Information literacy: enabling users in Higher Education

Sharon Markless of King’s College London will be speaking about - Information literacy: enabling users in Higher Education

Date - Thursday May 10th , 10.30am – 5.00pm
Venue - Seminar Room, Library & Information Centre, Swansea University.

She will cover the following topics -

Information literacy: more than a shopping list of skills?
What conception of IL do you want to project? Do you need an agreed framework – or any framework? How might you use a model of IL?

How do students learn to be information literate? 1
Key learning principles underpinning on-line or face-to-face interventions
Styles and patterns of information-seeking

How do students learn to be information literate? 2
What does the technology do best in supporting/enhancing learning?
The range of on-line learning activities
Linking to the curriculum

What has worked for you?
Sharing specific examples of sessions/programmes/collaborations that have worked well. How do you know what difference they made?

Levels of collaboration (including assessment)
Generic versus discipline-specific material
Stand alone versus embedded IL


To book a place please email:Michele.davies@swan.ac.uk

E-Learning & Cakes - 16th May

Fancy a coffee, some cake and a chance to find out what's going on in E-Learning here at Swansea? The next E-Learning and Cakes session will be on Wednesday16th May at 11:00am in Room 703 on the 7th Floor of the Library building. 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 - 16th May
Time - 11:00
Venue - Room 703

Lab gets a facelift

Hopefully you have noticed that the Learning Lab had changed a little. Nothing too radical, just a few tweaks here and there. The main changes are -

• New navigation that should makes it easier to find your way around
• A new search powered by swiki. It searches the Learning Lab first and then the rest of the web. You can rate results according to how accurate you think they are. The idea is that search engine learns from our community's search behavior thus creating more relevant searches.
• A discussion area
• A series of 'How To' guides will follow shortly.

We hope you find the changes an improvement and any comments are welcome.

Ad-Free web-based Wikis for Education

pbwiki have announced that they are offering Wikis designated as Educational Wikis (which provides access to specific Educational templates) as Add Free.

Take a look at some of the features they offer.

To find out more, or to sign up go to: http://pbwiki.com/edu.html

Restructuring approaches to assessment – Where Blended Learning can help

This is the latest in the Blended Learning Seminar series from the Glamorgan Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching.


This will be held on Wednesday 25th April at 12pm.

Covering:

• Use of Question Mark Perception for summative assessment on a first year accounting module
• The use of peer review for assessment

Events are open to all with an interest in Blended Learning and / or e-Learning and all events are free of charge, although prior booking is essential.

For more information visit this site.

Mobile Learning Workshop

This month Netskills are running a number of workshops at the University of Wales Institute Cardiff.

This workshop looked like it might be of interest:

Mobile Learning: Education on Demand, 19th April
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Mobile Learning: the next stage of e-Learning, or a whole new learning experience? This workshop explores the principles and practice of m-Learning. It is for anyone who is interested in the application of mobile technologies in education, or those who simply wish to know more about the emerging technologies and potential uses.

Further details about this workshop, including prices and booking forms are available from: http://www.netskills.ac.uk/workshops

What would you like out of eLearning training?

At the end of last week we posted a question in a Blackboard discussion forum asking instructors what they would like out of Blackboard, and out of eLearning workshops.

As we evaluate the information and sessions we provide, we wish to open this question up to the wider community (those that don't use Blackboard), and would love some feedback on what you would like to get out of Blackboard and eLearning workshops.

Are there particular areas you would like covered? Particular technologies? Web 2.0? Are you interested in sessions about planning online materials?

Would you like to see some shorter sessions on specific tools? Would you like to attend sessions about merging the use of eLearning tools? Are you interested in sessions about customising the look and feel of your Blackboard module?

What do you look for in a workshop or training session? What would you like to see?

All comments welcome!

Wikis as a collaborative Tool

Using Wikis to quickly and simply create shared websites

Friday's Lunch and Learn session in SDU (a 1 hour session where lunch was served, information provided, and questions answered), was all about Wikis!

What are Wikis? Essentially they are a set of web pages which can be quickly and easily edited through a web-browser. A Wiki is a piece of software, where the main feature of is an "edit" link or button on the web pages, which gives you a simple editing panel enabling you to add content without needing to know any web languages. More

Wiki is a bit of an odd looking term, but in fact it is the Hawaiian word for "Quick"! The creator of Wikis Ward Cunningham, was inspired by the Wiki Wiki (Quick Quick) busses at the airport in Hawaii. And what better term for software that allows you to quickly edit web pages, than Wiki!

Most of us are familiar with Wiki's because of Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedic website that is as commonly used as Google.


Wikis enable more than one person to edit the content on a page, quickly and easily. This enables the content to have been placed by many different authors, of varying expertise, where information that one person doesn't know is added by someone else, so that the document is cohesive, and as extensive as possible.

Wikis are really useful for collaborative activities, which fits well in the educational environment. Some activities that a Wiki could be used for are:
Brainstorming/Mind Mapping; for Collaborative Document Creation; Group Projects; Event Planning; Meeting management; Lists; Simple Websites; Shared Web resources…… there are many possibilities.

Within the session we looked at many examples of Wikis, and at exactly how easy it is to edit a Wiki page. A handout was given at the end of the session and can be found here: http://learninglab.swan.ac.uk/wiki/doku.php?id=wikis