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I am very pleased to participate in this afternoon's webinar , hosted by Blackboard, on how we are using the Kaltura building block for video at NUI Galway. Here are the slides that I'm going to be presenting with: To find out more about Kaltura at NUI Galway, take a look at our Blackboard blog . Our guide for instructor users describing the Kaltura building block can be found on our Blackboard support site . Tweet

I joined twitter on 20th February 2009, three and a half years ago. At the time I was very skeptical; I had no idea of the effect twitter would have on my professional life or the wealth of contacts I would build up in my Personal Learing Network (PLN). Being a shy individual, an introvert in fact, I felt uncomfortable about using my own photograph for my profile image, so I chose an image that represented me: a cup of coffee. I do like good coffee, and sometimes tweet about it. The image certainly said something about me, as a person. I also felt somewhat protected, lurking on twitter, hiding behind my avatar, thinking I was unnoticed, anonymous in some way. The cup of coffee lasted for about 6 months, until I met @vonprond at a conference in Galway. In fact, Ferdinand was the first person I followed on twitter. He commented that I looked completely unlike my image: he'd been expecting a large cup of coffee. I realised that my perceived anonymity did not exist an...

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

This week, I've been preparing for the start of our Learning Technologies module - offered to academic staff as part of our Higher Diploma in Academic Practice at NUI Galway. I have blogged, in the past, about the wonderful work carried out by participants on the module, and we have done some initial investigations into the longer term impact of the module . Using the old twitter embed code Twitter is just one of the many tools we use as part of the module, both to support communication between participants, and for them to reflect on how they might make use of it in their own teaching practice. Since we also use Blackboard as our VLE, it's useful to bring the course twitter feed into the Blackboard course, to help link various strands together. In the past, embedding a twitter feed was not straightforward, but was certainly possible. A quick google search would bring up instructions, and allowed us to produce some nice results (see image). So, I was really delighted to see tha...

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...