The Auricle

I presented an opening keynote at the Open University Business School on Friday (23 September 2005) for the Cambridge-MIT Institute�s conference Innovations in the Reuse of Electronic Learning Materials: Enabling Communities of Practice. I had my Higher Education Academy hat on, but given the conference theme and the aim of the keynote to stimulate reflection […]

Stephen Downes was the theme leader for the collaboration strand at ALT-C 2005 and, as expected, his combination of wry humour, incisive criticism and lateral thinking made him an ideal antidote to cognitive overload. But if you were someone who has tended to think of collaboration as inherently ‘good’ then some of Stephen’s points could […]

Coming in from left field on the e-learning research arena and with more than a dash of common sense re accessibility, comes Lawrie Phipps of TechDis, Brian Kelly of UKOLN, and the University of Bristol's Caro Howell who scooped the best research paper award at ALT-C 2005. You can read the abstract of Implementing A […]

Like many in the UK learning technology arena, we’re off to Manchester on Monday evening ready for the ALT-C 2005 conference on Tuesday. ALT-C 2005 has the overarching theme Exploring the frontiers of e-learning – borders, outposts and migration. The University of Bath has a number of interesting contributions but the Higher Education Academy (to […]

There is an interesting discussion in the Moodle forums about discussion forums and blogs. Martin Dougiamas has been considering adding a blog to Moodle but feels that he has found a big conceptual problem which he has thrown open to the Moodle community. What this lengthy discussion is showing is how much variance there is […]

BBC Radio4’s Analysis programme of 4 August 2005 titled BA UK (4 August 2005) is a must listen for those interested in all sides of the debate about the reasons for, and impact of, the escalting recruitment of overseas students to UK Higher Education. Compare and contrast the changing attitude and rationale of a tiny […]

In yesterday's Keeping it simple - is it too late? post I was in medium level rant mode, so today I want to drop down a gear (but only a little:) and focus on one example of what I mean by discrete tools to support learning. Let's suspend reality for a moment. Let's assume that, […]

In today's post I'm back to the theme of let's create/exploit really simple learning support solutions instead of endlessly trying to lock ourselves to increasingly complex multifunction 'managed' learning environments whose inevitable bias always ends up more towards the 'managed' than the 'learning'. Regular readers will know that since the inception of Auricle I've tried […]

Recently I was asked to give a presentation to a group of lifelong learning tutors at my university wih the theme 'e-Learning in the lifelong learning context – opportunities and challenges' and so this post provides a brief summary of this event. Most UK HEIs are still pretty much based on the premise that most […]

In my BBC TV Goes Broadband post (Auricle 18 July 2005), I suggested that the BBC should be a champion of open standards media distribution. At the moment the corporation ends up indirectly promoting the uptake of the proprietary RealMedia format. I also proposed that MP4 downloads would be a good thing to see as […]