Archive for the ‘conferences’ Category

there’s one constant we can be sure of – change

Saturday, April 21st, 2012

It’s been too long since my last post and a lot has happened in my professional life. Things are the same, but they’ve changed – here’s a quick update.

Since coming back from FUSION 2011 mid 2011, I worked on a small research project that examined the planning for the integration of ePortfolios into degree program. I believe this is a worthwhile way to implement ePortfolios by having them embedded in a purposeful and meaningful way with authentic assessment activities. The resulting research report was submitted as the final piece of assessment for the Graduate Certificate of Higher Education (happy to say that I’ve now graduated).

Then there was a flurry of conferences from October to December that provided me with opportunities to share, learn, reconnect and be inspired. I was able to present the preliminary findings of the ePortfolio research project at the ePortfolio Australia Conference (#EAC11) in Perth last October.  I also came away from the conference understanding that sufficient planning & preparation are required to introduce ePortfolios successfully, that student respond well to engaging ePortfolio tasks, and that ePortfolios provide a useful platform for student reflections on learning. While in Perth I was also able to attend the Apple Paperless Padagogy Workshop (great to see the development of tools to create epubs on the iPad platform) and the ATN Assessment Conference (#ATN11). I came away from this conference thinking more about how we can design assessment to be more meaningful in the 21st Century, how we provide authentic assessment of graduate attributes, skills and capabilities attainment, and how we might provide alternative modes of feedback such as audio.

I was on the organising committee of the Teaching and Learning with Vision Conference (#TLV11) in early November and we had a great lineup of speakers and a great vibe over the two days. We were challenged to think about using games for learning, creating innovative learning spaces, how a new generation of learners like to learn, the power of networks for learning, learnt more about QR codes, using point of view (POV) glasses to record skill development, and we shared our favourite social media & networking tools. Make sure you come along to TLV12 in November this year.

TLV keynote
Photo By miz minh TLV11

In mid November I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the Informa Technology for Learning and Teaching Forum and caught up with friends Steve Wheeler, Tom Cochrane and Dave Cummings (amongst others). Then at the end of November there was the ConVerge conference (#ConVerge11) and I enjoyed catching up with Howard Errey, Greg Young, Joyce Seitzinger and Nancy White. Came away with a better understanding of; how MOOCs work, ways mobile devices and video conferencing can be used for engaged learning, how to create epubs, the use Diigo & Evernote for social bookmarking, and the power of connecting groups and networks. 

Also late in the year I applied for a job in the School of Medicine at Deakin, and was very happy to be offered the position of Senior Lecturer, Medical Education (eLearning). This meant that I had to say goodbye to my team and colleagues in the Faculty of Business and Law and finished up on the last working day of the year. My new role is to support the use of technology in learning and teaching so has a similar focus as my previous position, but I’m also keen to develop the research component of my work to measure and evaluate the effectiveness of what we do. 

In early December I was able to attend ASCILITE (#ascilite11) in Hobart and and caught up with friends, made some new connections, and got to know some of my new colleagues from the Faculty of Health. I appreciated hearing about projects involved with; learning design and the use of technology in teaching, student response systems, rubric creation and use, curation and social media, and the potential for learning analytics. 

Ascilite11
ascilite 2011 opening keynote

I started in the School of Medicine mid January and have been busy getting to know staff and students as well as learning how the medical program is delivered. The LMS (Desire2Learn) is used extensively to support the delivery of the program and I see lots of opportunities to augment that system with the use mobile devices, ePortfolios, and video and multi-media. I hope to get a few projects going and looking at how we can improve the outcomes of learning & teaching program for both students and staff. 

So, while my work has been constant over the past nine months, there has been some change in the context of what I’m doing. I was very fortunate and appreciated the opportunities of professional development through conference attendance late last year and look forward to making a contribution in my new workplace. 

FUSION 2011 Desire2Learn Conference

Friday, July 15th, 2011

I’ve been fortunate to be able to attend the Desire2Learn (D2L) annual conference FUSION 2011 in Denver, Colorado this week and have enjoyed a great atmosphere, met lots of people, and learned more about D2L and how it can support teaching. I’ve still got two days of workshops to attend and look forward to some more in-depth best practice sessions on how D2L can support authentic teaching practice through assessment, analytics, learning design and ePortfolio.

Denver thunderstorm

There’s been spectacular thunderstorms each evening this week and the thunder & lighting generally announce a good downpour. The days have been warm but I haven’t been outside all that much as the conference has kept us busy from 8-4:30. There have been lots of sessions to choose from, including hands-on workshops to help people learn more about particular tools. Plenty of D2L staff have been available to discuss issues and I liked the triage desk (with staff dressed in white coats & stethoscopes) where you could go and chat about feature requests or other things that are of concern/need fixing. Nice.

I usually find conferences are a good litmus test of how we are travelling with regard to our practice and use of technology for learning and teaching. It’s been good here at D2L, to be confirmed in a way that indicates that we ‘up there’ with regard to best practice and robust implementation. Great to talk to other educators though, and hear about alternative ways of doing things and I’ll be reviewing all this as I debrief after the conference.

the storm before the calm (has passed)

Wednesday, July 6th, 2011

The last few weeks have been the storm before the calm. My university has chosen D2L to replace our Blackboard LMS (WebCT Vista) and we’ve been busy implementing for Trimester 2. As usual lots to sort out, configuration, training, educational development, meetings, negotiations, hand holding, requesting, testing and trialling. This week we went live with a limited number of units/subjects and for my Faculty this means around 100 staff and nearly 4,000 students – we’re all set for when teaching starts next week. There’ll be some evaluation of the processes and how it’s all gone once things have settled down and teaching’s well underway. All good and exciting work, but it’s been a wild ride that’s been a storm at times, and now I’m ready for some calm.

Storm in Colorado
Storms in Colorado (photo credit Jerry W. Lewis)

So, for some calm I’m heading over to Denver, Colorado on Friday where I’ll be attending the Fusion 2011 Desire2Learn users conference. I’m looking forward to it as it will be the first D2L conference I’ve attended, I’ve never been to Denver before, and the weather’s going to be much warmer than I’ve been experiencing lately (and I hope it’s calmer than the photo I found to illustrate this post).

I’m also looking forward to meeting other D2L users and having an opportunity to share our stories while doing some networking. The D2L staff will also have my attention as we get to know each other and establish our partnership as client and vendor. Amongst other things, I’ll be learning as much as I can about the ePortfolio tool and how others are using D2L for blended learning.  I’ll also be giving a presentation with a colleague in which we will provide two perspectives (learning systems and an academic) of the implementation process so far. I’ll be sharing some insights via twitter of course (@colwar) and intend to supplement them here with some blog posts.

Now to pack my bags – I hope there’s some good company & movies on the plane.

what kind of story are you telling when presenting at conferences?

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

Some of my thinking since the ascilite 09 conference that I recently attended in Auckland, has centred around the style of presentations I listened to. I was able to learn a lot about a range of topics (as reflected on in previous posts), but I feel that something was lacking during the presentation sessions. I’ve come away from the three days of short talks wondering why I didn’t feel more engaged with some of the talks I attended.

I believe the way I’m feeling has something to do with the ‘stories’ that people told. Too often we were presented with the outline of the paper as it was written for the conference, and people often read out their dot points from their slides. I would rather hear the story of the journey, the experience, how people felt while working their project, reflections from participants, about the new understanding they developed, and what changed about their thinking. An interesting story will always lead me to the paper and further investigation.

Narrative is core to our culture and we only need to look at the popularity of books & films to see how much we like a good yarn. While we in developed Western cultures have lost a lot of the oral tradition, it is still a common means of passing on knowledge and understanding. Maybe we would do well to focus a little more on developing stories through which to ‘deliver’ content, ideas, and findings in our educational institutions.

I believe a ‘presentation story’ is (should be) more than just about having a beginning, middle, conflict, resolution, and end, it’s about making it personal and sharing how your learning has effected, changed and evolved you. Sharing stories, or making a narrative out of what you want to say, helps provide authenticity and will connect with the audience, it grounds the presentation in lived experience. The story needs to be told within a context or setting, and the characters provide us access to the drama as we learn about it through their eyes. We get to understand the human element of the research, the impact to the participants and how learning has been improved, lives enhanced, innovation adopted, etc.

Is your story good enough to hold the attention of an audience? An audience of your peers at a conference, or an audience of students in a lecture or classroom. Are you able to engage your listeners in a (your) personal journey and make connections with others by inviting them to participate in your story? Do you have any good examples of a narrative presentation?

What do you think? Should we be focusing more on narrative in our teaching as well?

I’ve set myself the challenge of making the presentations I do next year, more like stories/narratives and will look forward to hearing what people think about them…

(these reflections don’t take into account the potential of a good slide deck to support a story, or whether there might be a Twitter or live blog, back channel in action while you are presenting – might cover those topics in a future post)

ascilite09 conference reflections #4 – Day Three

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

Wednesday already & the final day of ascilite09. Another gorgeous morning in Auckland (the weather has been perfect), and some people slow to turn up for proceedings after the dinner/dance last night.

We began with short plenary session where Matthew Riddle reported on his Blackboard research grant where he asked student to record their ‘day experience’ using mobile technology. Some interesting initial findings that students spend a lot of time at home, and when on campus would like better access to the internet and to powerpoints for laptops in meeting places – particularly after hours. (watch this space)

I then attended a session on eportfolios that explored the benefits & value of the use of a space where students can be reflective learners, collect artifacts, demonstrate acquisition of graduate attributes and professional competencies, complete assessable tasks and developing showcases or representations of their learning to particular contexts. We were challenged to think about the questions that could be asked of staff & students before going ahead with an eportfolio implementation plan. I understand that there needs to be some clear articulation of purpose and context when talking about eportfolios so that people understand how they are to used in a particular way in a particular place/space.

I went to the symposium, ‘Thinking about a new LMS: Comparing different institutional models and approaches’ where we heard representatives from four institutions discuss their evaluation and implementation of a new LMS – all of them went for Moodle. All very interesting as the university where I work has just about completed the evaluation process and about to decide on a new LMS platform. What was useful, was hearing about the planning and implementation phase of these projects and the lessons learned. Lots of great do’s & don’ts and tips & tricks for getting the best outcome for an implementation. There were no papers or presentations available for this session but each institution took a different approach to evaluation and implementation – one complete institution-wide with all courses converted, and another staged implementation with staff having to rebuild their units. Main take-home points for me: communication is key, get buy-in from academic staff, have some departmental champions, have a committed executive sponsor, ensure everyone knows where they are heading, and communicate (in as many ways as possible). You might be interested in Mark Smithers’ blog post Public LMS Evaluations, where he has compiled a list of publicly available LMS reviews.

After another delicious lunch, James Clay gave the final keynote and asked us all to think about what the ‘mobile’ means in mobile learning. He outlined the advantages & disadvantages of (mobile) technology and wondered how well education is coping with the changes in work, culture, & society. It was an engaging presentation that asked lots of questions and challenged us to think about how we respond to this change and what we might do to prepare our students for the future. It was great to see James have the Twitter backchannel displayed during his talk. He used keynotetweet to have tweets from his Keynote slides posted to the #ascilite09 hashtag so that those not present, could follow his slide points in Twitter. Nice!

You can access the archive of tweets with the #ascilite09 hashtag at Twapper Keeper, and you can also access the programme and papers of the conference online.

The handover to ascilite 2010 was made and the host for next year is University of technology Sydney. Hopefully see you there!

ascilite09 conference reflections #3 – Day Two

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

Tuesday already, and another nice morning in Auckland.

I set up my poster (Professional development and Web 2.0, can the space make a difference?) before heading into the theatre for Grainne Conole’s keynote, ‘Pushing the boundaries into the unknown, trajectories of user behaviour in new frontiers.’ The focus was on how new technologies create change in behaviour and asks how evolving practices might impact on education. Grainne also gave an overview of Cloudworks and reported on how the site was being used. Visit the Cloudworks cloud for James Clay’s live blogging of the presentation and links to the presentation (.ppt) & paper.

During the coffee breaks I talked with people about my poster and found that the project resonated with people with regard to it being a good model for professional development. The idea that longer term, project or research based activities are more beneficial and support deeper learning than those compared to one-off workshop type sessions.

The next session focus of virtual worlds and spaces where student interact online rather than face-to-face. A mix of presentations talking about experiences in Second Life, Elluminate and online discussions. The key to success seems to be the ability to not only make the learning authentic and having some connection to real world challenges, but also taking students along for the ride. Unless the students have a clear understanding of purpose and a relevance to them, their studies, future profession & aiming to solve real world problems, it is difficult to get them to fully engage.

After lunch I attended an interactive session called ‘Integrating Web 2.0 technologies into Moodle courses’. Stuart Mealor introduced us to a range of Web 2.0 social networking tools and asked us to consider if these tools might be included in the learning environment. He then demonstrated how some of these might be incorporated into Moodle fairly easily, and that it could be set up as an aggregator of a lot of social networking. Not sure of you’d actually want to incorporate all that much into the learning space though…

The afternoon session I went to was focused on design, and include papers on assessment, learning, patterns e-learning environment, and ‘edgeless’ universities. The two things that stood out for me were; a presentation explained the benefits of students priming and leading weekly discussion sessions, and that while they gained much from this, the peer e-learning critique by other students needed to be better scaffolded. Another presentation reminded us that online spaces need to be supported by the concept of community, so that students feel that they can ‘belong’ and have a connectedness with others that is social, educational and professional.

The conference dinner was held at the Sky Tower and it was a great night with heaps of good food & wine, lots of conversation & networking, and once the band started playing, lots of dancing.