Swansea Academy of Learning and Teaching

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.

iSocrates is an educational software program that allows instructors to quickly and easily create digital evaluation rubrics for virtually any assignment.iSocrates allows instructors to generate criteria pull-down menus featuring their most commonly used feedback comments, and to evaluate student performance from both a qualitative and quantitative perspective. iSocrates can also compute a performance score based on instructor-assigned weights and evaluations, and generate printouts of the filled out rubrics to hand back to students.

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.

PeerWise supports students in the creation, sharing, evaluation and discussion of assessment questions. From Twitter: "@busynessgirl Have you seen Peerwise? http://peerwise.cs.auckland.ac.nz/ #socrait (via @polarisdotca)"

Presented during the Activities week of JISC Enhancing e-Learning Conference

Whether or not you take a constructivist view of education, feedback on performance is inevitably seen as a crucial component of the process. However, experience shows that students (and academic staff) often struggle with feedback, which all too often fails to translate into feed-forward actions leading to educational gains. Problems get worse as student cohort sizes increase. By building on the well-established principle of separating marks from feedback and by using a social network approach to amplify peer discussion of assessed tasks, this paper describes an efficient system for interactive student feedback. Although the majority of students remain passive recipients in this system, they are still exposed to deeper reflection on assessed tasks than in traditional one-to-one feedback processes.

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

Some ideas for running the bencmarking projects?

zWebquest is a web-based software for creating WebQuests in a short time. When you use zWebquest, you will not need any of writing HTML code or using any web editor software

Secondbrain allows you to manage all your social media, bookmarks and files in one place. Organize everything in your library, follow your friends' updates and discover good content.

This 2008/9 Wikipedia DVD Selection is a free, hand-checked, non-commercial selection from Wikipedia, targeted around the UK National Curriculum and useful for much of the English speaking world. It has about 5500 articles (as much as can be fitted on a D

City University are running a one-day seminar on the topic of "Learn, Teach and Play in 3D Virtual Worlds" and are inviting you to join us in this exciting event! They welcome teachers, students, educational technologists, researchers, and anyone interest

eReturn - using ePortfolios to support women returners to employment

Singularity University aims to assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity's grand challenges.

A summary from the UNESCO discussion on access to open educational resources (more will be added to the wiki page)

Kindle's Revolutionary Wireless Delivery and Massive Selection of Content -- Now in a New Slimmer Design With Longer Battery Life, Faster Page Turns, Over 7X More Storage, Crisper Images and New Read-to-Me Feature

OpenSky is a free service provided by Gizmo5 which allows any mobile phone, web browser or IP aware phone network (SIP, asterisk, etc) to communicate with Skype users. OpenSky supports sending text messages and voice calls.

If you are interested in new developments in multimedia social technologies, social networking, online communities, virtual worlds and new skills, and want to know more about how you and your staff can benefit from these technologies right now, then the N

Developing Critically Thoughtful, Media-Rich Lessons in Science: Process and Product

Lizzer is a Firefox bookmarklet that allows you to search for pictures, videos, documents, and websites without having to leave your blog editor. Once the Lizzer bookmarklet is installed simply click on it anytime you need to find additional media to add