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The metaphor of the Digital Native is still very much used in academic circles - perhaps because it is easy to understand. Many academic staff feel comfortable to describe themselves as digital dinosaurs (or immigrants), separated from their students' apparent ease with technology by a gulf so fundamental that it cannot be bridged. When pushed, they do accept that students are ill-prepared to use tech in their educational lives - unable to navigate the VLE, not aware of file types, completely fazed when faced with a zip file. But still, the Digital Natives narrative persists and is accepted as a truth, an excuse. Read Donna Lanclos on The Death of the Digital Native. At the outset of my module on Learning Technologies (#cel263 on Twitter) I ask my group of participants - all academic staff - to reflect on their comfort in using new technologies for teaching 1 , by writing a group blog post. Despite including works by Donna Lanclos and David White in the readings for the module, s...

My last blog post - on the Etiquette for Tweeting at Conferences - got quite a bit of attention, and a number of comments. One person who commented is Dr Andrew Flaus ( @andrewflaus ) who sent me a long email including a discussion on etiquette for students in lectures. I invited him to contribute a blog post on the topic. Crayons My wife is an early childhood teacher so people sometimes ask her what she teaches to 3-4 year olds: “Everything”. Children who are new to the school environment start by learning etiquette of the classroom: How to wait in turn to answer, how to respect the efforts of others, how to share crayons. The recent post about twitter at conferences reminded me how fresh we and our students are to the use of technology in our lecture theatres. Whether they are “digital natives” or not, most students reflexively use smartphone technology for a variety of activities. If a student can see or hear something they have the technology to record it in their hand. They are ...

In December, a PhD student, Sally McHugh, called into my office to tell me that she had successfully received Explore funding for a project called Campus Create , with Dr. Tony Hall in Education. The idea was to promote and encourage creativity in all its forms, including within digital media. Sally and I had talked before about Digital Storytelling DS106 from the University of Mary Washington, and the work of Jim Groom , Alan Levine and colleagues. They had been working for many years, encouraging people to make art, to create, share and remix, in an open way, cognisant of copyright and domain ownership. Our heroes. http://campuscreate.eu / Before Christmas, Tony, Sally and I met to talk about how we might explore and enact these ideas at NUI Galway within the Campus Create project. We came up with the notion of having twelve weeks of themes, to correspond to the first twelve weeks of semester 2, and to post daily create challenges, similar to projects like the Daily Create , the Da...

CELT RESEARCH SEMINAR:  Supporting students in developing their digital research skills Thursday, July 16th, 11am – 12noon, AM 207    (Arts Millennium Bldg.)  Presented by visiting scholar Caroline Kuhn - Institute for Education, Bath Spa Univ .    How can universities encourage and support students in developing their digital research skills — in particular through the design and implementation of their own Personal Learning Environments (PLEs)? Caroline Kuhn will share research from her current PhD study in this area and looks forward to engaging in discussion with participants.  Further information: Caroline Kuhn research blog    Twitter: @carolak  Any questions? Please contact Catherine Cronin catherine.cronin@nuigalway.ie On the afternoon of July 16th, you might also like to join the #GREAT15 Conference , also being held at NUI Galway.  Update (27 July) We are delighted that Caroline's seminar was recorded and c...

We've finally gotten around to uploading Doug Belshaw's keynote from last month's symposium...   Tweet

Last Friday (19th June) was our CELT Symposium on the topic Getting Real about Virtual Learning . It was a fantastic day (despite the weather) with about 200 participants and plenty of learning. Twitter at #celt15 Thanks to the twitter team ( @gramcgrath , @marloft , @allaboardHE , @catherinecronin , @rosenidhubhda , @TELtales ) and all the lovely tweeps at the conference, there were almost 1200 #celt15 tweets on Friday alone, and we trended in Ireland for most of the day! The quality of the backchannel was quite amazing. I've created a semi-structured archive of all the comments and pictures using storify, which gives a sense of the day. A beautiful TAGSExplorer visualisation of all the tweets for the hashtag was created by Martin Hawsey's Twitter Archiving Google Sheet (TAGS). From here you can find the top tweeter from the conference ( @iainmacl ) and the top conversationalists ( @worried_teacher and @sharonlflynn ). TAGS also produces a searchable archive of the confere...

Last month CELT hosted a workshop, "Marvellous Mapping: Reflecting on online identities and practices using Visitors and Residents Mapping". The workshop facilitators, David White and Donna Lanclos, took the time while they were here to sit down with Catherine Cronin for a short chat and here it is...

I wasn't sure which identity to bring with me to #cesicon , the annual conference of CESI (Computers in Education Society of Ireland). Billed as an event for those who are interested in integrating technology into their teaching and learning , it seems aimed mostly at first and second level education. Since my professional experience is embedded firmly in higher education, I wasn't sure what benefit the event would be for me. The free stickers went down well In my new found interest in all things Wikimedia, however, I wanted to support the Wikimedia Community Ireland group who were presenting in a session called Wikipedia for Education . And so, I signed up as part of An Lucht Vicí. With my new (purple) avatar on twitter, I can no longer hide easily at events, and so I brought along my "me" identity as well. The one identity that I tried to leave behind was the parent of two children in secondary school. My experience is that parents and teachers don't mix, unles...

St Leonard's Hall The EduWiki 2014 event was held on Friday 31st October in the stunning St Leonard's Hall at the University of Edinburgh. Ever since I heard Toni Sant (Education Organiser with wikimedia UK) speak at the International Integrity and Plagiarism Conference ( see previous post ), which led me to join the Wikimedia Ireland Community working group, I have been fascinated at the potential of using Wikipedia (and other Wikimedia projects) to support student development in higher education. So, I was thrilled to be at the one day event in Edinburgh to find out more about the Wikimedia UK education projects. This was always going to be a different crowd from my usual conference network, and there wasn't much tweeting in advance of the event, so I was a little nervous when I turned up at the social event on the evening before the conference. I needn't have worried, the small group that had gathered were as welcoming as could be, including a nacho-eating dog, an...

The last couple of weeks have been busy, between the EdTech 2012 conference organised by ILTA, our own CELT conference, and then a presentation to the WRSLAI event last week. I haven't had time to think! So, before my memories fade completely, I'll write a couple of blog posts about all these events. I'm starting with the keynote speakers at EdTech 2012, compiled from my notes and tweets, using storify. [<a href="http://storify.com/sharonlflynn/edtech-2012" target="_blank">View the story "Keynotes at EdTech 2012" on Storify</a>] Tweet