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View of Empire State Building The last two weeks have been a bit surreal for me, and on Tuesday I spent a very pleasant day in Dakota Studio on 5th Avenue in New York City, recording a presentation for the Kaltura Education Video Summit . The summit will be a virtual event, taking place on 6th December, and you can register now for free. My presentation is on Supporting the use of video for teaching and learning (in the Blackboard LMS) and I am one of a long list of speakers , but the only one from outside the US, as far as I am aware. So, how did this strange situation come about? Being in New York, pre-recording a presentation for a virtual conference to take place next month? Well, just two weeks ago I got an email from Meytal Burstein, marketing manager with Kaltura , letting me know that my abstract had been accepted for the virtual Summit, and that I was invited to give a 30-35 minute presentation. I was very pleased, of course, and expected to deliver the presentation from my d...

I've decided to stick with my avatar. Here's why... (from Storify)   [ View the story "Hiding behind my avatar - follow up" on Storify ] Tweet

Following on from last week's webinar, I'm very pleased to see the publication of a Blackboard/Kaltura case study on how we are using Kaltura at NUI Galway . I'd particularly like to acknowledge Oliver Ryan (Physics) and Susan Folan (Acadamh) for their contributions to the case study. Read the full case study to find out how Oliver and Susan have been using Kaltura to support their students' learning. We have also been featured recently on the Blackboard blog , in a nice write up by Katie Drossos. Tweet

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...