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Tweet I see from today's NDLR newsletter that Minister Seán Sherlock will launch the 2012 NDLR Fest in Croke Park on 2nd May. Of course, Seán Sherlock is infamous for signing the Irish copyright amendment (also known as the Irish SOPA) into law last month, without public consultation and despite more than 80,000 signatures on an online petition ( stopsopaireland ). It will certainly be interesting to hear his views on the notion of people collaborating and sharing freely their digital learning resources. The NDLR Fest, now in its 6th year, is a nice event to attend. The community is friendly and open and there is a great buzz generated. The aim of the event, according to the NDLR conference website, is to showcase the wide array of free technology enhanced learning that has been generated across all subject disciplines in the Irish HE sector as well as celebrating the cooperative and collaborative process in which these resources have been developed, used and reused. You can si...

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...

Tweet   As part of our Learning Technologies module here at NUIG aimed at academic staff, this year I incorporated a session on QR codes, involving a QR code scavenger hunt. I intend to blog about how I did this very soon. Let's just say that we all had fun and came away with a better understanding of QR codes and what they can and  can't do. My challenge to the group was to think about how they could meaningfully use QR codes with their students to support a learning activity. I was delighted with this response from Anne Wiseman ( @annewiseman ), lecturer in Construction at GMIT. Reflections on Workshop 6 I have been thinking about QR codes and how to incorporate them into my teaching  since the workshop on 2nd December. While I can see their use while on the move or out in the field I'm not so sure of their application in the classroom. The main concern I have is that I'm not sure how many students have a smart phone and how fair it is to the students who don...

Serious Play is a hot topic. As the official LEGO SERIOUS PLAY web site states: 'Serious Plan is an innovative, experiential process designed to enhance innovation and business performance. Based on research that shows that this kind of hands-on, minds-on learning produces a deeper, more meaningful understanding of the world and its possibilities' http://www.seriousplay.com/ I was delighted to be invited along an Operations Strategy class recently to see Serious Play in action. Mary Dempsey and John Hynes facilitate a multidisciplinary mixed group comprising business and engineering under- and post-graduate student in a purpose-built laboratory in the new NUI Galway Engineering building. Students use SERIOUS PLAY 3D modelling techniques to build operational models; and from those models, together with the theory, the operations strategy is developed. The first task for the students was to model an individual 3D metaphorical representation of a McDonalds outlet within the stat...

As I mentioned in my last blog post, I've been attending the iClicker Pedagogy Webinar series over the last few weeks, and find them very interesting. On 25th January, Roger Freedman ( @RogerFreedman ) spoke about Pedagogical Best Practices. On 15th February, Angel Hoekstra spoke about Pedagogical Strategies for Teaching with Clickers in the Social Sciences. This week, on 22nd February, Jennifer Kaplan spoke about her use of clickers in large Statistics classes. It's interesting to hear about the different approaches, and also to see the common themes. In my post last week, I gave an account of the student feedback on the use of clickers in the College of Science initiative at NUIG. On the whole it was very positive, and it encouraged the College to expand the use of clickers to include 1st and 2nd year undergraduates. But, what about the staff issues? Three group meetings were arranged during the academic year, when all staff involved in the clicker project were invited to c...

I've been "attending" some of the webinars in the iClicker Pedagogy Webinar series over the last few weeks. They are organised for 1:00 EST, which translates to 6pm Irish time. If I race home from work, I can just about catch them while watching over the kids. On 25th January, Roger Freedman ( @RogerFreedman ), Physics lecturer and clicker enthusiast, talked on the topic of Clickers in the Classroom: Pedagogical Best Practices. Roger gave a lovely presentation, making a compelling case for using clickers and demonstrating that there can be a significant learning gain from integrating them into teaching. The webinar was probably more suited to people getting started with clickers, but it was very interesting to see some of our experience here in NUIG being mirrored in what Roger was saying. In September 2010, 762 clicker devices were distributed to incoming first year undergraduate Science students and Foundation Medicine students at NUIG. In addition, 40 RF receiver dev...

EdTech 2012, on the theme of Digital Literacies, will take place from May 31st to June 1st, at NUI Maynooth. This year's keynotes will include Lesley Gourlay @lesleygourlay (who is external examiner on our Learning Technologies module here at NUIG), Martin Oliver , Doug Belshaw @dajbelshaw and Martha Rotter @martharotter . The call for abstracts is now open, and submissions are welcomed, before 30 March, on the following themes: Teaching digital literacies The student experience  Learning resources - collaborative and social Creativity and learning design Online practitioner competencies  Assessing digital competencies Sustainable models of innovation Technology-supported assessment approaches More details about the conference are on the ILTA website . Check out Lesley Gourlay's keynote at the CELT/NAIRTL conference last year at NUI, Galway, on the topic of The tyranny of participation? Critically exploring notions of student engagement .