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Last year I was asked by Elizabeth FitzPatrick, to assist with recording a seminar series for the School of Geography and Archaeology. The seminar series was organised to mark and celebrate the anniversary of 90 years of Archaeology at NUI Galway .  It was a lunchtime lecture series, organised by staff in the School, in collaboration with the Galway City Musuem . The venue for the talks was the Education Room at the Galway City Museum. The talks were free and open to all.  The lecture series was a huge success and drew large numbers each week. The video podcasts from these seminars are available to view at My Own Galway.  The recorded seminar series is now being used by staff and students of the School of Geography and Archaeology as a learning resource. Such was the popularity of the seminar series that the School decided to run it again this year and the final lecture will be held tomorrow, March 27th, The speaker will be Conor Newman and his lecture is titled, The S...

I wasn't sure which identity to bring with me to #cesicon , the annual conference of CESI (Computers in Education Society of Ireland). Billed as an event for those who are interested in integrating technology into their teaching and learning , it seems aimed mostly at first and second level education. Since my professional experience is embedded firmly in higher education, I wasn't sure what benefit the event would be for me. The free stickers went down well In my new found interest in all things Wikimedia, however, I wanted to support the Wikimedia Community Ireland group who were presenting in a session called Wikipedia for Education . And so, I signed up as part of An Lucht Vicí. With my new (purple) avatar on twitter, I can no longer hide easily at events, and so I brought along my "me" identity as well. The one identity that I tried to leave behind was the parent of two children in secondary school. My experience is that parents and teachers don't mix, unles...

On Friday afternoon, 20th February, we had a very enjoyable event here in CELT. During the afternoon, nine of our participants on the Learning Technologies module, as part of a PG Dip in Academic Practice, presented on their projects. All participants are members of academic staff at NUIG. The project specification is quite simple: You are asked to identify and complete a project, based on the material covered in the module, to incorporate Learning Technologies in your teaching.You are given free scope in identifying a technology or technologies and what you want to achieve.  For the symposium itself, participants had to present for about 10 minutes and were required to use Prezi, to demonstrate competency with that tool. During the afternoon, both I and the PG Dip Course Director, Simon Warren, tweeted about the event, and we were joined by some members of the class, and some external people using the hashtag too. See below an archive of the tweets from the event , gathered usi...

Yesterday, the Times Higher had an article called Wikipedia should be 'better integrated' into teaching , based largely on a study carried out in Australia, but largely ignoring a lot of the work being done by the Wikipedia Education community in the UK and, to a lesser extent, in Ireland. Last November I wrote about the EduWiki 2014 event which was exactly on this topic. While integrating Wikipedia into teaching isn't widespread, there are a number of people who are doing this, and have been for a number of years. Our first Wikimedia event at NUIG was in November 2014, when we organised an Editathon on Vicipéid (the Irish language wikipedia) and Wikipedia . This involved MA students taking Irish translation modules, with a view to providing authentic translation opportunities. The event was very successful, and you can see Oliver Moran from Wikimedia Community Ireland talking about it in the video below. video platform video management video solutions video player Follow...

Way back in July/August 2014, David Hopkins ( @hopkinsdavid ) approached a number of people involved in EdTech, myself included, about an idea he had to collaboratively write a Really Useful EdTech Book. The book is now available for download and will be published on proper paper within the next couple of days. To find out more about it, and to download your copy, visit David's blog . It's a fabulous collection of chapters from practitioners, researchers and professionals in the area of EdTech, and has a foreword by our own Catherine Cronin. There are some very positive reviews already on this site, including one from Steve Wheeler. David has done an amazing job in bringing this all together. I don't know about the other authors but I don't think I met a single deadline. His patience is beyond belief, and he still seems to be talking to me! For me, it was a great opportunity to be part of such a collaboration, which includes some people that I know quite well from twitt...

I've just signed up for this initiative - the 12 apps of Christmas - offered by the Learning, Teaching and Technology Centre at DIT, and facilitated by Frances Boylan. Based on a similar programme led by Chris Rowell at Regent's University London, this looks like a fun approach to continuous professional development and kudos to the LTTC team for implementing it. The video on the site gives an overview of what is going to happen. Starting on Monday 1st December, and continuing for 12 working days until Tuesday 16th December, an app will be considered each day. According to the video, there will be a short demonstration of how the app might be used in a teaching and learning context, and there will be an optional exercise. Like an advent calendar, there is a sense of excitement about what might be behind the next door! Already there is an active twitter stream using the hashtag #12appsDIT, and numbers signed up for the event have reached 260. No doubt there'll be many more...

This is a brief report from the Blackboard Education on Tour event which took place in Dublin last week, on Tuesday 4th November. First of all, I'd like to mention that the Irish user community really appreciated that Blackboard included Dublin in its tour, making it so much easier for us to attend. It was good to see such a great turnout from various Irish Institutions. The programme for the day included 2 tracks: Product Discussion and Professional Development. I'd have loved to get to some of the Professional Development sessions, but because I was the only one from NUIG, I decided to stay in the Product Discussion track. The event was opened by Demetra Katsifli who welcomed everybody to the event and spoke about Blackboard's development priorities for the EMEA region and some specific examples of where Irish/UK requests have influenced product design. The big one here is delegated and anonymous marking, which is starting to be addressed in the April 2014 release. She ...