Some time ago I wrote a blog  about different approaches to continuous professional development (cpd) in the area of technology-enhanced learning. Since then there have been many projects addressing this issue, particularly in HE (for example Gwella - and JISC Building Capacity), and recently, several examples of effective cpd practice  (which sometimes overlapped with these projects) were submitted to UCISA and presented at event on 7th December at the University of Salford (Engaging Hearts and Minds ) . Amongst these was ‘Synergy in Action’, as outlined by Mary Jacob of Aberystwyth University. The key ‘synergy’ she referred to was between the E-Learning Support team and the Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching in Higher Education (PGCTHE) programme, and the importance of this link was a recurrent theme of the conference.  At Aberystwyth, the two teams work together to ensure that academic staff undertaking the PGCHE integrate e-learning into their teaching ‘cycles’ (this is effectively a form of action research). Mini-conferences and ‘brown bag’ sessions, along with Aberystwyth’s Nexus website, also help in the dissemination of good e-learning practice between academics.
Other models of staff support mentioned included a ‘menu’ of staff development ‘building blocks’ (University of Wolverhampton); a ‘community of practice’ approach to share ideas in an informal way ( University of the Arts, London); a blend of ‘bitesize’ sessions including both face-to-face workshops and evening webinars ( University of Salford). The initiative that took the prize for best case study came from the Dublin Institute of Technology, and comprised a very popular annual summer school. Academic staff get together for a concentrated period of learning and trying out new ideas, and opportunities for ‘quality’ socialising are built in. These, and other case studies have been incorporated into  a UCISA best practice guide which provides much more information.

Many institutions are already adopting these approaches, or some version of them. It would seem that the greater the range of methods used the better the result is likely to be, though the precise ‘blend’ needed for effective cpd may vary between institutions and curriculum contexts. Case studies of the sort collated by UCISA can be very useful, but there is a need for more robust data to inform future decision-making, and help institutions to avoid the risk of re-inventing the wheel and/or repeating old mistakes. It is also worth reiterating that PGCTHE courses provide an important opportunity to mainstream e-learning cpd, and it is likely that learning technology is better valued if it has a clear role in an institution’s overall approach to excellence in teaching and learning.

The role of PGCTHE courses also arose in an event I happened to attend the day after the UCISA conference – a briefing day on the new HEA( Higher Education Academy) UK PSF (Professional Standards Framework) at Llandrindod Wells. This framework has a significant influence on cpd in HEIs, and also on the  organisation and content of PGCHE courses. The core knowledge outlined within the framework now contains an explicit reference to the use of technology:

“ …a range of technologies to enhance learning, including current innovations which support a diversity of learners, including those with visual and/or hearing impairments…
…the effectiveness of technologies for individual contexts”

There is also a requirement for evidence of this knowledge in several of the descriptors for different levels of HEA accreditation.
This development should help to enrich PGCHE courses, and will also serve the cause of supporting effective professional development in the use of learning technologies.

This month Cardiff played host to a roadshow about research data management, one in a series organised by the JISC-funded Digital Curation Centre. The aim of the events is to “allow every institution in the UK to prepare for effective research data management and understand more about how the DCC can help.”  The event was attended by several Welsh universities as well as staff from further afield. Perhaps appropriately for a topic that includes preservation, we met in the historic surroundings of the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama‘s Anthony Hopkins Centre. It soon became clear from the presentations that good research data management is about much more than simply preservation of data. It also has much to do with management and communication of research, and so needs to engage with the whole research lifecycle.

Most of the day focussed on case studies from Cardiff, Bristol and Swansea Universities, showing how they were tackling various challenges relating to research data management, often making use of free resources developed by the DCC. While the DCC has been around for some time, its role has shifted away from tools development to focus more on capacity building and advocacy, working closely with the research community. The leadership and support that it offers must be invaluable to support staff in institutions who can often find themselves working in isolation and have to combine research liaison with other responsibilities.

The most useful presentations for me were both about data curation in the humanities. Sarah Phillips, Records Manager at Cardiff University, gave a really interesting talk about how she has been working with Dr Steve Mills archaeology to ensure the longevity of his important data relating to historic sites in Southern Romania. As one of the projects was a community engagement project it was important that the data should be available for public access as well as for more purely academic purposes, and better curation could help minimise the many risks attached when academics are working on data in different locations. Making access to research data easier also saves academics time in the long run.

Later, after a session from Caroline Gardiner of Bristol University on storing data securely, Stephen Gray talked about data.bris, a JISC project. Stephen has an exciting-sounding role as a digital support officer, working with academics in the humanities to navigate the technology needed to support their research, not least so they can demonstrate maximum research impact in the REF (Research Excellence Framework) come 2014. Such was the original role of subject librarians a generation ago, and although their role in many universities has since become much more focussed on teaching, there seems to be a need for staff who can offer a ‘translation service”, combining digital or information fluency with research capability.

Martyn Guest of ARCCA (Advanced Research Computing @ Cardiff) focussed on the topic of High Performance Computing and whilst I did not grasp all the technical detail I did learn the meaning of a terabyte (1000 gigabytes), petabyte (1000 terabytes) and exabyte (one quintillion bytes). I also gained a better understanding of  High Performance Computing Wales . This involves £40m worth of supercomputing capacity, research institute and skills academy that aim to bring academia and industry together. In simple terms, as I understood it, it will be possible to move data around and work on it wherever there is most capacity. This will help the current “data tsunami” situation where apparently it is easier to send large quantities of data via Fedex rather than over networks!

For me, some of the most interesting discussion points during the day were around the need for better communication across departments (eg subject researchers and IT staff; records managers and archives) and the need for advocacy with senior management. IT services are critical to universities’ business engagement and the public dissemination of research that is required for economic prosperity as well as research quality. Yet research data are often still managed within faculties.

Apologies to Liz Lyon and Alex Roberts for not including reference to their presentations which unfortunately I missed! It was a pity that train problems made it difficult to attend the whole day. Not for the first time, I did wonder whether it would be helpful for events organisers to consider running ‘taster’ webinars alongside the face to face event programme. These could act as a ‘trailer’ or ‘taster’ for the big event and could widen the audience particularly at times of year where travel is particularly hard. Face to face contact is important though: the value of bonding over a spot of food and drink can be underrated, and the social element is also key to building cross-disciplinary relationships, especially in relatively new fields of endeavour.

The DCC website provides links to a wide range of resources and tools on research data management. For those wanting help with advocacy or just an overview, I can recommend their short briefing paper Making the case for RDM (research data management). You can also follow @digitalcuration on Twitter. Thanks to Janet Peters at Cardiff University and the staff of DCC for making the effort to bring the roadshow to Wales!

All the presentations from the event are now available here.

The European Conference on e-Learning 2011 took place at the University of Brighton this year (10-11 November), and I was there to present a case study (abstracts, p15) on work I undertook whilst at the University of Glamorgan. The event was truly international, with many attendees having travelled from well beyond the borders of Europe. There were keynotes from Don Clark, Grainne Conole and Anne Boddington, and well over 100 presentations organised into parallel streams covering topics such as Learning Management Systems, course design, evaluation, collaborative learning, VLEs, personalised learning, distance learning, teacher issues, and open source and open educational resources (OER). Most of the presentations were HE-focussed, though research was also presented from other sectors including schools.
VLEs seemed to dominate the technologies mentioned, thought there was also  reference to the use of audio feedback (eg. Fitzgerald, Northampton – abstracts, p26); accessibility (eg. Egan et al, Hertfordshire – abstracts p 22); mobile learning (eg. Fotheringham et al, Edinburgh – abstracts, p 28). I was particularly interested in ‘Peerwise’, a free online system of peer review involving students both producting and answering  multiple choice questions, and this has been trialled on Veterinary and Dental courses in Glasgow (Sykes at al – abstracts, p86). 

Throughout the event, evaluation was a particularly strong theme, with delegates seemingly more interested in checking the efficacy of existing technologies, or finding better ways to use them, than engaging with the cutting edge (I got the same impression at ALT-C, also). Perhaps this is sensible in times of economic uncertainty, and also provides a timely breathing space for the e-learning community to examine what open source and OER can offer.

On 1st November,  a group from the e-learning community gathered at the Open University in Milton Keynes to discuss criteria for effective e-learning. Our discussions covered not only best pedagogical practice but also economic and environmental issues, and though the focus was on HE,  the criteria could be applied to any educational sector. This consideration of e-learning criteria was associated with the JISC-funded Open University SusTeach project (Sustainable Tools for the Environmental Appraisal of the Carbon Impacts of HE Teaching Models Using ICTs), and also had links to other Green ICT initiatives including SusteIT (Sustainable Information Technology in Tertiary Education).
Here is my abbreviated version of the criteria that were discussed:-
Economic  Criteria
Open source software and OER (Open Educational Resources) should be used where possible to cut costs. Asynchronous and synchronous technologies were  mentioned as cost-effective substitutes to face-to-face teaching and other academic meetings, and reference was made to video-conferencing case studies from Wales featuring the WVN (and also referred to in one of Paul Richardson’s blogs earlier this year). It was also stated, however, that it is important that quality is not compromised for the sake of cost-saving.
Environmental Criteria
Professor Peter James from the University of Bradford made the point that many of the technologies that we now take for granted are not as ‘clean’ as we might like, and just the abundance of PCs leads to significant energy usage. Institutions need to ensure that they have ‘carbon management plans’ in place which enable them to see the energy costs of technology in its entirety – ie. covering departmental and personal computer use as well as data centres.
Pedagogic Criteria
Learning design – whether for single lectures or substantial programmes of study – should accommodate appropriate technologies to add variety and flexibility to teaching, learning and assessment. Issues of accessibility and inclusivity should also be borne in mind, along with staff development and learner support needs.

What is your view of these criteria? Should there be additional points made, or amendments?  You can comment here, or contact the SusTeach project group at the OU directly.

On 19th October I attended a conference at the Swalec Stadium at Cardiff entitled ‘Engaging Wales’ which show-cased the outputs of the initial phase of the Beacon for Wales projects.
The Beacon for Wales is one of six pilot Beacons for Public Engagement funded by the Higher Education Funding Councils, Research Councils UK and the Wellcome Trust. Beacons for Public Engagement are university-based collaborative centres to help support public engagement work across the UK. The Beacon for Wales is a partnership between Cardiff University, University of Glamorgan, Amgueddfa Cymru-National Museum of  Wales, Techniquest, and BBC Cymru Wales, though other Welsh HEIs were also involved. The projects to date have targeted in particular the 14-19 age range, rural communities, health and well-being, and cultural minority groups. The subject areas involved have been very varied covering science, history, and art amongst others.
The use of technology was not an explicit aspect of the projects, and yet I was interested to discover that many of them relied on technology in some way, and participants often picked up important digital skills as a consequence. For example, several projects included digital story-telling and hence the recording of mp3 files. Mp3 files were also important in a project jointly run between the Universities of Glamorgan and Cardiff to produce ‘audio walks’ for participants’ neighbourhoods. Blogs have also been used as an online journal to record participation in an archaeology dig at Cosmeston Mediaeval Village (‘Reclaiming our Past’ project coordinated by Cardiff University ), and video-blogs were used to record young peoples’ experiences at the Amelia Trust farm in a project run by UWIC. A project run by the University of Glamorgan has employed social networking tools like Facebook and YouTube to engage young people in genetics and help them learn about and discuss aspects of a topic which they might otherwise never encounter.

Artwork from the 'On Common Ground' project

The involvement of technology was sometimes covert – for example, in the art-fcussed ‘On Common Ground’ project run by the National Museum of Wales, young mothers had to learn how to operate a digital scanner in order to obtain pictures for a quilting activity. Interestingly, the Project Coordinator, Sarah Greenhalgh, mentioned that these young women had stipulated that they did not want to use IT on their project – does that imply negative experiences of school IT, or a general fear of anything new? The Beacon for Wales projects show, in any case, that previously unengaged  individuals can become enthusiastic learners – of technology and many other subjects – so long as the context is relevant and inspiring.

Well, not really a new face! Many of you will remember my previous FE and ITT-focussed work at RSC Wales, and you may have wondered why I’ve been so quiet of late, and why I have not contributed to RSC Wales blogs. The reason is that for the past nine months or so I’ve been working at the University of Glamorgan in an academic role undertaking the main duties of their JISC Building Capacity Project (and wrote several blogs whilst there!). I enjoyed my research activities at CELT at the University of Glamorgan, and learnt some valuable lessons about the ways Universities operate. However, I am now happy to be back at JISC RSC Wales where I currently have the role of ‘Associate HE Co-ordinator’, helping to look after the HE aspects of RSC Wales’ provision whilst Lis is involved with JISC Advance project work.

I’m looking forward to supporting the use of technology in Welsh Higher Education, and learning more about the excellent practice that goes on in many different subject areas across Wales. There are also many JISC projects underway to tell you about, and other initiatives such as HEFCW’s refreshed ELTT strategy and Gwella programme that continue to provide guidance for the effective use of educational technology in HE.

You can contact me at c.p.davies@swansea.ac.uk ; tel: 01792 602511

Key Note by william.neuheisel

Ahead of our forthcoming “Developing Digital Literacies” workshop I recently went along to a version of the event held in Bristol. I hope this summary will give a taster of what to expect if you book onto the workshop on 4 Nov, to be held by videoconference in Wales (book here by 24 October). Although I’m posting this on the HE blog, the event is open to all, and I feel is relevant not just to university practitioners, but to a  leaders and staff responsible for change in any role or sector.

I certainly came away with a feeling that I’d got a much better grip on what developing digital literacies might actually involve for staff and organisations. Perhaps just as importantly, I was able to see that there are a host of people from many backgrounds (academics, librarians, learning technologists, managers and more) who are enthusiastic about learning literacies in the digital age, and what’s more are eager to share knowledge and move things along.

The workshop outline and all materials from the workshops are easy to pick up from the JISC Design Studio. They provide a wealth of resources such as background research, case studies and tools that can be used both at a personal level and at an organisational level.

One definition of digital literacy is “those capabilities which fit an individual for living, learning and working in a digital society”. I must say that I quite like the inclusiveness and brevity of this. A confusing array of terms crops up around ‘learning literacies in a digital age’ (“information literacy”, “media literacy”, “ICT skills” to name but a few), and I tend to agree with a comment made on the JISC-DIGLIT-PUBLIC list:

“…’digital literacy’ is most useful as a kind of shorthand for exchanging ideas in this area, among people from different professional and academic backgrounds. It may be that the term has almost no currency in our ‘home’ professional roles or academic tribes – and it certainly has little with students – but it saves us from all talking a different language when we meet to discuss the challenges.”

In the workshop we started with an ice-breaking activity around the attributes of a digitally literate person. We focussed on “graduates” but I felt the exercise could be readily applied to any learner, employee or citizen. There was a chance to review some of the lessons about “supporting learners in a digital age” that came out of the JISC SLiDA programme (University of Glamorgan was one of the case studies).

After considering learner needs we were tasked with identifying interventions that could be made at different levels to support different aspects of digital literacy. For the activities we used free JISC templates which can be adapted for use in your organisation. These materials are all easily available to download under a Creative Commons licence, but using them in a practical workshop like this means that they become tools to aid the thought process, rather than just blank forms!

After a sociable lunch we had what I think was one of the highlights of the day, a case study by Charl Fregona of London Metropolitan University, who talked about their experience of implementing institutional change around digital literacies and in particular engaging and supporting staff. Charl’s good humour and honesty were inspiring. Her presentation will, I hope, be added to the Design Studio shortly and in the meantime you can look up the London Met SLiDA case study. I particularly liked the London Met idea of having ‘show and tell’ sessions in the library that included not only academics, librarians and other staff but also students. Charl was also passionate in making the case for staff having time to reflect. As others also said, technology should be freeing us up to do the most meaningful human work in education. This reminded me of a comment made at a conference last year, when someone suggested that in future we would focus not so much on ‘technology-enhanced learning’ but ‘human-enhanced learning’. I would suggest digital literacy might be the key that can enable this to happen. (The image by william.neuheisel above, by the way, is of a work by American artist Michael Christian, of which more here).

We finished the day by identifying our own recommendations for things that staff in different roles should be doing develop digital literacies. All the material generated across the workshop series is being collated here (via various collaborative authoring and social media tools) and I look forward to us being able to add our own contributions at the 4 November workshop.

Lastly, to give a flavour of the discussions at Bristol, I captured a selection of tweets from the day in the form of Storify. It was one of those events where Twitter truly added to the learning, with both attendees and facilitators commenting and questioning in a reflective way. The hashtag for the whole workshop series and related discussion is #jiscdiglit and it’s a great way to keep up with the debate (and of course contribute).

One of the main things that struck me about the day was that although the focal point was ‘digital literacies’, it tied into many of today’s burning themes, like employability, learner experience, inclusion and staff development. In fact it’s hard to think of any area in education, be it front-line teaching, services or research, that does not  have something to gain from better approaches to digital literacy, and does not need to be involved in its development.

I look forward to meeting lots of colleagues from Wales and beyond on 4 Nov to explore digital literacies even further, and if you haven’t already booked, do so here before places disappear (deadline 24 Oct)!

 Interesting also to observe that the term 'digital literacy' is most useful as a kind of shorthand for exchanging ideas in this area, among people from different professional and academic backgrounds. It may be that the term has almost no currency in our 'home' professional roles or academic tribes - and it certainly has little with students - but it saves us from all talking a different language when we meet to discuss the challenge'digital literacy' is most useful as a kind of shorthand for exchanging ideas in this area, among people from different professional and academic backgrounds. It may be that the term has almost no currency in our 'home' professional roles or academic tribes - and it certainly has little with students - but it saves us from all talking a different language when we meet to discuss the challenges.s.

Over the summer months a couple of publications have appeared which will be important reading not only for those engaged in technology innovation or the enhancement of learning and teaching in Higher Education, but also for those who need to engage with the HE sector. We’ve also seen the launch of a number of JISC-funded programmes, several of which hold opportunities for direct participation by Wales.

Earlier this year, a review was undertaken into the implementation of Enhancing Learning and Teaching through Technology: a Strategy for Higher Education in Wales. When HEFCW published the strategy (as circular W08/12HE) back in April 2008, it was realised that the strategy would need to be reviewed at intervals. A consultancy was commissioned to undertake the first review between March and June 2011, and the results are now published on the HEFCW website as HEFCW Enhancing Learning Through Technology (ELTT) Strategy Implementation Review.  The review includes a number of recommendations to which HEFCW are currently responding. In addition, it provides a very useful overview of the current state of play in the Welsh Higher Education sector as regards innovation through technology, together with valuable survey data and citations of relevant research. Many staff in Wales gave their time and expertise to participate in the review and it is pleasing to see the reviewers state, “We encountered a vibrant and enthusiastic community engaged in technology-enhanced learning who, despite all of the challenges they face, were remarkably optimistic about the future.” We look forward to playing our part in assisting the HE sector in Wales as it continues to build on this strong foundation.

Back in June we saw the publication of the final report and briefings resulting from the Gwella project (see the Gwella blog for details) and over the summer it was confirmed that some continuation work would take place during 2011-2012. Again we look forward to working with the Gwella consultancy team and the institutions in the coming year.

Also published on the HEFCW website over the summer was the Building Capacity Wales programme summary report. Building Capacity funding from JISC enabled institutions to identify a key strategic priority and use JISC or other publicly-funded resources to help them address that priority. More detailed information about many of the projects are available on the JISC Building Capacity Programme page, along with many other projects from England. The project reports and case studies on the site provide good examples of how existing research and project outputs can be used to inform better institutional decision-making. Priorities addressed included e.g. assessment and feedback, staff engagement and employability.

Over the summer many HE institutions have been busy considering bids for JISC funding and it is great to hear when bids from Wales have been successful. New projects, for example PADDLE and Digidol in the Developing Digital Literacies programme, have potential in due course to build capacity not only for the lead institutions and partners, but also across the wider education sector. We’ve also heard that there has been success for Welsh HE in the recent round of bids for the Assessment and Feedback Programme – congratulations to those who are starting those projects.

One of the latest rounds of bids has been the Transformations Programme (it closed on 15 September). Welsh Higher Education institutions have been able to bid for this funding (the Welsh colleges will want to look out for announcements later in the coming months about opportunities for FE participation). This programme will operate on a similar principle to the Building Capacity programme in that it aims to “help institutions move towards organisational change through the application of existing JISC and other resources” in order to ” a. Enhance their student experience; b. Improve the efficiency of their business and become agile in a climate of change; c. Enhance their organisational capability for business and community engagement”. This provides yet further opportunity to aid innovation in the Welsh HE sector.

Image by kenfagerdotcom (Flickr Creative Commons)

If you are starting a new project, do let us know as we are always delighted to do what we can to help technology-related projects (JISC funded or otherwise) to maximise their reach across Wales and beyond. Good luck to all projects running this year!

Improving practice through scholarship: raising the bar was the theme of a conference at Coleg Llandrillo on 5 July, attended mainly by the college’s HE lecturers but also by visitors from other colleges as far afield as Bridgend; universities; Colegau Cymru and the Higher Education Academy. RSC Wales contributed a keynote and workshops on ‘Scholarship in the digital age’. Here is a brief report on what we felt was an excellent event.

Orme View Conference Centre

In the beautiful setting of the Orme View Conference Centre at the Rhos-on-Sea campus, we began with an address from Huw Evans, Principal of Coleg Llandrillo. He spoke about the distinctiveness of HE in FE and identified a number of defining characteristics of HE in Wales:

• marketisation
• regionalisation as a principle of planning (regional identity is important)
• widening participation (including employer relations)
• Welsh language
• Employability (which it is felt FE are particularly strong on)

Jackie Doodson, Vice-Principal (Planning and Standards) gave us a very useful update on the current HE fees situation. It was great to see that learning technology is seen as a way for the college to continue to offer wider access to HE.

Keynotes

We had two thought-provoking yet down-to-earth keynotes in the morning, from Dr Phil Bassett (Dean of Education at Glyndwr University) and Dr Fay Short (Lecturer in Psychology at Bangor University). Both did a great job, I thought, of demystifying aspects of the pedagogical research process.

Phil’s talk was entitled The Scholarship of Learning and Teaching: a public or private affair? He reminded us that scholarship included sharing and applying new knowledge, not just reading (though critically studying the literature is important). He spoke of discovery and integration, as well as application, and remarked that we can’t necessarily assume that we all mean the same thing by ‘scholarship’.  Other points I noted:

• pedagogy is the subject lecturer’s ‘second discipline’
• performance and professional development should be closely aligned
• it should be acceptable to say that you encounter problems in your teaching
• we need to learn to make measurable that which we know to be important
• good scholarly teachers try new things

Fay gave a lively talk on Reflective research: improve your teaching through scholarship. Her main theme was that it is possible to ‘kill two birds with one stone” (the two birds in this case being research and teaching). She made her case by referring to efforts she had made to embark on scholarly activity within a largely teaching role, for example by doing book reviews. As she pointed out, you need to keep up to date in your subject in any case, so why not get your work valued as scholarship by writing it up (you may even get a small fee into the bargain). Fay talked about how she had changed her assessment on a science module to provide group feedback, then writing it up as a scholarly paper (publication pending!). Some of her tips for beginners included: give consideration to ethics if publishing (there may be no problems but you need to check); also, be prepared to try several journals and don’t be afraid of the first rejection emails. There are journals which actually want to help new researchers get published. Many disciplines have journals specially devoted to teaching in the subject (including the Academy’s various journals). There are also general peer-reviewed journals geared to HE-in-FE such as Journal of Education and Work and Journal of Further and Higher Education.

Case studies

After coffee we had three short inputs from college staff who told their own story of how they had made progress in undertaking scholarly activity based on their teaching.

Teacher-educator Robin Trangmar‘s advice to the audience was: “Read, communicate, do it, share it!” He gave examples of how he had exploited social media tools, for example to investigate QR codes in education. It was great to hear Robin cite his recent webinar for RSC Wales’ Online Summer Bytes series, as a good way for FE lecturers to disseminate their pedagogical research – thank you for the mention Robin! He’s in the process of delivering various publications on his research under the title Using crowdsourcing and social learning networks in teacher education, in  collaboration with Alec Couros. If you’d like to see the presentation Robin did for the RSC Wales Summer Bytes event you can access the slides here and the recording on the event webpage here.

Graham Hembrough and John Hedley (lecturers respectively in photography and printmaking) gave a really interesting account of how they carried out an Arts Council of Wales-funded project to explore relationships between digital and traditional printmaking techniques. They argued that by extending their creative practice in this way, sharing their work with academic and gallery communities, they maintained their credibility as teachers. What began as a small-scale project now promises to lead onto international links and further research.

Elizabeth Day, lecturer in Psychology, took as her theme Reflecting on learning: effect or artifact? She had investigated structured reflection with her students in an attempt to improve their performance. Points I picked up included:

• a key priority was to help students become independent and develop their critical thinking skills
• she was keen to avoid the trap whereby reflective journals are “fabricated” simply in order to pass an assignment, hence the choice of a structured approach to reflection in class
• her research had found that students differed widely in their responses to structured reflection
• recommended resource: Jenny Moon’s Guide for Busy Academics no. 4: Learning through Reflection

For the rest of the morning staff had opportunities to audit their individual scholarly activity over the past year, identify good practice with others, look at the college’s draft ‘Improving Practice through Scholarship (IPS) Model’, and consider scholarly activity for the coming year.

Scholarship in the digital age

After lunch we focussed on ‘Scholarship in the digital age’: I gave a keynote (available on Slideshare here), focussing on some of the ways that social media might assist the research process (or example in discovering new resources and opportunities, and in dissemination) and the skills that are likely to be required of the digitally literate researcher. In preparing the talk, I found the Research Information Network’s Social Media: a guide for researchers immensely useful, particularly the case studies and the one-page Links and Resources guide (a handy overview of social media for anyone: I discovered quite a few new resources there). JISC’s work on digital literacies and the new Information Literacy Framework for Wales have also been very helpful in updating my knowledge. Paul Richardson, Sharon Crossan and myself then worked with three workshop groups to explore some key questions:

Wordle from Conference #dr10 The Digital Researcher http://www.flickr.com/photos/ajc1/4437163129/

• in what ways do you think digital communication can help or hinder you in developing scholarly activity?
• How could the development of digital scholarly approaches have an impact on other areas of work
• What new skills do you think are needed by the digitally literate researcher?

The 60 or so staff had a great deal to say, so it was difficult to fulfil the requirement to come up with just two priorities and one question per group! We captured as much of the discussion as possible via a combination of the RSC Wales text wall and good old fashioned flipchart, and RSC Wales collated the results speedily via a Google doc for the college to use in developing their HE plans.

Reflected on the discussions later, the following thoughts came to mind:

• in FE, when talking about scholarship, the discussion returns frequently to teaching and to the students. This interplay reflects the nature of HE-in-FE and is an asset to be valued.
• there could be some tension between the technologies which HE-in-FE staff might want to use for research purposes, and the technology needs of their HE students. There are also differences between the technology environment needed for HE, and the particularl needs of younger or vulnerable learners in the college (eg with respect to safeguarding).
• there continues to be debate around the concept of digital immigrants/digital natives, though there is a growing awareness that students are not all expert technology users.
• in research, the choice of digital approaches may be wider and more personal than in teaching, where the supported tools and policies are more likely to be laid down by the provider. Whilst this freedom to choose your own tools/techniques could be seen as liberating, there is a challenge in terms of how staff can be helped to make informed choice (this is true in universities too).

Paul Richardson feeds back from the workshop

We’re very grateful to the staff for their readiness to engage with us in thoughtful and critical reflection on technologies, digital literacies and policies.

At the start of the day, HE Manager Mary Pritchard had defined the purpose of the event as being to:

• offer a spring board to capture scholarly activity
• demystify the research process
• offer some tools to help staff to work smarter
• offer practical ways to improve performance

I hope we were able to offer some suggestions on all these fronts. Congratulations and thanks to Mary and  colleagues for a very successful event. All being well, there should be no shortage of HE-in-FE presenters to talk about their research at our conferences in a couple of years’ time!

Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/jdhancock/

Here’s my brief report on some of the sessions I attended on day 1 of Summer Bytes, the RSC Wales webinar extravaganza taking place 21-23 June.

It’s just to give you a flavour of the discussions and encourage you to look into some of the event resources in more detail.

Presentations, recordings and other resources are available here, and if you’re reading this during the event and want to follow it on Twitter, the hashtag is #sbytes.

Niall Sclater (Head of Learning Innovation, The Open University) : Future Scenarios for Blended Learning

We got off to a cracking start with nearly 70 participants for Niall’s session. Niall took as a starting point a business analyst’s view of the Top Ten Strategic Priorities for 2011, strategic technologies being defined as

“an existing technology that has matured and/or become suitable for a wider range of uses. It may also be an emerging technology that offers an opportunity for strategic business advantage for early adopters or with potential for significant market disruption in the next five years”

In the field of educational technology, Niall saw the future as being Interactive (illustrated by a number of examples of how the OU is developing online assessment and feedback); Mobile (some interesting-sounding e-books developments were mentioned); Social (interesting discussion about preferences for keeping study and other life  separate; as well as Facebook, Niall also noted the nature crowdsourcing site iSpot ); and Personal. I was interested in Niall’s comments on the importance of being able to annotate to assist learning and I will have to follow up some of his ideas on his Learning Innovation blog (this ties in with another blog post recently by Donald Clark on the value of note-taking for learning).

The mobile learning topic was probably the one that sparked the most questions in the online chat, but participants also picked up on issues of student preferences and engagement. Clearly there is so much we don’t know about the future, but at least with Niall’s advice we have a few pointers as to where to focus our attention in the next year or so.

Hannah Mathias (ILT Development Manager, St David’s Catholic College) – SharePoint

For the second session of the day we switched our focus to business efficiency: Hannah Mathias shared her experience of introducting SharePoint 2010 to provide an intranet for her college (though as she pointed out, SharePoint 2010 can be used for more than just an intranet). It was interesting to hear the value placed on features such as automatic retention schedules to assist with legal compliance, and graphical reporting to aid decision-making. They haven’t had a chance to explore all the possibilities yet, but so far staff have responded well to the new system. During the session we had some enquiries about sources of training and I came across this forthcoming seminar organised by UCISA which may be of interest (it’s open to non-members too).

It struck me that the webinar format was ideal for the sort of session Hannah presented. It’s the sort of short informal contribution that if we were limited to f2f, might get slotted into a network meeting (but then would only get heard by a few). The webinar format allowed a wide range of people to hear a bang up-to-date experience from someone who has recently tackled some of the challenges others are about to face, and was willing to respond personally and directly to individual questions.

After that I took a short break from #sbytes to attend two more meetings (in other online spaces!) then returned to listen into the last session of the day which I’ll blog about later.