SSPEL Newsletter: Research and Scholarly Activities

Thursday, March 23, 2006

I attended this one-day conference with 4 colleagues. What made this one attractive was that the main contributions came from practitioners, and we saw several inspiring examples of e-learning from colleagues in Yeovil and Bournemouth. There was also a rather nostalgic 1970s- type delivery from an educational technologist with the usual caricatures of face-to-face and lots of gee-whizzery and imminent breakthroughs. He announced he was 'passionate about copyright', for example, which gives you the idea. Most of the practitioners cheerfully worked in the grey areas of copyright law as you would expect.

The Yeovil person demonstrated an award-winning library site, based on the Moodle VLE software which happens to be open source (i.e. free) (see a comparison with Blackboard here). They had specialist subject pages much as we do, and had also used e-books on their site. The colleague from Bournemouth also demonstrated what can happen with enthusiastic (Media) students using their own webspace (100mb each, provided by the University on their own separate server) to assemble web portfolios; weblogs as a way to record reflection and the design process; discussion forums; podcasting (video as well as sound). They use Blackboard at Bournemouth, although with some reluctance, and the system was well displayed from a teacher's perspective.The interactive technology seems cheap and easy to use, despite technical and political worries about whose server should host the software. Movable Type was recommended for weblogs (although Blogger and Myspace also seem possible, and this Newsletter uses Thingamablog which is also free). The iTunes site itself was used to syndicate ( i.e. publish and share) student-designed podcasts.

The final presentation featured the new JORUM site, where members can both contribute and downolad electronic teaching materials. The newsletters look good too. Had there been more time, I would also have asked for opinions about MERLOT -- a huge American repository of teaching material including some excellent work on statistics.

It seems to me to work best if students and lecturers try the technology for themselves instead of waiting for some ed tech-led initiative. I would not worry personally about the technical ownership of software or the legal niceties of hosting and would cheerfully use 'free' software. The passion about copyright led to denunciations of universities owning teaching material in any strong sense, but seemed much more cautious about these matters.

Student involvement seemed to emerge as a major theme as the new technology permits students to develop their own purposes. Colleagues were aware that VLEs had much to do to keep up with pod/MP3s, mobiles, instant messaging and personal websites and blogs. As usual, what was missing was any discussion of the social context, especially the motivation behind students ignoring the gear provided by the university but enthusiastically embracing electronic technology and formats they control themselves.

I'd be happy to share my limited experiences so far.

Dave Harris