by Derek Morrison, 14 December 2010
I post to a number of technology in HE related blogs and when I feel there are items of general interest I also post them here in Auricle. This is one such posting which today focuses on the work of one special interest group.
There are now a number of special interest groups in the UK HE sector focusing and exploring various aspects of enhancing learning through the use of technology which the UK’s Higher Education Academy has helped give birth to, e.g. ELESIG, MELSIG, QAQESIG, SSELF, HEthicsWeb2.0, ESTICT, and just getting underway Games, Virtual Worlds and Higher Education. These SIGs are totally self-organising entities which plan and run their own online and face-to-face events, create their own resource bases, seek sponsorship, establish synergies, and, in some cases, undertake small scale investigations into their particular foci of interest; all are good examples of how peer education and development can make a valuable contribution to the HE ecosystem. We should also note that there are also other SIGs set up independently of the UK HE Academy such as the Association for Learning Technolgy’s (ALT) Video in Education SIG (ViE SIG) and Learning Environment Review SIG (LERSIG).
I try to participate in as many SIG events as is possible and so I attended the ESTICT event at the University of Bath on the 17 November 2010, which was one very wet and windy day. I found the whole day stimulating and although a SIG with the name “Engaging students through in-class technology” could easily have swayed towards the last word in its title it was obvious that it was “engagement” that provided the underlying ethos for the group’s work. There were many excellent and interesting presentations but it was the approach taken by the keynote speaker Derek Bruff (who is the author of Teaching with Classroom Response Systems : Creating Active Learning Environments) that I want to focus on in this posting. Derek’s creative approach to his keynote provided a masterclass in how employing hybrid multimedia asynchronous/ synchronous modes of communication can mitigate the tyranny of time and distance; all those interested in online distance education should take note. I grossly simplify the activity segue of Derek’s process but in essence its components were:
- A Camtasia recording of his presentation with a talking head video in the right hand corner (presented during Derek’s sleep time)
- In the concluding part of this recorded part of his presentation Derek initiated a delegate activity with feedback to be authored in Google Moderator, i.e. questions, comments, and voting on comments
- A live link to Derek later in the event (albeit early in the morning for him) during which he used Adobe Connect presenter to respond to the highest rated questions in the Google Moderator instance and provided excellent examples of using various forms of “backchannel” to promote active learning and engage students in their learning.
I found the above segue interesting because the combination of recorded primer for an activity followed by at least some elments of live interaction meant that the separation by time and distance became largely irrelevant. I have attended a number of fully live events that were less interesting and engaging than this one.
Although Google Moderator was used in this instance other presentation or engagement tools/platforms can be used, e.g.
Regarding the last of the above list Derek Bruff highlighted the the University of Texas Twitter Experiment as example of catalysing class discussions using Twitter (Monica Rankin’s video on YouTube should be of interest); as should her conclusions on the experiment.
Although my focus in this posting was Derek’s approach to engagement at a distance other standout parts of the day included the University of Bath’s use of Panopto lecture capture software.
Some related links to explore
ESTICT Derek Bruff keynote part 1
http://derekbruff.com/talks/estict_partone/estict_partone.html
ESTICT Derek Bruff keynote part 2
http://derekbruff.com/talks/estict_parttwo/estict_parttwo.html
The Google Moderator thread generated as part of the activity
http://tinyurl.com/estictkeynote
All ESTICT@Bath resources
https://wiki.bath.ac.uk/display/estaffdev/ESTICT+at+Bath
