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Today we are very pleased to announce the launch of our new Blackboard help website. This site brings together useful documentation and resources on using Blackboard at NUI Galway. It can be found at the following location: www.nuigalway.ie/blackboard Based on user feedback about our existing support site and on support calls and requests since the upgrade to Blackboard 9.1 last Summer, we have completely redesigned the website and developed new materials to help you find the answers to your most asked questions. The resources are grouped into categories, to help you navigate quickly to the required resource, and an A-Z of help topics is also available. It is also possible to use the Quick Search facility to jump straight to a topic. We hope you'll agree that the new site is tidier and easier to use. We will continue to develop resources for this area, based on common queries and requests. If you have any comments or suggestions for the new website, please get in contact . As we la...

Poster by Andrew Flaus, NUIG Last Wednesday, a group of us from CELT took the early morning train from Galway to Dublin to attend the 2012 NDLR Fest at Croke Park. A number of our NUIG Learning Innovation Projects (LIPs) from last year were included in the poster showcase , and we welcomed the opportunity to participate in an event to highlight the valuable work being done by academics across Ireland in the area of open educational resources (OER). What was good about the event? It seems that we are finally reaching a critical mass in terms of creating a culture of sharing and collaboration. This is wonderful to see, though I suspect it still exists in pockets of good practice, rather than being widespread.   We are building up experience and data in the OER movement in Ireland, so that our practice can be evidence based. It was suggested that Ireland is currently "punching above its weight". I am not sure about this, but I think we are holding our own. The OER moveme...

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...

Hi folks Looking forward to seeing a range of NUI Galway-related submissions at EdTech2012: Digital Literacies for Life , NUI Maynooth from May 31st to June 1st. The call for paper has been extended to 7 April. The EdTech organsisers are particularly keen to hear about interesting practitioner initiatives (and any lessons learned) that can be shared amongst the EdTech participants at the conference and online via http://ilta.net/ Submission guidelines and abstract links are available from here . As an incentive, all accepted abstracts and papers will be included in a new ISBN eLearning journal being launched in October 2012. Go for it! Paul

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...