February 8th, 2010
No comments »
E-learning and Digital Cultures was a 12-week course taught by me and Siân Bayne as part of the MSc in E-learning programme. It was innovative for the programme because of the nature of its engagement with digital cultures: it was open-access and disaggregated (you can see for yourself by browsing the web site), and made use of blogs, lifestreaming, twitter and a range of social and user-generated tools from across the web.
We’ll be presenting a paper at the Academic Identities for the 21st Century conference at Strathclyde University in June called “Posthuman academic identities in digital environments”, drawing on Siân’s recent work on uncanny digital pedagogies to talk about some of what we’ve learned from this course: how to work productively with volatility, disorientation, and strangeness.
December 7th, 2009
1 comment »
For this year’s Edublog Awards, I want to nominate the University of Edinburgh’s MSc in E-learning virtual graduation on 26 November 2009. Four of the students from the programme attended a graduation ceremony in Second Life, while two graduated in the University’s face to face ceremony in McEwan Hall. It was an extremely moving and amazing experience, especially when the principal asked those in McEwan Hall to give a round of applause for the virtual attendees. The whole concept and event (masterminded by my colleague Fiona Littleton) really deserves an Edublog award, I think!
Nomination for best educational use of a virtual world: Virtual Graduation at the University of Edinburgh
Update: Virtual Graduation won!! More information here: https://www.wiki.ed.ac.uk/display/VueWiki/Virtual+Graduation
November 3rd, 2009
No comments »
I wrote a review of Martin Hand’s book “Making Digital Cultures” for the Resource Centre for Cyberculture Studies, and this was published (with the author’s response) this month:
http://rccs.usfca.edu/bookinfo.asp?BookID=444&ReviewID=643
I really liked this book, and in fact Chapter 1 is now a core reading on the “E-learning and Digital Cultures” course at the University of Edinburgh.
