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Just in time, personalised feedback - using Twitter

New publication from the UK HEA on student - teacher partnerships for learning & teaching.

"This page features innovative uses of online collaboration tools (OCTs) for teaching and course management. You can browse the full list or use the search criteria to find the examples most relevant to you. Click on any title for a full description or use the Links to watch short videos of faculty describing their teaching strategies and see examples. For a summary of practical recommendations for effectively implementing OCTs in one's teaching, see CRLT's Occasional Paper No. 31: Teaching in the Cloud: Leveraging Online Collaboration Tools to Enhance Student Engagement."

Great piece on the new mooc movement. Worth engaging with.

"If you want to find out why people might become engaged in OER and Open educational practices (OEP) then you might like to look at the Motivations section. If you are interested in looking at the range of models and approaches adopted for OER Release then the Models page may be useful for you. If you want to know about the impact of the HEFCE funding then we have an Impact section. We have drawn together some critical factors to support OEP for those that want some tips on how to go about this themselves. We have a section that highlights tensions and challenges around OEP and the OER journeys section provides an interesting look at the wider context and how the HEFCE-funded initiatives fit into that. We also offer recommendations. If you contributed to our surveys, polls and interviews then we have a series of supplementary appendices and you can look at out methodology and evidence pages - all available from the main report page http://bit.ly/HEFCEoerReview. We have also produced a summary briefing paper."

"Massive Online Open Course for Educators, or MOOC-Eds, are professional development experiences that will engage you in new technology-enabled learning opportunities that are becoming widely used for both adults and students"

Seb Schmoller with short piece on moocs and why they are worth attention.

"Digital literacy is not word processing or watching movies on an iPhone, but instead using technology to create, code and collaborate. In today's world, that necessarily includes the Web. Building a generation of young 'webmakers' is key to job creation, international competitiveness and engagement in civil society. In this webinar, Mozilla will talk about their work in this area to define key Web literacy skills, create pathways for innovative learning experiences around them and build a network of instructors and facilitators with a shared mission."

Using paper technology to engage classes, lectures etc.

"Teamie is a cloud-based social platform that makes learning collaborative & fun, enables educators to engage & teach, and drives performance & behavior."

"If we think of OERs as we think of physical artifacts, we might focus on their design, production, storage and distribution. We could quantify their number, calculate their popularity, and track their use. However, in open, distributed, networked learning environments, the emphasis is not be on the resources but on the engagement between participants who create, use, modify, and share experiences."

The government of Switzerland has issued a statement declaring that it will not take action to alter current copyright laws allowing the downloading of music and movies for personal use. The statement is the result of a lengthy study conducted by the Swiss government into the impact of so-called "piracy" on the entertainment industry. Despite the industry's claims that downloading undermines their business, this study shows that the effect of unauthorized downloading on the industry's bottom line is negligible. One key finding of the study is that downloaders spend as much if not more to acquire content legally as those who do not download. Researchers found no change in amount of disposable income spent on music and movies, despite the fact that roughly one third of Swiss people engage in some form of downloading. The government concluded, then, that no change to the current legal structure was necessary, and urged the entertainment industry to grow and adapt with the changes in technology and in consumer habits, rather than trying to suppress progress.

Stuff on the iBooks launch

The objectives of the NZVWG initative are to:     Undertake both experimental and routine use of virtual worlds in teaching and research;     Develop engaging, interactive in-world content customised for NZ use; and     Develop new context-specific plugins enabling interaction between the virtual and real (non-virtual) worlds. 

Queen's University Belfast have a website which is provided for students to show evidence of learning and skills learnt from extra-curricular activities and achievements. "Many activities you participate in - whether you serve as a Course Rep or have a part-time job or are engaged in voluntary work - may be allowing you to acquire important employability skills such as teamwork, leadership, communication and commercial awareness.  The Degree Plus Award allows these skills and this experience to be formally recognised" The Award is awarded by the University and is a 'value added' item which students can get in addition to their formal qualification. 

This duplicates quite a lot of the functionality of Panopto, but the student Moodle video assignment (starts @3:25) looks nice. Kaltura is fundamentally an open source streaming server.

How to disengage students before they are even engaged - and this is just in the library. Students taught arcane searching skills that don't even work in the library search engine.

Keep videos short, include a person.

Excellent article on a different approach to getting teachers engaged with elearning (and any pedagogical innovation). I think we've already bed this overall idea i.e. that we need teachers to participate in the design of their courses but this provides structure around it and also theoretical underpinning.