Tag Archives: conference

elearning, events, teaching

Learning from the “E-learning and Digital Cultures” course

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.

events

ALT-Conference, Edinburgh

The ALT-C (Association for Learning Technology Conference) starts for me tomorrow. I’m really looking forward to it – I wasn’t very well in Manchester last year, so couldn’t do as much networking as I would have wanted to.

Already this year I’ve had a chance to meet some people whose work and writing I admire – at the Curverider conference at the University of Edinburgh today.

My ALT-C presentation is tomorrow afternoon. It’s called “Next Generation Learners: do they speak the language? Non-traditional students and their engagement with e-portfolios”, and it was written with my colleagues Hamish Macleod and John Davis, with some very valuable advice from Steve Farrier at the University of Northumbria. I’ll be arguing a few things: that non-traditional, part-time, mature students constitute an important next generation of learners in Higher Education; that the notion of ‘digital immigrants’ often applied to these learners can obscure both a range of attitudes to technology and legitimate dissent and criticism of our ICT implementations; and that embracing the level of flexibilty that the diversity of this group of students requires may force us into taking more radical positions than our institutions can easily accommodate.

I hope I’ll be able to make my case adequately in the short time available, but in any case a longer paper is due to be written, so I’m going to try to be reasonably relaxed and just enjoy the experience.

events

ideas cyberspace education 3 symposium

ideas. cyberspace. education 3: ‘digital difference’
21-23 March 2007 Ross Priory, Loch Lomond, Scotland.
Keynote Speaker: Professor Gunter Kress, Institute of Education,
University of London.
_____________________________________________________________________

The third ICE symposium is being held on the shores of Loch Lomond in
Scotland. ICE3 – the last of the series –
will address the question of ‘digital difference’, and the call for
abstracts is now open.

The�symposium will give lecturers, developers, researchers and theorists an
opportunity to discuss the culture, theory and politics of learning and
teaching in digital spaces.Details of the symposium, including more about its key themes, are
available from the website: http://www.education.ed.ac.uk/ice3

As in previous years, the symposium will be for a maximum of 40 people
to keep the event intimate and allow a high degree of interchange and
discussion. Papers will be presented in a single stream to allow a
shared experience of the event. The deadline for extended abstracts of
1000 words is the end of November 2006.

ICE3 is jointly organised by the University of Strathclyde and the
University of Edinburgh.