Jane Hart of the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies used Twitter to engage with the audience in her keynote on social media. She organises Twitter chats #lrnchat at 4 pm on Thursdays.
Add comment June 14th, 2010
James Clay of Gloucestershire College gave the opening keynote on “Cultural Shifts” at EdTech 2010, the annual conference of the Irish Learning Technology Association. James invited participants to use Twitter and other mobile technologies during his presentation. Indeed, participants both virtual and physically present tweeted extensively about the conference.
According to James, while society has changed, the way we think about change has not. Educational technology enthusiasts can be seen as nerds obsessed with the latest “shiny things”. New technologies are rarely either/or – television did not replace cinema, cinema did not replace theatre. We can have both books and eBooks serving different purposes in different situations. To change the culture of change educational technologists should present new technologies as choices which can have a positive impact for both the learner and teacher. Lecturers should experiment and encourage their students to experiment with new technologies. This is a natural part of learning.
In his presentation, Larry McNutt of the Institute of Technology Blanchardstown gave an update on his research into the role of Educational Technologists which he has submitted for his EdD thesis. (Previous posts on this subject can be found using the tag cloud). He has been interviewing educational technologists in Irish higher education to gain an understanding of their motivations, values and beliefs. In brief, his findings are that educational technologists are learner-centred with a belief that technology can improve learning and access to learning. Technology has the potential to become a transformative force in higher education but this has not and may never be realised. Educational technologists have a marginal role with little influence in higher education even in their area of expertise.
Photographs from the ILTA Photo Gallery
Add comment June 11th, 2010
| I used Twitter for the first time at the EdTech 2009 conference where some of the delegates were ‘tweeting’ each other during the presentations. At the time I could see benefits but also downsides of such tweeting. It has the advantage of allowing people who are not physically present to participate in the conference. Indeed, in the plenary session tweets from both inside and outside the room were projected for all delegates to see. But should a small group who are present tweet each other during presentations? Maybe more questions and discussions would be fairer on the speaker and allow non-tweeters to participate. |
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Some of the tweets were quite critical and I doubt if their authors would have uttered them out loud. Apart from issues of courtesy, tweets are persistent and can read by anyone. So tweeters be careful what you say!
Olivia Mitchell discuses these issues in thoughtful posts on How to tweet during a presentation, Should you display the live twitter stream on a large screen? and other Twitter related subjects in her Speaking about Presenting blog. (Thanks Fiona for tweeting me the link)
Thanks to the NCI photographer for permitting the use of this image.
Add comment July 29th, 2009
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EdTech 2009 kicked off with a keynote address by Niall Sclater, Director of Learning Innovation at The Open University. The distance learning provided by the OU has always helped the house-bound, prison inmates and others disadvantaged by time and space to participate in higher education. |
Niall’s talk “Does Location Matter?” showed how the free dissemination of quality-audited, course materials in programmes such as the OU’s OpenLearn and MIT’s Open Courseware have brought the resources used by their registered students to a global audience. Of course, teaching materials are not everything… physical presence on campus gives students all the social and networking benefits of university life which a virtual presence cannot really replicate, at least at present, … and without registering and paying fees the students won’t get a qualification.
Moving beyond the provision of content, Niall looked at how virtual worlds could help deliver a richer and more social experience to students. However, we start with what we know and virtual worlds can end up replicating the structures and limitations of the physical world. In the mid 1990s, Niall and colleagues developed the Clyde Virtual University. It welcomed students with images of a lecture theatre, a library, a café and an examination hall. The library contained links to resources, the café links to discussion boards and the exam hall to online assessment. This imagery recreated the boundaries of the physical university and did nothing to foster collaborative learning. Today, virtual worlds can be created with tools like Second Life and OpenSimulator but our avatars still sit in virtual lecture theatres and search for resources in the virtual library. We can even buy land and build our own home. Perhaps with time virtual worlds will dispense with these metaphors and allow new forms of interaction. Perhaps at that point new ways of teaching and learning to harness these new ways of interacting will emerge.
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About 150 delegates attended EdTech 2009 in the National College of Ireland. Others participated virtually by watching live streams of the keynotes and exchanging comments using Twitter.
Thanks to the NCI photographers for permitting the use of these images. |
1 comment May 28th, 2009
