Atelier-D

25 June 2009 Engaging and Responding to Learners, Maple House, Birmingham

Steve Garner attended this one-day JISC event that brought together representatives from the curriculum design strand and the curriculum delivery strand. It was facilitated by Helen Beetham and Rhona Sharp of the Learner Experiences of e-Learning Suport and Synthesis team.

 

The workshop aimed to assist projects to gather information from learners about their experiences, the technologies and their learning. Through a number of short participatory sessions attendees were exposed to methods for evidencing and analysing the learner experience.  In the parallel sessions SG attended ‘Developing digital literacies’ and ‘The role of peers in the learner experience’.

 

Attendees were asked to complete a planning chart of anticipated activities that picked up on the issues discussed in this workshop.

 

CABLE and Carpe Diem project: Are academics brave enough when they design new courses?

On the 28th of April, I (Theo) attended a JISC funded workshop about the work of two Pathfinder projects: the CABLE project (Change Academy for Blended Learning Enhancement) and the Carpe Diem project.

My understanding is that the core objective of these projects is to support educational institutions so as to effectively design, develop and deliver their teaching curriculum. The workshop made me realize something that is a bit broader in its scope and concerns the design and delivery of new ways of learning. Much of the discussion was centred on the realization that universities are quite conservative in their teaching approach. This doesn’t mean that universities are conservative in the content of their courses, but mainly in the learning experience they are offering and probably in their institutional ‘design’ process that leads to the development of such learning environments.

Nevertheless, I also have to say that I was surprised by the large extent to which these projects are dealing with issues of design, design methods or design thinking. Both projects seemed to be concerned with the development of a design methodology or some sort of ‘designerly way of thinking’ for developing learning environments. Although not always explicitly said, their concern was to identify methods for supporting collaboration and conflict resolution between different stakeholders (academic staff, administrators and students), supporting the identification of a vision or problem, supporting divergent/convergent thinking, prototyping and reflective thinking, just to mention some of the reoccurring themes. The workshop had a ‘hands-on’ approach which at some points created a feel of a design studio workshop.

I include the suggested readings from this workshop:

Anderson I, Bullen P, Alltree J. Thornton H (2008) CABLE: An approach to embedding blended learning in the curricula and across the institution Reflecting Education, 4(1)pp 30-41. Http://reflectingeducation.net

ARMELLINI, A. and JONES, S. (2008) Carpe Diem: seizing each day to foster change in e-learning design. Reflecting Education, Vol 4 (1) (pp. 17-29). Available at: http://tinyurl.com/58q2lj, last accessed 6th February 2009.

SALMON, G.; JONES, S. and ARMELLINI, A. (2008) Building institutional capability in e-learning design. ALT-J, Research in Learning Technology, Vol 16 (2) (pp. 95-109).

Immersive Education Initiative

I think that this is an interesting initiative about technology enabled distance education. It is based on Wonderland - a Java and open source toolkit for creating collaborative 3D virtual worlds (check this video). Maybe we should join as members?

‘The Immersive Education Initiative is an international collaboration of universities, colleges, research institutes, consortia and companies that are working together to define and develop open standards, best practices, platforms, and communities of support for virtual reality and game-based learning and training systems. Initiative members have early access to the Education Grid, where they can conduct classes and meetings within a growing collection of virtual worlds. Initiative members can also use the Education Grid to build custom virtual learning worlds, simulations, and learning games.

Immersive Education and the Media Grid were recently recognized with a prestigious national award by Computerworld for being “innovative, promising technologies which hold the potential to significantly affect society in the near future”.

The Immersive Education Initiative is a merit-based, not-for-profit initiative of the Media Grid international standards group. Membership is free (no fee) and open to the public but restricted to organizations and individuals that have experience using virtual worlds, simulations, or game-based learning technologies.’