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Congratulations to our team member, Labhaoise Ní Dhonnchadha, and her collaborators Pilar, Laura and Dorothy, on the publication of this collection of contributions on Translation, Technology and Autonomy in Language Teaching and Learning .The collection is based on a very successful conference that took place at NUI Galway in December 2010. From the book synopsis: This volume brings together contributions from academics, language teachers and practitioners from across Europe and beyond to discuss questions of autonomy and technology in the area of language learning and translation. The book focuses on English, French, Italian, Irish and Spanish language acquisition, but many of the essays also develop an interlinguistic perspective from a plurilingual point of view. The book opens with key contributions from a number of leading scholars: Dr Daniel Cassany on critical literacies, Professor Henrik Gottlieb on translation into 'minor' languages, and Professor David Little on auto...

Using video in your teaching can be a great way to get a message across and to enhance student engagement. There are some great videos available on YouTube , iTunesU or TED Talks , for example, that can be used to illustrate a concept or give additional information. In the last year, we've seen an increase in the number of academic staff who are creating their own videos for use in teaching. See, for example, the NUI Galway Microbiology channel on YouTube, Derek Molloy 's (DCU) award-winning channel on Digital Electronics, or setting up the oscilloscope in a Physics lab. Certainly, recording something on my mobile phone and uploading it to YouTube is surprisingly easy. But how easy is it to create something a little bit more professional and useful for teaching purposes? With these questions in mind, I went along to Irene McCormick's presentation at the EdTech conference in Maynooth in May. Irene is from IT Carlow and she is responsible for this NDLR-funded video, illust...

The International Turnitin User Group meeting took place on Monday 16th July at the Sage in Gateshead, just before the start of the 5th International Plagiarism Conference. This was a great opportunity to meet with Turnitin representatives as well as other Turnitin users, to compare experiences and find out about the product roadmap. After a welcome from Will Murray (VP International), Christian Storm (CTO) gave an update on recent developments and current research in the Turnitin suite. It's clear that there has been a shift in focus from plagiarism detection towards supporting assessment and feedback, with a view to improving student outcomes. Turnitin aims to be the complete solution for improving student writing and the best-in-class solution for grading . It seems that the company has really been listening to its customers, and my impression is that future directions are very positive and exciting. Recent developments include voice based grading (which I haven't played wi...

This afternoon I am UK-bound again, this time to Newcastle, for the 5th International Plagiarism Conference . Having been to two previous events, I'm looking forward to catching up with some old friends and meeting some new ones. I will miss Jo Badge @jobadge , who has moved on to new challenges. Although not strictly learning technologies , I will post my thoughts on the conference, and will certainly be tweeting from the event - the hashtag is #5ipc. Day 1, Monday, incorporates the Turnitin User Group meeting, and I'm looking forward to hearing about the roadmap for this product. So, do follow me on twitter for updates. And if you are going to be at the conference, let me know so that we can meet up.   Tweet

Yesterday I attended the inaugural event of the Centre for Learning Innovation, a new organisation funded by Enterprise Ireland and the IDA, to bring together industry and research in the area of technologies for learning. The event was held at Croke Park, where the pitch was busy being prepared for the farewell Westlife concerts tonight and tomorrow. (That's not an omen - I hope.) The theme of the event was Learning for Growth, and the purpose was to launch the Centre for Learning Innovation, an organisation which has been in gestation for some years, and which only arrived at its name the previous evening. Yesterday it was announced that the government is to invest €6m in the Centre over the next 6 years. The first keynote speaker, Donald Taylor ( @DonaldHTaylor ), chair of the Learning and Performance Institute, spoke about the many changes in Learning Technology in the last 13 years. He identified 3 major changes in that time, leading to new opportunities for the Centre: Le...

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

Using Martin Hawksey's twitter archiving google spreadsheet , we can now reveal the top tweeters at the 10th Galway Symposium: The Written Word - writing, publishing and communication in higher education . The conversation is still continuing, using the #celt12 hashtag . So far, we have archived more than 1000 tweets from the event. To see a visual representation of the archive, you can visit the Interactive Archive of #celt12 tweets (static image below). Click on any name to get a list of that person's tweets and interactions. A full archive of tweets , though it's not particularly pretty, is also available.   Tweet