New YouTube videos from the European LAMS Learning Design Conference 2010
Finally this weekend got around to putting the slides to the audio that was recorded at the European LAMS & Learning Design Conference 2010. I’ve uploaded the presentation to YouTube in two parts. Part 1 essentially introduces the Student-Owned Learning-Engagement (SOLE) model itself and Part 2 highlights the recent version of the toolkit in Excel.
Part 1: The Model
Part 2: The Toolkit
Two conference in June/July in the UK 2009
It’s been five weeks since I got back to New Zealand from a brief conference visit to the UK. Amazing how time flies. I’ve been reviewing my participation at LAMS 2009 in Oxford with the DiAL-e.
I had some fantastic conversations around attendance at both the JISC Digitisation Conference (Gloucester) http://www.jisc.ac.uk/jdcc09 & European LAMS Learning Design Conference (Milton Keynes)- http://lams2009.lamsfoundation.org/
The UK education sector has invested very heavily in recent years in the digitisation of museum, libraries and University collections for tertiary teaching and research purposes. Following completion of Phase 2 of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) Digital Content Conference 2009 discussed what was working with respect to the sustained integration of digitised content. Primarily focussed on UK universities, although other tertiary providers were represented, I would guess some 200 people attended over the two-day event. The thematic strands revolved around: Managing Content; Content Development Strategies; Content In Education; User Engagement; Looking Into The Future. Kevin Burden, a colleague from the University of Hull, and I had been invited to present the results of our Phase I assisted take-up project developing a framework of engagement activities (www.DiAL-e.net). Our 90-minute ‘workshop’, was concerned with a mechanism for getting take-up of these rich digitised resources. It’s clear that there is still a huge range of practical and logistical issues facing the broad spectrum of users. It’s hard in fact to address an audience when some are still unsure ‘why’ you would use a digital resource and others are concerned with new rich blends of multi-media in immersive environments. A real challenge. But we got some great feedback and there [was] a good write-up of the session on the JISC digitisation blog. [JISC severs connections regularly it seems]
The following week I attended the one-day 2009 European LAMS Learning Design Conference at the Open University. As a former employee, it was great to see familiar faces in the audience and to be able to identify people by name during Q&A. The conference, attended by less than 100, was a rather specialist affair. My rearranged presentation followed is a series with some really interesting perspectives including one from Diana Laurillard on a large project run by the IoE in London on online learning design tools. My personal highlight was a stimulating insight into the OU’s OpenLearn initiative (what people access and why) from Patrick McAndrew. This gave me a good deal of food for thought. I again presented the DiAL-e framework and current work to make learning designs more accessible to practitioners. The two events demonstrated a strong philosophical move towards freely available open digital content (OER – Open Educational Resources), but a clear recognition that content needed to be interpreted, evaluated and reused effectively if the challenges of the massification of higher education were to be met with quality learning experiences.
Now I just need to work out how to get traction on the academic professional development side of the equation.
Interesting meeting with the CompendiumLD team at the Open University
Had a long day 7 April getting across country from Wantage to Milton Keynes. A worthwhile trip though none the less. Met with Simon Cross, Paul Clark and Andrew Brasher from IET at the OU in the old Jenny Lee Library now all revamped and unrecognizable.
Nice to be back, wish I had had time to pop round and say hello to a few people. Grainne Conole popped in briefly.
I shared with them the development process that Kevin Burden and I had gone through to produce the DiAL-e Framework (www.dial-e.net) and some of the very recent attempts to make these designs real, reusable and malleable to front line academics. I’m really quite optimistic that the use of PowerPoint and other slideware, MovieMaker or other AV editing software and tools such as the eXe XHTML editor will make designs very accessible. What is less clear to me is how this will work with ‘learning design’ tools like LAMS and Compendium LD. LAMS creates these runtime learning engagements, and element of which might consist of a DiAL-e design but they are different.
Compendium LD to me looks like a fantastic tool for mapping curricula and looking at issues of assessment stress, workload management and the relationships between learning outcomes. One can see how a project tool like this, emerging from an institutional way of working at the OU has an application. It will be interesting to see how that translates into other institutional contexts.
I think there will be time to make all these DiAL-e designs available in a range of desktop deployment tools by the time of the European LD and LAMS conference in July and the decision now is whether to participate in the design bash.