Dr Rónán O’Beirne’s Weblog

Education; Technology; Digital Transformation; Information & Knowledge Management; Librarianship; Digital Leadership

I attended the JISC RSC YH event at Doncaster entitled “e-Learning in HE: Strategy and Planning” on Wednesday. The day opened with a thought-provoking presentation from Seb Schmoller from The Association for Learning Technology; he spoke mainly about technology and its impact on learning giving a wide range of examples, his website is here.

Both the workshop presentations I attended were excellent – Phil Badger (University of Huddersfield) talked about an interactive learning resource “The Ethics Game” used in various settings and developed in MS Powerpoint. I was surprised at the amount of interactivity Phil had built into the game. It was based on the philosophy of ethics and presented the learner with ethical choices the consequences of which formed a learning point.

A stimulating presentation from Dr. Kelly Smith, (University of Huddersfield) “Using Web 2.0 technologies to promote student and graduate business start-up – enhancing employability” forced me to consider the world of the Twitter, something I had been vaguely avoiding for a while. I was pleasantly surprised at the “serious” use to which Kelly had put her seemingly well advanced twittering skills and there was no disputing the success she had. It did strike me that the instantaneous and immediacy of the medium , she gave an example of the plane landing on the Hudson being common knowledge in the twitter world within minutes, that twitter was a kind of 21^st Century H.G Wells World Brain albeit with a rather short attention span and perhaps no medium or long-term memory.

My own workshop presentation “Moodle – a virtual research environment” seemed very well received and raised some interesting questions. One was about the use by learners of their own technology devices to engage with learning. The other question was concerned with motivating researchers to use the VRE while still remaining independent in their research endeavour. The conclusion was that the minor administrative overhead to researchers should be paid back by the obvious benefits of the VRE.