Fortnightly Mailing

Becta's Emerging Technologies web site, and a cross-site search

Becta currently runs a big Emerging Technologies web site. It has valuable contents but I found it frustratingly organised. (I vaguely remember being consulted a few years ago - with wire-frames - by a company that had won the contract for this service, or the web site on which the service runs.) I found the site quite difficult to navigate, with unhelpfully short abstracts, and peculiar policies on things like the dating of items, and their authorship. I n the continuation post below I combine some links on the site with abstracts about the (interesting and useful) items to which they point.

Abstracts of this kind save the user a lot of time in the long run, and JISC does them a bit better in sites like this one, although it is also evidence that the UK technology in learning world is unhelpfully fragmented, something that is on my mind as a result of UK Government's decision to close Becta.  (The Association for Learning Technology - ALT - for which I work part-time, had  something about this published yesterday.)

I played about with a custom search that gives returns from JISC, Becta, ALT, Naace, Futurelab, TEL  (it would be simple to add others, cheap to get the advertisements removed, and the current version of the code for the search window is at the foot of the continuation post if you would like to reuse it):

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10 techniques to increase retention (in memory rather than on courses)

Donald Clark has posted a terse and informative 10 techniques to increase retention, which deserves to be widely read, though (if this is does not seem churlish) it could do with a couple of links to references for each of the techniques.

Teaching with games - Katie Salen from New York's "Quest to Learn" school explains

Below is a gripping 7 minute video in which Katie Salen, design director of the Quest to Learn school in New York. Full of choice quotes about why game design is such a powerful medium for learning, for example: "To design a game you have to really know what you are talking about in order to create a system that models that idea."

The video is one of many on the Intel-sponsored Big Think, amongst which is this talk by Leonard Kleinrock about the invention of the internet protocol. This struck a very strong cord with me having as a child gone through the make-your-own-crystal-set-from-bits-around-the-house stage, including the visit to an electronics shop to buy a variable capacitor, as described by Kleinrock. There is a connection between the two videos in that people of my generation had many opportunities to tinker - in the 1950s to 1970s, and to learn a lot of science and maths from this. Today the scope to tinker with technical objects is more limited because they tend to be much more "sealed".  Is a games based curriculum a modern equivalent of the home made tinkering curriculum of old?

Links to articles in the May 2010 ALT News Online

Here are links to the main articles in the May issue of ALT News Online, edited by Morag Munro:

• OER 2010: Exploring OER Content, Design and Communities, by Theo Lynn and Neil Bruton;
  
• Blackboard Teaching and Learning Conference 2010, by Leo Havemann and Mimi Weiss Johnson;
  
• Telling Stories at ELI2010: the Educause Learning Initiative 2010 conference, Texas, by Jackie Carter;
  
• MoodleMoot UK 2010, by Jessica Gramp;
  
• MEC 2010: Celebrating 30 Years of Sharing Learning Technology Experience and Expertise, by Theo Lynn, Neil Bruton and Kieran Linehan;
  
• Innovative Teaching and Learning Research - Studying Changing Teaching Practices and Students' 21C Competencies, by Maria Langworthy;
• Confederation of Open Access Repositories Inaugural General Assembly, March 2010, by Neil Jacobs of JISC;
  
• Using a departmental blog with post-16 Health Sciences students, by Keith Shaw;
• Online Learning – a Guide for Associations, by Louella Morton and Brendan Noud of WBT Systems;
  
• Action Research as a key to stimulating Innovation and Professional Development in ILT, by John Webber;
• Amplified staff development, by Jennifer Jones, Joanne Badge, Stuart Johnson and Alan Cann.

Clayton R Wright's vast listing of conferences with a learning technology component

Clayton R Wright has sent me - from Sierra Leone - the next instalment of his terrific listing of learning technology conferences [1 MB DOC].  Clayton writes:

Although it focuses on July to December 2010, note that events, such as "PLATO@50", have been added to June 2010 as well as the International Association of Universities 2010 Conference: Ethics and Values in Higher Education in the Era of Globilization. Since my previous publication of the conference list, forty-seven events have been added to the June 2010 listing. I am hoping that readers will step a little out of their comfort zone and consider attending events that at first glance may not be their "cup of tea".

"Data is not the plural of anecdote". Eric Mazur talks about how to improve large group learning.

Via Martin Hawksey, here is a long video from November 2009 in which Eric Mazur, who teaches physics at Harvard, describes the main innovations he has made in how he runs his courses - and the painstaking empirical research that he has used to guide these changes. The educational research area of Mazur's web site, with its focus on peer instruction, gender and physics, classroom demonstrations, and technology and education, is worth careful study. [Note: site has been intermittently down in recent weeks - 17/9/2010.]