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The metaphor of the Digital Native is still very much used in academic circles - perhaps because it is easy to understand. Many academic staff feel comfortable to describe themselves as digital dinosaurs (or immigrants), separated from their students' apparent ease with technology by a gulf so fundamental that it cannot be bridged. When pushed, they do accept that students are ill-prepared to use tech in their educational lives - unable to navigate the VLE, not aware of file types, completely fazed when faced with a zip file. But still, the Digital Natives narrative persists and is accepted as a truth, an excuse. Read Donna Lanclos on The Death of the Digital Native. At the outset of my module on Learning Technologies (#cel263 on Twitter) I ask my group of participants - all academic staff - to reflect on their comfort in using new technologies for teaching 1 , by writing a group blog post. Despite including works by Donna Lanclos and David White in the readings for the module, s...

Every year, for the last 6 or 7 years, I've started teaching my module on Learning Technologies, aimed at members of academic staff, by introducing them to twitter. We then use twitter as a tool throughout the module, sharing information and developing a community . Each year there are always one or two participants who are already twitter users, some people who have dabbled or lurk, and always a few who have never used twitter before. It can be a challenge to convince people to give twitter a try, because the value of twitter to an academic is only realised after a period of time spent engaging. Even building up a network takes time, and often it's not clear to the academic that the time invested now will pay any dividends. To that end, I was helped enormously this year by a short presentation from Jane Walsh ( @DrJaneWalsh ) who gave an engaging, often amusing and very persuasive talk on the value of twitter in her own research and teaching. Jane was a participant herself on ...

My last blog post - on the Etiquette for Tweeting at Conferences - got quite a bit of attention, and a number of comments. One person who commented is Dr Andrew Flaus ( @andrewflaus ) who sent me a long email including a discussion on etiquette for students in lectures. I invited him to contribute a blog post on the topic. Crayons My wife is an early childhood teacher so people sometimes ask her what she teaches to 3-4 year olds: “Everything”. Children who are new to the school environment start by learning etiquette of the classroom: How to wait in turn to answer, how to respect the efforts of others, how to share crayons. The recent post about twitter at conferences reminded me how fresh we and our students are to the use of technology in our lecture theatres. Whether they are “digital natives” or not, most students reflexively use smartphone technology for a variety of activities. If a student can see or hear something they have the technology to record it in their hand. They are ...

I've been using twitter for more than seven years, as many of my readers will already know. One of the most useful aspects of twitter, for me, involves tweeting at conferences - whether I am at the conference, or following a conference hashtag. As well as being part of the general conference discussion and backchannel, it also offers insight to an event beyond the traditional boundaries of location. How I use twitter at conferences If I am (physically) attending a conference, my usual style is to tweet key ideas, references, links, and photos of the speaker and his/her slides. More recently, since I'm trying to make written notes (yes - on paper) I will also tweet an image of my notes. I converse with other twitter users, who may be co-located at the conference, or not. I use my own twitter feed as a record of event, along with my notes. I often use storify to collate and share a record of all the event tweets. In particular, I use the photographs to remember useful information...

I've been very remiss in my reports from #BbTLC16 , which happened at the beginning of April. But I still have my notes from the sessions, intending to write them up. On Tuesday I sat in on the Blackboard International Product Update Webinar - which covered similar ground to the product update sessions at #BbTLC16 - so I thought I'd take the opportunity to put a few sentences together. The webinar covered three main products: Blackboard Learn , Collaborate Ultra , and mobile solutions Bb Student and Bb Instructor . Blackboard Learn Wade Weichel gave a presentation (at both #BbTLC16 and on the webinar) about the roadmap for the classic VLE. Apparently the focus is to make the learner's experience "more delightful". flickr photo by Pleuntje https://flickr.com/photos/pleuntje/3456892561 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license Blackboard are moving to a regular update schedule, with two major releases each year, and cumulative updates in-between. Q2 2016 was...

We were excited today to see that NUI Galway features in the April edition of Tech & Learning UK (pages 27 and 28). Based on the talk I gave at the Kaltura Education Summit last year, the article describes our deployment and use of the Kaltura building block in our Blackboard VLE, and how staff and students are making good use of video for learning. Thanks to Lisa Bennett of Kaltura Marketing for putting the article together. Tweet

On Saturday the 23rd of April I attended the #ictedu conference at Limerick Institute of Technology, Tipperary for the first time.  I had booked the conference before, but it had always fallen at such a stressful time in the secondary school year that by the time that Saturday rolled around, I didn't have enough steam left in me.  This year left me with a bit more freedom to attend, so naturally I signed up. A sunny April morning in Thurles The conference theme hinged upon the student as co-creator and attendees stemmed from across the sectors.  I knew many faces on a professional basis and from CESI events, so it was useful to be at a more intimate conference where there was time to catch up properly.  The event began with a keynote by Steve Wheeler  from Plymouth University.  I've seen Steve give a keynote before and followed him for a long time online , so I was excited to hear him again as I've found his work to be both insightful and practical. ...