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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...

Every year, for the last 6 or 7 years, I've started teaching my module on Learning Technologies, aimed at members of academic staff, by introducing them to twitter. We then use twitter as a tool throughout the module, sharing information and developing a community . Each year there are always one or two participants who are already twitter users, some people who have dabbled or lurk, and always a few who have never used twitter before. It can be a challenge to convince people to give twitter a try, because the value of twitter to an academic is only realised after a period of time spent engaging. Even building up a network takes time, and often it's not clear to the academic that the time invested now will pay any dividends. To that end, I was helped enormously this year by a short presentation from Jane Walsh ( @DrJaneWalsh ) who gave an engaging, often amusing and very persuasive talk on the value of twitter in her own research and teaching. Jane was a participant herself on ...

The annual CEL263 symposium for 2016 took place almost 2 weeks ago on Monday 29th February. This year, seven participants from the PG Dip Learning Technologies module gave short presentations on their project for the module. The project brief is: You are asked to identify and complete a project, based on the material covered in the module, to incorporate Learning Technologies in your teaching.You are given free scope in identifying a technology or technologies and what you want to achieve. The technology does not have to be something that we are covering during the module, and could be something specific to your discipline. The participants were asked to give a 10 minute presentation to the group (which included module participants and members of CELT) on their project, whether it's complete, in early stages, or halfway through. As in previous years, I took notes by tweeting. The following is a collection of tweets from the event, using Storify. [ View the story "CEL263 S...

The Quad by Malbe554 Just over a week ago I had a workshop for academic staff (on the PG Diploma in Academic Practice module in Learning Technologies) where we discussed the use of wikis in teaching and learning. As well as demonstrating how Blackboard wikis work and might be used to support collaborative group work, I also tried out a Wikipedia familiarisation session, in the style of Martin Poulter . This was based mostly on the talk I gave at EdTech earlier this year, on Academic Writing and Wikipedia . The purpose of the Wikipedia familiarisation session is to highlight certain academic qualities of Wikimedia articles - the quality scale, citation guidelines, peer review, authorship, collaboration. I also talked about some of Wikipedia's sister projects, hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, that can be used to enhance teaching and learning activities, such as Wikiversity , Wiktionary , Wikinews and Wikimedia Commons . To add a practical element, without a full-blown editing se...

On Friday afternoon, 20th February, we had a very enjoyable event here in CELT. During the afternoon, nine of our participants on the Learning Technologies module, as part of a PG Dip in Academic Practice, presented on their projects. All participants are members of academic staff at NUIG. The project specification is quite simple: You are asked to identify and complete a project, based on the material covered in the module, to incorporate Learning Technologies in your teaching.You are given free scope in identifying a technology or technologies and what you want to achieve.  For the symposium itself, participants had to present for about 10 minutes and were required to use Prezi, to demonstrate competency with that tool. During the afternoon, both I and the PG Dip Course Director, Simon Warren, tweeted about the event, and we were joined by some members of the class, and some external people using the hashtag too. See below an archive of the tweets from the event , gathered usi...

On a Friday afternoon, just over a week ago, I started with a new group of participants on our Learning Technologies module, CEL263, part of the PG Diploma in Academic Practice offered at CELT. During  the module, we explore various technologies for teaching and learning. For the last number of years I've introduced twitter as a tool for communication as part of the course. Every year we have a few people who user twitter, some who have twitter accounts (but little more) and some who have never explored twitter at all. To motivate, participants can earn a Twitter Novice badge, awarded for completing a twitter profile and tweeting a few things using the #cel263 hashtag. I also maintain a twitter list , which includes all the people who have been enrolled on the module in the last 5 years - currently 61 people. They are not all active, but those who keep tweeting make a great contribution to the CEL263 weekly newsletter , which is full of news and articles all year round. So, that Fr...

Today I am looking forward to the start of our popular module on Learning Technologies, CEL263. This module forms part of our PostGraduate Diploma in Academic Practice, but can also be taken by academic staff as a stand-alone module. This year is the sixth time that it will be run, and we have an eclectic line-up of participants from across the university. I know it's going to be fun. The module is run as a series of 7 workshops, each on a different topic. While we explore lots of different technologies, the focus is on how the technologies can be used in a meaningful way to support teaching and learning activities. We always have a great mix of people, from technophobes to technophiles, and we all learn from each other. Our aim is to move each person out of their comfort zone, to try something new in a supported environment. As well as the face-2-face workshops, the module is supported by a Blackboard course, with resources and activities, as well as recordings of each workshop. I...

Back in September, I welcomed the #cel263 class of 2012 to the Learning Technologies module, as run by the Learning Technologies Team at CELT. Over the next few months we examined a range of technologies in the context of teaching and learning, and each participant was encouraged to complete a project to incorporate a technology into his/her teaching. Five months after our first meeting, we again came together, this time for the annual Learning Technologies Symposium, where each participant in the course gives a 10 minute project presentation. From Storify, read about it as it happened: [ View the story "Learning Technologies Symposium #cel263 2013" on Storify ] Tweet

This afternoon I am meeting with our new intake of academic staff on the Learning Technologies module. It looks like we have a great group of people this year and I'm looking forward to working with them to explore their use of technologies in teaching and learning. This afternoon we'll be introducing ourselves and I'll run through the structure of the module - 7 workshops, each addressing a different theme. Over the next few months we hope to introduce participants to some new technologies and new ways to use those technologies to support teaching. Today we'll also take a look at some social networking. Fiona will introduce an activity based around social bookmarking, and then we're going to have some fun using twitter. We're using the hashtag #cel263, so please keep up with participants by following the tag, and join in the conversation. Tweet

Last week I spent 3 days at the Plymouth Enhanced Learning Conference . Since I came back, I find myself reflecting on the experience. At the time, it was a whirlwind of enthusiasm, inspiration and tweets . Now that I'm back at the day job, back in reality, I'd like to write down some reflections and share them. For me, PELeCON 2012 was all about making connections. Travel Connections For a start, there was the travelling. Last year, @catherinecronin and I travelled direct from Dublin to Plymouth, at a civilised time of the day. This year, unfortunately, travelling to Plymouth from Galway was a little more complicated. We had to fly to Bristol at the unfortunate hour of 6:40am from Dublin. This meant a stopover in one of the Dublin Airport Hotels, after a bus journey from Galway to Dublin. We met up with @crumphelen at Dublin airport, ready for the early morning flight. Once we arrived in Bristol, we got a bus to Bristol Mead train station, then a two hour journey by train to...

Tweet Over the last three days I have been immersed in the very special conference that is PELeCON 2012 . The theme this year was Create, Connect, Collaborate, and that is certainly what was achieved over the three days. The annual conference in Plymouth, organised by Steve Wheeler ( @timbuckteeth , @stevewheeler ), is well worth the long travel. It's also an event that can be enjoyed virtually, because the participants are so active on social media and, this year, all sessions were live-streamed. More thoughts on the conference are to follow. I presented yesterday (Friday) on our initial attempts to evaluated the longer-term impact of our Learning Technologies module (#cel263). While more in-depth analysis is needed, initial results from a survey of our alumni are very positive. In particular, we do seem to be affecting a change in culture, with the creation of technology champions within the disciplines. Here's the prezi from yesterday. I already tweeted the link yesterday mo...

Tweet It's that time of the year again when we hold our Learning Technologies symposium. This is when the participants on our Learning Technologies module (cel263) come together and present their projects, developed as part of the assessment for the PG diploma module. During our workshop on video Participants are asked to identify and complete a project, based on the material covered in the module, to incorporate Learning Technologies into their teaching. They are given free scope in identifying a technology or technologies and what they want to achieve. From the team's perspective, we aim to move each person beyond his/her comfort zone and to try something new in a supported environment. This year, six people presented their work, using technologies such as social media, podcasting, screencasting, video and google earth. Maura spoke about her plans to use social media to keep MA students engaged while they are involved in a field based module and away from the on-campus, con...