I’m just back from the LAK17 conference in Vancouver. While I was there, I talked to a professor who had given feedback to doctoral students on their presentations in previous years. In most cases, it was the first time they had ever had feedback on their presenting skills. Thinking back to some of the talks […]
About 116 people registered to attend the Alpine Rendezvous this year – 10 workshops, almost every country in Europe represented and several attendees from outside Europe. Report from Workshop 1: Orchestration How do teachers orchestrate events inside and outside the classroom? First model – started with a very dry mathematical model. How does the teacher […]
I must admit, I don’t remember ever hearing the word metalepsis before. And when I google its meaning, I then have to google the meaning of the words used to define it. ‘Trope’ and ‘extradiagetic’ aren’t part of my day-to-day vocabulary – though they might have been if I’d stuck with language and literature instead […]
Another set of notes from Handheld Learning finally making it into my blog. This is from a talk by James Clay. He argues that Twitter is about the community having coffee together and having a conversation. Like coffee-break chat, it’s a stream you dip into and it’s a leveller that can improve efficeincy within an […]
Matthew McFall of Nottingham University spoke at ALT-C 2009 about learning with wonder for wonderful learning. His key words for ways into wonder included mirrors, puzzles, magic, clews (the thread Perseus used to help him through the Minotaur’s labyrinth), interest, mercury and enchantment. His boxes of delight are used to collect conceptions of wonder, to […]
Liveblogging at ALT-C. Martin Bean’s title is ‘A journey in innovation’. This refers both to his journey to this point and to the journey involved in educational innovation. We at ALT-C are custodians of a small but important part of this journey. Education can no longer be regarded as a once-in-a-lifetime experience, it is a […]
Some useful references I jotted down while at the Handheld learning conference. Ollie Bray’s site – currently one of my favourite blogs. danah boyd’s blog. The Edubuzz blog – which, I notice, currently contains a link to a widget that displays your Twitter updates on your blog. Tessa Watson’s blog, which has useful information and […]
Some web references I picked up at the ‘Creating Second Lives’ conference in Bangor. Exit Reality is an application that allows you to present every web page as part of a 3D virtual world, and to move the same avatar around them. I’ve been a bit limited in my ability to try it out, as […]
More notes on the ‘Creating Second Lives’ conference in Bangor. http://nieci.bangor.ac.uk/conf/?q=en/content/abstracts Astrid Ensslin, one of the organisers of the conference, reported on a very interesting piece of research, adapting Maslow’s hierarchy of needs from the real world to the virtual world. Maslow identified that people have to prioritise their physical suvival needs and their need […]
More notes on the ‘Creating Second Lives’ conference in Bangor. Jonathan Roberts and Nigel John are doing some very impressive work on being able to touch the virtual. Their research relates to training medical students to perform operations, and developing haptic technologies to do this. They pointed out that touch is not a single sense, […]