Effective Practice in a Digital Age

The JISC publication 'Effective Practice in a Digital Age' is designed for those in further and higher education whose focus is on designing and supporting learning: academic staff, lecturers, tutors and learning support staff, facilitators, learning technologists and staff developers. Thew report argues that "What unites this diverse group is their interest in enhancing the quality of learning and teaching, and a curiosity about how technology can assist them."

Download a copy from here

Videos of the various case studies can be found on the JISC Resource Exchange

Excellence in Learning and Teaching Conference

Swansea University - Excellence in Learning and Teaching Conference

Date: Tuesday 2 June 2009

Venue: James Callaghan Lecture Theatre and Conference Suite

Jointly held by the University Learning and Teaching Committee and the E-Learning Sub-Committee

Call for Seminar Proposals
The University’s Learning and Teaching Committee invites proposals for seminars to be held during the conference to showcase good practice in learning, teaching, and assessment across the University. Proposals on the following themes are especially encouraged, however, all areas will be considered.

• Feedback on Assessment
• Peer Learning and Peer Assessment (Peer supported learning, peer assessment, collaborative content creation, student led learning)
• E-Learning/Technology Enhanced Learning
• Information Literacy

If you have a proposal for the conference please contact Phil Brophy in the Academic Registry on 2721, p.a.brophy@swansea.ac.uk

The conference and the call for proposals is open to all staff including Learning and Teaching support. Please respond by the 22nd of April

e-Learning Reading Group

The first of a monthly, or so, get together to discuss a particular article or book relating to e-learning.

When: Tuesday February 17th 11.00am

Where: PC Room 1 in the Library Building

If you can't make the session you can join the discussion on the wiki http://labreadinggroup.wikispaces.com/Reading+One

Reading: An absolutely riveting online course: Nine principles for excellence in web-based teaching by Jim Henry & Jeff Meadows

You can access the reading from here http://tinyurl.com/choxm9

Abstract: This article explores excellence in web-based teaching. Drawing on the views of experts in the field and the perspective of their own years of experience, the authors compiled a list of 9 principles to provide direction in the search for online excellence. The principles include: the online world is a medium unto itself; sense of community and social presence are essential to online excellence; in the online world, content is a verb; great online courses are defined by teaching, not technology. The list is not intended to be an exclusive set of principles or a comprehensive guide to online teaching. Rather it is a collection of important ideas and suggestions for teaching excellence in the online world.

Scholarly journals - new free service makes keeping up-to-date easy

Keeping up-to-date with the scholarly literature just became much easier, thanks to a new service called ticTOCs - Journal Tables of Contents Service.

http://www.tictocs.ac.uk

ticTOCs is a new scholarly journal tables of contents (TOCs) service. It’s free, its easy to use, and it provides access to the most recent tables of contents of over 11,000 scholarly journals from more than 400 publishers. It helps scholars, researchers, academics and anyone else keep up-to-date with what’s being published in in the most recent issues of journals on almost any subject.

Using ticTOCs, you can find journals of interest by title, subject or publisher, view the latest TOC, link through to the full text of over 250,000 articles (where institutional or personal subscriptions, or Open Access, allow), and save selected journals to MyTOCs so that you can view future TOCs (free registration is required if you want to permanently save your MyTOCs). ticTOCs also makes it easy to export selected TOC RSS feeds to popular feedreaders such as Google Reader and Bloglines, and in addition you can import article citations into RefWorks (where institutional or personal subscriptions allow).

You select TOCs by ticking those of interest - thousands of TOCs, within a tick or two (hence the name ticTOCs).

ticTOCs has been funded under the JISC Users & Innovations programme, and has been developed by an international consortium consisting of the University of Liverpool Library (lead), Heriot-Watt University, CrossRef, ProQuest, Emerald, RefWorks, MIMAS, Cranfield University, Institute of Physics, SAGE Publishers, Inderscience Publishers, DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals), Open J-Gate, and Intute.

ticTOCs home: http://www.tictocs.ac.uk/
News from ticTOCs blog: http://tictocsnews.wordpress.com/
For more information, contact:
Roddy MacLeod, ticTOCs Management Support, Heriot-Watt University Library, Edinburgh, UK
email: R.A.MacLeod@hw.ac.uk
tel: +44 (0)131 451 3576

Call for Papers - ALT-C 2009: “In dreams begins responsibility” – choice, evidence , and change

ALT welcomes paper submissions for ALT-C 2009: “In dreams begins responsibility” – choice, evidence, and change. In preparation for when the submission system opens in late December 2008, please find details below of the research paper guidelines (including the research paper
template) and guidelines for other paper types e.g symposia, workshops, short papers etc.

First call for papers and abstracts for:

ALT-C 2009: “In dreams begins responsibility” – choice, evidence, and change 8-10 September 2009, Manchester, UK http://www.alt.ac.uk/altc2009/

Keynote speakers:
Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, USA.
Terry Anderson, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Distance Education at Athabasca University, Canada.

Submission guidelines for Research Papers and for Abstracts are available from:
http://www.alt.ac.uk/guidelines_papers.html
- a Research Paper Template is also available from this webpage and is a word document so it can be downloaded and used to submit your research paper proposal.

ALT welcome submissions of two broad types:
- Full 5000 word Research Papers, for publication in the peer-reviewed Proceedings of ALT-C 2009, with a 350 word abstract (taken from the
paper) and a 200 word presentation overview both of which will appear in the conference Abstracts Handbook, and online.
- 350 word abstracts describing 30 minute Demonstrations, Posters, 20 minute Short Papers, 90 minute Symposia, and 90 minute Workshops. All abstracts will appear in the conference Abstracts Handbook, and online.

Key dates:
Proposals accepted from late December 2008 (the link to the submission system will be available from http://www.alt.ac.uk/altc2009/) Deadline for receipt of proposals: midnight UK time on 16 February 2009 Bookings open during May 2009 Presenters' registration deadline 29 June 2009 Earlybird registration deadline is 6 July 2009 Bookings close on 14 August 2009