Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Service oriented architecture for education
Service Oriented Architecture and Enterprise Learning Integration Summit
A summit to discuss approaches to Service Oriented Architecture in education will be hosted by IMS on 22 October at Oracle in California. A number of speakers will discuss the challenges education organisations face with enterprise integration. The summit will consider identity management, user provisioning and outcomes reporting, as well as discussing good practice SOA approaches. This follows on from the public release of the IMS SOA white paper entitled “Adoption of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for Enterprise Systems in Education: Recommended Practices”
More information - http://www.imsglobal.org/soa
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Recursive tweets and tips for academics
Wake up and smell the new epistemology
A remote viewer advised via the Elluminate chat screen of a lively Twitter stream about the keynote. I really wanted to see what they were saying, but had decided not to take my laptop so I would listen to the session without distraction. Technology 1 : my thinking 0!
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
New models for learning management
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
eBooks provide safety valve for librarians
Read more or download the podcast (13min)
Great conference - no carbon footprint!
From the conference website: "If you are a researcher, institutional manager or practitioner involved in technology-enhanced learning and teaching, Innovating e-Learning 2009 will be of interest to you. Delegates from further and higher education and from overseas are welcome."
Read more / register
JISC publications on learners and curriculum design
JISC programme manager Sarah Knight said: “Two of these publications draw together the latest findings from JISC’s £11.36 million e-learning programme which ended in March 2009, and show the central role technology is playing in enhancing the curriculum design processes and practices in UK colleges and universities.”
Read more
Monday, September 14, 2009
Professional supervision for teachers
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Digital Citizenship
Watch the Social Media Revolution on Youtube.
PS many thanks to Kate for pointing me to the site that exposes the stats in this video as mostly hype (not the exact term used). If the plan is to sell books it probably works. If it is to be honest about presenting current trends then it seems to be a failure. Who to believe these days?
Monday, August 3, 2009
Screencasting, screen capture and lecture recording tools
A variety of easy to use tools are available to capture lectures and screen content before or during a teaching session. Post-production facilities allow editing prior to distribution. For anyone wondering about the strengths, purposes and points of difference with these software programs, the April 2009 edition of the ALT Newsletter has some useful reviews.
Simon Davis, Learning Technologist, Staff and Departmental Development Unit, University of Leeds, used Camtasia software for real-time lecture capture including audio, video of the lecturer, presentation slides and dynamic content created on a tablet PC during classes. Simon reckons that a real time “screen capture” video is like someone looking over your shoulder while you talk them through something on your computer. His review looks at various ways this can be used to support teaching and learning. His conclusion – ‘a powerful and surprisingly flexible tool for creating rich multimedia learning objects.’ Read more.
Graham McElearney, a Learning Technologist from The University of Sheffield’s Learning and Teaching Services looks at two popular types of screen capture software for audio enhanced presentations and software demonstrations prepared ahead of time. He concludes that both programs offer the ability to rapidly create e-learning resources without having to invest large amounts of time learning new software. Read more.
Kris Roger and Chris Fryer from the London School of Economics review an integrated hardware and server system to automatically capture and process live lecture recordings for web-based delivery. Audio, PC and document camera output, as well as video of lecturers can be output as podcasts, vodcasts or web pages with flash video. Technical descriptions offer rather more than conceptual understanding of the system. Probably more than the average academic needs to know, these will be useful to system administrators and interested others. The verdict on benefits to learning and teaching is positive however, with students believing they might not have passed courses without the recordings, and lecturers even watching their own to try and improve their teaching. Read more.
All these forms of output can be presented or linked through an institutional learning management system. The biggest sticking point seems to be getting lecturers to the point of confidence where they agree to being recorded or to recording and distributing their resources. Experience shows this to be a minor challenge that disappears in time. This all bodes well for the UoA lecture recording pilot that is currently in progress.
Thanks to the UK Association of Learning Technology (ALT) and authors for these timely and useful reviews.