Benchmarking & Pathfinder – End of “Funded Phase” Report

September 29th, 2008 No Comments

by Derek Morrison, 29 September 2008

The end of the funded phase of the HE Academy/JISC Benchmarking & Pathfinder Programme is marked by the release today of this generally upbeat report by the Academy about what has been achieved, how it has been achieved, and what has still to be achieved. Readers should keep in mind that a key principle of the whole programme was to provide participating institutions with an opportunity (and some support) to analyse and reflect on their own e-learning processes, provision and practices; and then translate that into action for self-improvement and evaluation thereof.

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B&P Final Report (206 KB, PDF – right click to download)

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eBooks and the e-learning ‘filling station’ revisited

September 25th, 2008 3 Comments

by Derek Morrison, 25 September 2008 (addendum added 26 September 2008, Plastic Logic update 19 February 2009)

In my November 2004 Auricle post A ‘filling station’ model of e-learning? I posited a ‘filling station’ view of e-learning which was at variance with the then dominant VLE view of the online learning world. I reflected on the learning potential of the increasingly ubiquitous mobile multifunction/multimedia devices that can play games, communicate, make telephone calls, play audio and video, store data and don’t need to be connected to a local or wide area network to function, but are enhanced by doing so. There are also a series of related Auricle postings on the topic. Here we are in 2008 and so I thought it was time to revisit and extend the ‘filling station’ metaphor to include considerations of the ‘vehicles’ and their ‘drivers’. I’ll be focusing mainly, but not exclusively, on one category of vehicle, i.e. ebooks.

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You take the high road …

September 24th, 2008 No Comments

by Derek Morrison, 24 September 2008

Reflecting Education Vol 4, No 1 (2008) ‘From Pedagogic Research to Embedded E-Learning’, contains articles by three Pathfinder projects, i.e. Leicester, Hertfordshire, and the Institute of Education plus a context-setting article by Terry Mayes and myself.

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QA-QE SIG web-site launched at ALT-C 2008

September 16th, 2008 No Comments

by Derek Morrison, 16 September 2008

The QA-QE SIG web-site has just been launched at ALT-C 2008. New members are being invited to register for the SIG via the link on the home page. Members are expected to actively participate in the online community – for instance, participation in discussions and uploading (or giving links to) resources and case studies. The site also offers a webcast which shows the features and functionality of the member area – you can link to this from the home page. It’s great to see how the institutions participating in the Pathfinder Programme have taken ownership and are attempting to progress the agenda in this extraordinarily important area. Well done all!

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QA-QE SIG ALT-C 2008 flyer (33 KB pdf).

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Storm Clouds?

September 9th, 2008 No Comments

by Derek Morrison, 9 September 2008 (addendum added 26 September 2008)

The recent release of Google’s Chrome is not intended to offer just another web browser to a marketplace already largely segmented by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Mozilla’s Firefox, or the eponymous Opera (plus a few other more minor players). No, Chrome is meant to advance the concept of ‘cloud’ computing.

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Indiscrete addressability (a Third Life addendum)

September 4th, 2008 No Comments

by Derek Morrison, 4 September 2008

Following on from yesterday’s posting Third Life – Auricle: the next generation (Auricle, 3 September 2008) here’s a few more reflections on blogs as information object repositories. I believe the issues addressed yesterday and in today’s posting are relevant to any context where unique and persistent object identities matter, not just blogs.

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Third Life – Auricle: the next generation

September 3rd, 2008 1 Comment

by Derek Morrison, 3 September 2008

Over on the JISC-PoWR (Preservation of Web Resources) site there’s a posting entitled Auricle: The Case Of The Disappearing E-learning Blog (1 September 2008). Yes, that’s right this blog is the ‘disappeared’. While it’s a new experience becoming such a case study the author, Brian Kelly certainly raises some interesting issues. Although I’ve already contributed a comment on the PoWR site in today’s post to Auricle I’m taking the opportunity to expand on the points I made there.

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Psst … want to ‘see’ a good podcast?

June 15th, 2008 No Comments

by Derek Morrison, 15 June 2008

The Podcasting for Pedagogic Purposes (PPP) SIG is one of the five Pathfinder Network Projects. I participated in the well-attended third face-to-face event at the Warrington campus of the University of Chester on Wednesday (11 June 2008). Particular respect is due to the SIG for including a delegation of students as contributers to one of the afternoon workshops. The main source of information about the SIG appears to have gravitated to a PPP pbwiki site rather than one hosted by any particular university. I find this preference for, and growing confidence in, external services such as “ning” and “pbwiki” quite interesting.

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Lock-in, Lock out?

May 3rd, 2008 No Comments

by Derek Morrison, 3 May 2008

The central argument of Jonathan Zittrain’s book The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It is that the concept of “generativity” that has been unleashed by Web 2.0 is being increasingly compromised by increasingly ubiquituous appliances that may do limited things well but which lock or tether the appliance owner to the range of services offered by a supplier, e.g. games consoles, iPods, iPhones, internet phones etc. The result, Zittrain argues, is that these appliances may appear to offer a level of security, efficiency, and usability that the sometimes choppy seas of the internet cannot, but that they also compromise the innovative culture of the internet and reduce freedoms. In previous Auricle postings I’ve commented on the loss of freedoms that the advent of hardware/software internet appliances can represent.

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Take me to your thought leader!

January 28th, 2008 No Comments

by Derek Morrison, originally posted 11 January 2008 (updated 13 January and 28 January 2008)

For some time I’ve been mulling over the thorny question of leadership in this era of “digital democracy”, Web 2.0, “user-generated content”, and “wisdom of the crowds”. Consequently, I much welcomed the 9 January 2008 posting All about me by Jane Plenderleith and Veronica Adamson from the Academy’s Evaluation & Dissemination Support Team (EDSuT). Jane and Veronica’s posting raises a number of interesting questions about the nature and use of weblogs as well as other so called Web 2.0 technologies, not just by the institutions taking part in our Benchmarking & Pathfinder Programme, but also more generally. Because my response is considerably longer than is comfortable either to author or read in a comment field I offer readers this posting to complement All about me.

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