Beyond control: ALT-C Highlights Part 1

I’m just back from ALT-C, the annual conference of the Association for Learning Technology at Nottingham University, 3-6 September. It was my first visit to ALT-C and I would definitely recommend it. It provided an excellent way for me to mark my transition to a full-time role as Higher Education coordinator for RSC Wales. Contrary to my fears there were many other newcomers, and the group was very diverse.

The conference had around 500 delegates and as well as three keynotes there were four strands comprising workshops, short papers, symposia and research papers, not to mention a massive poster session and exhibition. Here’s an attempt to sum up four days of non-stop activity.

PebblePad

Kicked off with a pre-conference workshop on PebblePad, the e-portfolio product from University of Wolverhampton. The session was useful in giving an overview of the main features of the newly-released v.2 and allowing us to experiment with an account (everyone attending the workshop received one year’s free login). Most of the participants apart from me seemed to be lecturers whose departments either had or were evaluating the product. It’s in use in small and large HE, schools and some professional bodies such as the Chartered Society of Physiotherapists.

The interface is quite simple: clicking on a “pebble” on the home page (eg to create material) results in a zen-like water splash and in you go. I found myself presented with a variety of pre-designed templates for different kinds of activity, such as an action plan, blog or simply ‘thought’. We created different assets and were able to share and comment on them amongst the group. I have a few thoughts on how I could use this tool in the course of my work this year, eg for my own CPD record: fortunately it is possible to export your ‘webfolio’ as a standalone website if access is discontinued.

The workshop was also useful in highlighting a few generic issues around e-portfolios, e.g. space required on student servers; access for alumni; the fact that standards are still evolving; the development of PDA and WAP-enabled versions for access via mobile devices.

Monday evening took the form of a quiet drink in the bar catching up with colleagues from University of Glamorgan and Swansea, a gentle warm up for the marathon that lay ahead…

Day 2

The first day had been quite structured; the rest of my conference experience can best be summed up as one long conversation about learning in some shape or form.

In an attempt to convey the spirit rather than the factual content (which I guess will appear on the ALT website) here are some quotes and ideas I jotted down.

Michelle Selinger’s keynote

• “Don’t be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated. You can’t cross a chasm in two small jumps.” (Lloyd George). Yet we tend to tinker round the edges – academic publishers are still wedded to print; we create podcasts of lectures and put lecture notes on the VLE. [but I think our funding system and audit culture encourage us to take few risks]
• The original telephone was created for listening to concerts and making public announcements -  nice example of people veering off the path set out by the pioneers
• John Seely Brown - the importance of learning to improvise to solve problems (interesting echoes here of earlier JISC learning spaces discussions with Les Watson, and of current discussions in the library world about rethinking teaching of information literacy). Need for a knowledgeABLE society.
• North-South divide and ‘learning imperialism’ [could be applied to urban-rural Wales?]
• Personal learning environments predicted to be on the verge of takeoff, combining formal and informal learning
• Learners need analytical intelligence as well as practical and creative skills, persistence, metacognitive skills, power tools and play (“learning 2.0″)
• Need to harness the power of student-authored work
• Media literacy is important
• Interested reference to some Australian work with 8-12 year olds in schools, where the children devised what questions they were going to set themselves, learning there isn’t always a right answer, benefits of collaboration etc.
• Not all learners are ground-breakers
• Assessment is political
• Teachers model the learning process, they are the expert learner, apprentice model (echoes again of what librarians were saying at LILAC).
• Student literacy is acknowledged as a problem: partial solution may be to get them accustomed to writing for different audiences
• Student motivation problem: don’t want to learn when they have to leave their culture at the door, they need problems to solve.

Speed networking

All my careful planning with the weighty conference handbook went out of the window almost straight away, as my chosen workshops (on wikis) were fully booked. So it was purely by chance I ended up in a ’social networking’ workshop. Imagine speed dating with a pile of business cards, one party hat and four ‘dates’ at a time. Not as scary as it sounds, it was good fun and an excellent icebreaker for us ALT-C novices. Even if you couldn’t remember a thing about eachother by the afternoon, at least you had a few familiar faces to say hello to in the dinner queue. Speed networking definitely beats standing around wearing an ”I’m new” badge and a forlorn expression.

Informs workshop

Good to have an element of information literacy in a conference where librarians/information professionals were noticeable by their absence. Emily Shields of Manchester Met and colleagues from MIMAS gave a very useful workshop.

I’d seen Informs when it was first developed, but I hadn’t used it much and it was good to see how it has moved on in recent months, following its move to Intute.

In essence, Informs offers librarians a tool to create ‘guide on the side’ tutorials for topics like how to use a particular online database or how to choose resources. Interestingly some of the most popular types of guide are not for library resources as such but for tools like whiteboards and referencing software, in fact these have proved some of the most popular. Manchester Met staff showed how they’ve used Informs on a large scale in conjunction with their electronic library. There are around 140 institutions using, and 2000 tutorials (which you can easily customise).

Apart from a general facelift, Intute have enhanced Informs with a quiz creation facility, stats reporting and a facility for users to communicate, which it woudl be useful to find out more about.

They have worked out a way of integrating Informs with WebCT (and to a lesser extent Blackboard) but unfortunately not Moodle as yet- it would be nice to see this happen.

Three short papers to end the day:

• Online silence: a space for learning or anti-social? – this is some doctoral research from Sheffield University. I was intrigued by the title: I’ve noticed that non-participation in online communities is often perceived as very negative, whilst in a face to face group, the quiet person can often be an asset, perhaps by being ‘the good listener’ or doing the practical stuff. Unfortunately the short paper format didn’t really provide the space to explore the topic in any depth. However it was good to be reminded of the important role silence and reflection can play in a conversation, and in learning, especially higher and professional learning.

• Developing borderless learning spaces: interactive Teaching and Learning Observatories – this basically covered videoconferencing in teacher training at University of Nottingham’s CETL-Visual Learning Lab. They started off seven years ago doing straightforward lesson observation, but have gradually moved towards more interactive use. Several of their examples involved modern languages teaching and international conferencing. It was interesting to see how they had developed the use of the videoconferencing technology over a sustained period. Maybe there would be some useful contacts here for our Welsh Video Network.

• Bridging 3D and Web-based virtual learning environments – learned a new term: MUVE (multi-user virtual environments eg Second Life). Unfortunately this session was really talking about tools rather than seeing them in use, which felt rathre dissatisfying. The main points that came out for me were the drawbacks of Second Life as a learning environment (difficulty of navigation, lack of support, lack of orientation, “too much” freedom, authentication). Sloodle was mentioned, integrating Second Life with Moodle, but it wasn’t possible to learn much practical information and I guess it’s a question of getting in and trying it.

Comedy Night

Laughter, free drinks and late night conversation at Jongleurs in Nottingham, courtesy of Wimba. Here and throughout the conference, the commercial presence was surprisingly low-key, though we are unlikely to forget our sponsors’ slogan which was comprehensively ridiculed and thus imprinted on our brains. Good to get away from campus for a few hours.