E-Learning & Cakes - February

The next E-Learning and Cakes is on Friday 9th February at 11:00am in Room 703 of the Library, which is on the 7th floor.

Have a coffee, and some cake, and find out what's going on in E-Learning at Swansea. It's not a formal meeting but a chance for anyone who is interested in using technology in learning to share what they are doing and find out what others are up to.

Date: Friday 9th February
Time: 11:00am
Place: Room 703 on the 7th floor of the Library building

Community Searching?

I've been having a look at swiki which is in beta from Eurekster. It looks interesting in that it attemps to take the concept of collaboration into to searching using the 'wisdom of crowds' approach. The idea is that -

"A swicki is a natural extension of personal publishing on the web. Just as you can create a webpage, blog, or podcast, now you can publish a community powered search engine, tailored to produce only the targeted search results that you and your community want! A swicki shows a buzz cloud of what is hot in your community and makes it easy to find the best content, news and info on the web."

I've added a swiki to the Learning Lab at http://learninglab.swan.ac.uk/swiki. Have a play and share your comments.

Doughnuts 2.0: The way forward?

35 people, 35 doughnuts and only some sugar left. The way to the heart of LIS is certainly though it's stomach. Apart from eating doughnuts, LIS staff spent a few hours examining many of the issues raised in a previous post about how new web technology impacts on the way the University works. The suggestions and thoughts can be found in the Web 2.0 section of the Learning Lab wiki.

All of the websites discussed during the session can be found on delicious at http://del.icio.us/web2donut.

As I write, barely 24 hours after the event, there are wikis under construction by Careers and Medical School librarians as well as the development of RSS feeds from Voyager.

Thanks to Alex Roberts and the RSC team for presenting the sessions.

For those of you unable to attend the event we plan to run it again later in the year for a University wide audience.

BETT 2007

Just got back from BETT. The biggest learning technology show in the world apparently. It certainly felt like it walking around. Although it's mainly geared towards schools there was plenty of weird and wonderful stuff of interest to higher education. The main areas of focus this year seemed to be e-portfolios and podcasting. Futurelab had some interesting things to say about portfolios and PLEs (Personal Learning Environments) with their Learners' Charter. On the podcasting front Podium looks to simplify creating and distributing podcasts. Something completely different is Crazy Talk, which allows you to turn any photograph into an animated talking actor. Not quite sure how useful it will be at the moment but its good fun to play with.

They are just three of the hundreds of things I looked at and I'm still ploughing my way though the masses of literature and software that I picked up - training materials and resources from Microsoft, lesson planners, mind mapping software, Smartboard lessons......... I think it will keep me busy for a while.