First up, Dr Bex Lewis, with ‘Getting in on the Twitter Action? Using Twitter to build your professional network’.
University of Plymouth (Janice Gibbs, Neil Witt)
‘Learning Technologists’ is a TEQF – hangover… But money has gone!!
Learning Technologists: taken a long time to see past the technology/tied into ‘pedagogic problem to solve’ – here’s your solution.
Change in funding – leads to an opportunity to change the structure of the role. Hub & spoke models … Central team move from innovation by embedding.
Must take care with the wording use – if invite people to a Twitter/blogging/social media session – less likely to come than if you say come to to a session on ‘encouraging reflective learning amongst your students’.
Don’t disregard a technology because it doesn’t do 5% of what you want it to do just because you ‘have always done it this way’. Need to look at teaching design process.
Don’t tell the academics that ‘the VLE is dead’ … They are panicking about what they need to do next!! What may be ‘what everyone else does’ may not be sexy to learning technologist but to jobbing academics it’s still another thing to get hold of.
Go out and find the ‘not keen’ – don’t just go through the student unions. Convincing the skeptics makes for great. Staff & students – taken 2 years to convince of the value of learning technology.. Only now people coming to talk at programme design stage – now discuss/not imposed!
Virtual condom = IT often a barrier to others – need to use the right terminology.
Kent University – Steve Bailey/ Stephen Ogden
Moving from WebCT to Moodle (wanted open source, could keep on top of developments, rather than have changes forced upon them by companies buying each other out). Ensured that Learning Technology & ITS talking to each other.
Migration model – needed a process whether migrator would work without need for decision making processes (even if students sit all summer and do manually).
In moving data had to have intermediary stages to ensure that data was secure. Very carefully prepared the training programme to ensure that not overwhelmed … Timed to fit with what was needed at the time.
Lots of links to examples on the Crowdvine site, including simple file upload which bypasses the double file upload. In house developments – contributed back to the core community. Understand that the process is endless & ongoing.
See further resources for all papers on Crowdvine.
This blog entry was written live in session, with photos/headings added afterwards.