We are launching a number of Continuing Professional Development courses, this Autumn including 2 new courses.
24th September
Introduction to Electronics
Patient-Based Evidence (NEW)
1st October
Perl for Bioinformatics
22nd October
Key Concepts in Health Care for People Experiencing Homelessness
5th November
Effective Online Tutoring (NEW)
As I collected my daughter from nursery the other day I was struck by how they were using digital photography and the associated easy editing and printing to decorate the classroom.
When I was at school the walls were decorated with our artwork and it was part of what made my classroom feel like a place where I wanted to be. Now my daughter’s nursery not only decorate the walls with the outputs of what they have been doing, but pictures of them doing it. It is no longer only the artwork you can see on the walls, but the class dancing to the drummers who were at the carnival, visiting the theatre – or just pictures of all the kids eating their favorite food.
These images are just colour print outs, the quality is pretty bad, but it is good enough, you can see what is happening and that it is her and her friends doing it. This is their nursery full of the things they have been doing.
We work in adult distance learning so in the end everything we do has to be online (and not pitched at a 3 year old) but I think there are opportunities with these tools in terms of social presence and belonging that we could be exploring.
This autumn we are offering more short courses than ever before, including 7 new courses
10th September
Brontës (NEW)
Learning to Look at the Visual Arts
New Economic Powers
Study Skills
12th September
Jane Austen
Learning to Look at Western Architecture
Philosophy Gym
Political Philosophy
17th September
Exploring Roman Britain
Islamic Art and Architecture (NEW)
Victorian Fiction: an Introduction (NEW)
19th September
Contemporary British Fiction; an Introduction (NEW)
Critical Reading
Durer to Bruegel: Northern Renaissance Art c.1480-1580
Learning to look at Modern Art (NEW)
Philosophy of Religion
Reality, being and existence: An introduction to metaphysics
24th September
Philosophy of Mind
Theory of Knowledge (NEW)
Visual Arts of India
26th September
Playing God: an introduction to Bioethics (NEW)
For more information on these courses or to enrol on a course visit Online courses at Oxford University’s Department of Continuing Education, email the online courses office or telephone +44 (0)1865 280974.
TALL and colleagues were recently runners up in two categories of Oxford’s IT in Teaching and Learning Awards 2007.
Administration, support services or research
Runner-up
Department for Continuing Education website
Matt Street, David Balch, Sean Faughnan, Michael Brooks
http://www.conted.ox.ac.uk
Special award for best Teaching and Learning project created with assistance
Runner-up
TALL – Good practice in citation
This course is an introduction to the issues surrounding plagiarism.
http://www.tall.ox.ac.uk/plagiarism
For further information on the awards go to
http://www.ict.ox.ac.uk/oxford/groups/oxtalent/itawards/winners2007.html
A couple of weeks ago I went to a very interesting meeting in London organised by James Dalziel of LAMS fame. Bringing together people working on Pedagogic Planners from all over the world it included Phoebe, the project we’re working on, the London Planner, Compendium at the OU, LAMS Lite, Remath, among others.
What was fascinating was both how different the planners and the problems that they were trying to solve were, but also how much common ground there was.
We have been working on the Phoebe pedagogic planner for 18 months now and in that time it feels like the amount of people looking at this space has grown immeasurably. There is no question that there is something very attractive about the idea of a tool that can help people design effective learning experiences (whether supported by technology or not) but what this should be is still the million dollar question.
I am more convinced than ever before that there is never going to be one tool that solves everybody’s problems – if only because we already know that everybody does not want the same thing from a tool operating in this space, and that people will only use a tool that does what THEY want it to do. However as existing projects address different parts of this continuum what is clear is that we need to find a common language to allow these tools to join up. Perhaps this is IMS LD but I think at the moment it is far from clear that this really addresses the issues at hand.
The BBC has reported on the University proctors using Facebook to track down students involved in “unruly post-exam pranks” as TALL is actually located in one of the Universities two main exam buildings we have more experience than most in what these involve….However for isthmus I think it is a telling example of why students may not want their online social spaces used for learning.
Here’s an interesting article on PLEs from Scott Wilson. As you would expect from someone who was a core member of the CETIS team that looked into PLEs for JISC, and the person who originated the ubiquitous future VLE, it contains a lot of the ideas that have informed our thinking on Isthmus. However the comment that intrigued me, which I have not seen so explicitly elsewhere was
“On a more basic level, the use of commercial third-party services has risks, such as a change in charging, or even services disappearing completely, and so there could be a role for universities in offering a free secure archiving service to that students would never lose access to things they have published. It is also increasingly on the agenda of universities to make access to basic administrative processes and information available through multiple channels and devices, such as using mobile phones, iPod, and RSS feeds.”
These are all things we are looking into for Isthmus – we’re drafting the survey at the moment so it will be interesting to see what our (admittedly non-standard) students make of these sorts of ideas.
Another post that touches on the ways we classify PLEs. Once the research we are doing into isthmus comes in I think it will be worth revisiting these and deciding whether the solution we decide to implement makes sense by these metrics.
I have just read a very interesting post by Josie Fraser (always a good read) who has a great diagram which points up some of the implicit assumptions people make about PLEs without realising they are talking about completely different things. I think we need to clarify where Isthmus fits in this grid …as we may find some of our assumptions are not the same.
Of course not that Isthmus is necessarily trying to build a PLE…
In the last fortnight I have been to two events focusing on mobile technologies, one here at the department run by the Forum Oxford people and the Seriously Mobile Summit in London (cue being blown away by Canary Wharf -we’re not in Oxford any more Toto). The former was by telecoms people for telecoms people and after a day in a room with them even someone who has only just mastered predictive text starts thinking the future is mobile phones….yes they will be doing EVERYTHING for us in 10 years time…but that is a whole other story.
What does this all mean for learning? The second event focused on this by way of social software and immersive worlds. What is clear is that getting content on mobile devices is getting easier an easier – to the point where this will be just another way students assume they can access your stuff in a few years time – but will they want to?
Going back the telecoms guys, who stress that the point about mobiles is that they are always with you…what aspects of your learning do you want all the time?
At the moment, I would think it will be forums blogs wikis…the places where the conversation is taking place, much more than the “content” of our courses, but I guess the best way to find out is to ask our students, something we’ll be doing as part of the Isthmus project over the next few months.