ELECTRICCHALK

I missed last week’s Chalknote deadline but don’t worry, I have forgiven myself!

So, the last 2 weeks have been about…

ePortfolios

You can read my personal account of the ePortfolio Scotland conference elsewhere but the event was also notable for meeting Piers MacLean from Cranford Uni. There was a short TeachMeet session during the lunch break at which he showed us the rather fine stop-motion animation piece he did as a way of encouraging reflective learning (in engineering students I seem to remember). Sadly, I don’t have it to show you but he has kindly agreed to provide me with a bit more information about his storytelling work to include in the forthcoming Netskills workshop.

PRINCE2

Along with a colleague I spent all of last week in a training room being force-fed the PRINCE2 project management methodology. The PRINCE2 method is a fascinating piece of work; extremely detailed and held together with an internal logic that allows it to be used either when planning a night out or the Olympic Games. I’m glad I got the chance to learn about it and I’m really looking forward to putting it into action in the future.

The learning experience wasn’t a pleasant one, though. Either due to the trainer’s style or the quality of the materials he was using we were faced with absorbing vast amounts of information that were talked at us with virtually no time for reflection or discussion. I think we did one group exercise over the course of the week.

I’ve really come to expect that learning should be fun. By fun, I mean I come away feeling challenged, exhilarated and clutching my new found knowledge like a prize at a fairground. Not fun, as in a lark.

This was not fun. This was like going through a process where inputs were provided and certain outputs were expected, very little opportunity for me as a learner to adapt what was happening to my own experience or to learn from the experience of those around me.

Jorum & OER

We had a chance to meet Nicola Siminson, from the Jorum team on Thursday, finding out about the work that they have been doing establishing a repository for open educational resources. OER has been something on my personal periphery for a while but not something I’ve had to engage with properly but it’s becoming more an more of an important issue for us at Netskills. I’ll be delving a bit more into the JISC InfoKit on OER, methinks.

BTEC in eLearning Essentials

A while back I went on this 3 day Netskills event with delegates from the UK, Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands and just down the corridor. It’s led by Danny McAtominey and was a much better experience than the PRINCE2 one! It’s worth a look at if you are responsible for putting together e-learning activities.

Anyway, official confirmation came through that I’d passed today. Great stuff!

Business and Community Engagement

I’m off to York today to attend an event run by the JISC Business and Community Engamenet team on using collaborative tools to support BCE activities. It’s not a project I have direct involvement with but I have an interest in using collaborative web tools to enhance the student learner experience and there’s a lot on the agenda that is relevant to me, especially the keynote by students at Northumbria uni talking about their experiences using collaborative tools when working with external partners.

I’ll blog a report about it soon.

…and on a personal note…

Absolutely delighted for my cousin and her husband who are expecting their first child at the end of March. My other cousin has twins arriving shortly so our extended family is taking on Dickensian proportions.