Dr Simon Paul Atkinson (PFHEA)
Enhancing Institutional Outcomes
There is no such thing as blended-learning. Or rather there has never been anything except ‘blended’ learning. Of course we all know that, we’re just lazy with our language and as Orwell(1) said “…if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” Maybe it’s worth thinking about the terminology we use. I have no problem …
Continue reading “There is no such thing as blended-learning.”
It was a real shame (I’m rarely disappointed) to have had to miss the JISC/CETIS Design Bash in Oxford today. I was very much looking forward to catching up with progress on the LDSE and sharing the SOLE model iteration described in Madison-Wisconsin in August. In the end the meeting I had to attend would …
Continue reading “Sorry to have missed JISC Design Bash”
It’s a long way from the staff workload issue that the SOLE model and toolkit sought to answer, but perhaps a model can serve as a central conceptual pattern through which institutions can challenge, their own conceptions of learning, teaching, and learning spaces. The extent to which a model of the learner’s world can represent …
Continue reading “Changing Faculty Roles in Changing Learning Spaces”
Can one know too much about the learning we design? Why is it we appear to know so little? It’s hard to share what you can’t articulate. This is an attempt to make the learning expectations, aspirations and intentions we have of learners as transparent as possible. The desire to produce a useable, intuitive (or at least helpful) toolkit to implement …
Continue reading “Modes of Engagement: Version 2.3 of Toolkit released”
Following the presentation of the SOLE model and toolkit at Madison-Wisconsin in August 2011, a number of conversations about the ‘diagnostic’ function of the SOLE toolkit have taken place. One of the concerns of faculty and students is contact time. How much contact time am I being offered (versus how much I take advantage of), …
Continue reading “Dashboard: Recognising Faculty-Student Contact Time”
There have been a series of provocative, challenging and inspiring conversations with colleagues at BPP University College this past week. Still in my ‘induction’ phase in many respects I find myself listening to bold, ambitious and potentially game-changing notions of tertiary education around the introduction, or expansion, of serious games and social media use. What …
Continue reading “Serious Games and Social Media. What’s the connection?”
Terminology in education is a fascinating thing. Words are after all concepts. Concepts change, evolve and mutate frequently more quickly than the words associated with them along the way. Learning once meant to go to the place of learning associated with what one wanted to know, the monastery to learn about religion, the blacksmith to …
Continue reading “Contextual Learning not Blended Learning”
The Australian Flexible Learning Framework (Framework) has this month released a user guide on Digital Video Principles which it says is “designed to help e-learning content developers make informed decisions about the use of video formats, codecs and delivery systems”. Published by the E-standards for Training business activity of the Australian Flexible Learning Framework (Framework), the Digital Video Principles guide is …
Continue reading “Digital Video Principles – Australian”
The 27th Annual Distance Learning and Teaching Conference at Madison-Wisconsin this August was a diverse and varied programme attended by some 900 distance educators from all sectors, from K-12 to professional education. My contribution was a half-day DiAL-e Workshop with Kevin Burden (University of Hull) attended by some 24 people. The workshop went relatively well but …
Continue reading “DiAL-e and SOLE at Distance Education Conference Madison-Wisconsin 2011”
The 45 minute ‘Information Session’ session on Thursday (4th August) at the 27th Annual Distance Education Conference at Madison-Wisconsin produced a tweet from @lookstein “simon atkinson shares his flexible model for student-owned learning engagement – very valuable (and entertaining!)” so at least one person was interested! The session was attended by some 50-70 people on …
Continue reading “US Interest in the SOLE model & toolkit”
The 45 minute ‘Information Session’ session on Thursday (4th August) at the 27th Annual Distance Education Conference at Madison-Wisconsin produced a tweet from @lookstein “simon atkinson shares his flexible model for student-owned learning engagement – very valuable (and entertaining!)” so at least one person was interested! The session was attended by some 50-70 people on …
Continue reading “US Interest in the SOLE model & toolkit”
24 colleagues from Distance Providers across the US, including from sectors with which we were less familiar such as Military Instructional Education, joined us for a DiAL-e workshop in Madison-Wisconsin. A half-day workshop on the first day of the 27th Annual Distance Education Conference in Madison-Wisconsin ( #dtl2011 ) provided us with an excellent opportunity …
Continue reading “DiAL-e Workshop in US #dtl2011”
Student-Owned Learning-Engagement Model Wednesday 3rd afternoon Videoshare session had some 60-70 people present for 5 short videoshare presentations. The session was intended to be 5 minutes pre-prepared video and 10 minutes of questions each. A fun and interesting session. The 5 minute SOLE video is shared here: [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiBza0rOvBs]
It’s not every morning you wake up to find a ‘new university’ being announced in the United Kingdom. The BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13659394) and Sunday Times describing an initiative to launch a New College of the Humanities, to be based in Bloomsbury, charging £18,000 in fees (per year presumably) and set to rival Oxford and Cambridge by embracing the …
Continue reading “The University Delusion? New College of the Humanities”
A number of teacher educators, like Dr Matthew Kearney at University of Technology Sydney, have expressed interest in using the DiAL-e framework to support their trainee teachers in the use of video and media in teaching and learning. We have worked closely with Matthew and his colleagues at UTS in the past, running workshops around …
Continue reading “The value of the DiAL-e Framework in Teacher Training”
The programme has been releasded for the 27th Annual Distance Learning and Teaching Conference at Madison-Wisconsin this August. It looks like a really fascinating programme and I’m very excited to be part of it. I’ll be running a workshop with Kevin Burden on the DiAL-e and details will follow on that (www.dial-e.net) but on the …
Continue reading “SOLE Model sessions at Madison-Wisconsin 2011”
Great to see details of the DiAL-e Workshop is PM-7 at the The 27th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning is sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Our session is: DiAL-e Framework: Optimizing media for engagement at a distance and is a half-day workshop on Wednesday, August 3; 1:00-4:00 advertised as “Despite the abundance of digital media and …
Continue reading “DiAL-e Workshop is PM07! #dialeUS”
This year the ALDinHE conference had as its theme – “Engaging Students – Engaging Learning” and was a series of small, diverse but very practical sessions ranging from identifying successful work-based learning models to the effective induction of non-traditional learners. In amongst all of that I ran a small workshop on Wednesday 20th April using …
Continue reading “SOLE Model Poster at ALDinHE 2011”