Swansea Academy of Learning and Teaching

Students who are aware that their work will be checked by plagiarism-detection software are just as likely to cheat as those who are not, a study suggests.

Really useful set of resources from Herts on L&T issues. Lots of pointers here for further development of SALT pages.

Some alternatives to PowerPoint for presentations (and not just Prezi either)...

Last Friday David White (University of Oxford) and Dr. Lynn Silipigni Connaway (OCLC) presented some of the findings from their JISC-funded work on Digital Visitors and Residents. Slides, audio and a recording of the Blackboard Collaborate session can be found below:

This paper investigates the similarities and differences between two important ideas in information processing and knowledge utilisation. Those ideas are [critical thinking] and [information literacy]. The two phrases are shown in brackets to indicate that the two words involved in each idea are not arbitrarily combined but have been coupled by authors to represent a single entity or a focus for development of concepts describing the characteristics involved. By exploring terms related to this couplet from the same sentence, the meaning of each of the central ideas can be expanded. The education, library science, and health science literature were used in this study, which analysed 8745 articles dealing with [critical thinking] and 8201 reports dealing with [information literacy] included in either ERIC or PubMed from 2000-2009.

Interesting article on learning analytics (thanks to Emlyn Phillips for the heads-up on this one).

Thought provoking blog post from David White. Some interesting ideas that have come out of interviews related to his Digital Residents and Natives and Open Edducational Resources research, viz the "emergency collaboration" 24 hours from coursework submission (I'm sure that goes on a lot in Swansea) and Google> Wikipedia> References which is a popular technique with students but is kept hidden because of the overt discouragement of academics for Google and Wikipedia as valid academic research tools. I've personally never had a problem with either G or W in my own learning. Am I prejudiced against them in my students' learning?

This study investigated the impact of Open Educational Resources (OER) use on teaching and learning. To achieve this, the project team reviewed current research in the area; surveyed, interviewed and ran workshops with suitable participants to collect dat

"This study investigated the impact of Open Educational Resources (OER) use on teaching and learning. To achieve this, the project team reviewed current research in the area; surveyed, interviewed and ran workshops with suitable participants to collect data; and produced an accessible report on the study findings. The report considered the use of OER from both an individual and institutional perspective looking at the benefits OER can offer each and identifying the pedagogic, attitudinal, logistical and strategic factors conducive to uptake and sustained use of OER, as well as the associated issues and challenges." Video, "accessible" report and full report available. Cited on Paul's e-Learning Resources https://sites.google.com/site/technologyenhancedlearning/home/the-resources/open-educational-resources-oer

A Survey of Undergraduate Technology Use and Attitudes. Funded by Evaluation of Learners' Experiences of e‐learning Special Interest Group (ELESIG ) Small Grant

Interesting discussion on the Higher Education Teaching and Learning (HETL) group on LinkedIn (itself an interesting resource). You may need to be a LinkedIn member and join the HETL group to access the discussion.

Free Online webinar on Open Educational Resources

This site contains guidance material aimed primarily at students, teachers or doctors who wish to use a patient recording or patient data for learning and teaching. It will also be of interest and use to other clinical and healthcare workers as well as to university staff where patient recordings are made available for learning and teaching. Learn about the ethical principles that underpin the guidelines.

As part of our greening scientific computing and videoconferencing projects, we are producing short (2pp) case studies on best practice in universities, colleges and research organisations (see below for list, and page bottom for downloads). The 2008-09 SusteIT project also produced over 20 case studies of greenIT in universities and colleges - see below for a master list and click here for actual cases.

"This website provides an introduction to digital collections designed for education. They are mainly aimed at university students, researchers and librarians but many of the online archives are open to anyone. The collections cover areas such as history, social sciences, or science and engineering and include, for example, journals, newspapers and images."