 conference

A short report on the JISC 2011 conference,  of which you can revisit some of the live streamed sessions and grab the virtual goody bag.  The keynote speech by Professor Eric Thomas, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bristol, contextualised our current shift in HE provision to an unavoidable consumer lead market model. The twitter back channel displayed next to the recorded videos makes for a useful resource, and a glimpse into personal reflections on the day. Maybe they should have used the tool created by Martin Hawksey (JISC) which enables Twitter feeds to by overlaid onto video?

Ironically, one of the most interesting sessions I attended – “amplifying events” run by Brian Kelly of UKOLN was not officially recorded – but Brian and colleague did record it on their iphones (see above). This session was a good overview of some of the techniques and tools available to event organisers to enhance F2F and blend them with online events – as JISC demonstrated his year. The green meeting guide, was also mentioned – which looks a useful resource. As does this article by  Marike Guy (co-presenter) entitled “10 ways to amplify your event.” This topic also resonates with my previous post on using Elluminate here at Aston to help with our sustainability agenda.

The session entitled “Using digital media to improve teaching and learning”, illustrated some interesting exemplars of effective practice at University of Bristol focussing on the role of students as producers of media rich learning content. This session was fronted by JISC Digital Media service, reminding me of their wealth of excellent resources.

I also attended a short workshop explaining the Co-generative (Co-genT) toolkit project, which guides you through the process of writing learning outcomes. These can then be exported from the Moodle toolkit into PebblePad. Very handy for course designers, and could also be used to assess activities. n.b a great deal of work has been done on this tool  to map outcomes/descriptive verbs against national standards.

The final session I want to comment on was entitled “Pushing the frontiers of ‘open education and research“.  This session outlined two new tools created by Plymouth University and The Academy. They will be extremely useful for people wanting to easily understand copyright and create OER resources. Both will be live in a week or so. I’ll wait until they go live to report back, as I will be using them myself.

JISC Live

Conference presentations and resources, including all the Elluminate recordings, from Innovating e-Learning 2010, are now available on the JISC website for general viewing.

The JISC Online Conference, Innovating e-Learning 2010 ran from 23rd -26^th November and attracted  483 delegates numbers from around the world. The conference theme was ‘Bringing Innovation to Life: from adversity comes opportunity’ to reflect the challenges facing colleges and universities in sustaining innovation in the current climate. The presentations and Elluminate recordings of all the sessions are now available and include presentations from:

• Keri Facer, Professor of Education at Manchester Metropolitan University and Director of the CREATE centre – Learning to live in interesting times – what are educational institutions for?
• Graham Galbraith, Deputy Vice Chancellor and Jon Alltree, Director of Learning, University of Hertfordshire – Developing a culture of blended learning innovation
• David Boud, University of Technology, Sydney – Transforming assessment for learning in a digital age
• Aaron Porter (President) and Usman Ali (Vice President (HE)),  National Union of Students – What do students really want?
• Anne Miller, inventor, author and co-founder of The Technology Partnership – How to get your innovations adopted (and change the world.)
• Elliott Masie, internationally recognised futurist, analyst and researcher on workforce learning, business collaboration and emerging technologies and Head of the MASIE Centre – Shaping our learning futures

In addition, recordings of the Elluminate conference sessions covering  mobile learning;  Sustaining OER innovation through collaboration and partnership; sustaining innovation in curriculum delivery are also available

JISC launches guides to new technology

JISC have released a series of guides on using emerging technologies for research, administration or teaching covering social media, RSS, collaborative writing, podcasting and microblogging.

Each guide consists of a short animated video explaining the key concepts, supported by a more in-depth printable overview of the topic, covering the potential uses, risks and how to get started. The guides and the resources used to create them can be downloaded, modified and shared under a creative commons licence.

Find out more and download the guides at web2practice.

Getting Started With Second Life

I consider myself a nerd someone who is interested in the geekier side of things, but Second Life can leave me perplexed. So it is great timing that JISC have just published a guide to getting starded with Second Life.

The guide has been written by representatives from several projects from within JISC’s recent Users and Innovation programme, which gave project teams the opportunity to work in emergent technology spaces that at the time were the domain of very few in higher education. These included multi user virtual environments such as Second Life.

You can order a copy or download the guide on the JISC site.

JISC Next Generation Technologies in Practice

I’ll be attending JISC‘s Next Generation Technologies in Practice event tomorrow, but the event is already well underway. Discussion on the first day is aimed at projects already involved with the Users and Innovation programme and its Emerge community. The second day will act as a showcase.

Organisers are encouraging delegates to follow and join in the discussion during the event. Follow the conversations about the conference on Twitter. They’ve even managed to get themselves as one of the most discussed topics on Twitter.