Friday
Jun122009
Libraries and Learning in the E-environment
Friday, June 12, 2009 at 1:02PM
Yesterday I attended a stimulating and interesting event at the ELISA Open Forum 2009 - Libraries & Learning in the E-environment in Edinburgh. The programme was packed but well paced with lots of interesting presentations, discussions and cross sector delegates from library and information services in Edinburgh.
The morning keynote speaker was Nora Mogey, Head of Learning Services, Information Services, University of Edinburgh on "All kinds of E-verything". Nora went through the alpahabet informing us of lots of useful tools / free stuff that she / the university are using. Examples included:
Nora stressed that eLearning is not about learning online, the focus is on learning (pedagogy).
Elspeth Scott, ICT and elearning Staff Tutor, Dundee City Council Education Development Service - talked about "GLOW: the national learning arena for schools". Elspeth is an experienced school librarian and GLOW mentor. In her introductory session Elspeth gave an overview of GLOW stressing that it was not about IT / ICT but about learning and that it was an opportunity for librarians both school and public. For those that wanted to know more this was followed up in the share and discussion section. Elspeth logged onto GLOW to show interested parties what Dundee had added and the various aspects of GLOW in response to questions asked. The latest news includes:
Nicola Osbourne is a Social Media Officer at EDINA who is also a student study social media who gave us "A Day in an E-Life: E-Ventures in Studying, Working and Living!" This was a fascinating insight into her personal, work and student life which she says "all overlap" and through technology is "always on". She likes doing 5 things at once and said that her learning takes place through Skype and Second Life. It is not a life that I am familiar with or would want to emulate but it is the life of many young people and a life style that educators should be aware of.
Other presentations were:
The day finished with Hamish Macleod from the MSc programme in E-learning at Edinburgh University who talked about the programme which has part time students from all over the world and his thoughts and experiences. He did make reference to pedagogical principles and talked about capitalising on 'teachable moments' when someone wants to know something they want to learn. The term wasn't knew to me as I had come across it in the book I'm currently reading about Practical Pedagogy for Library Instructors - which I will post another time. Now I need to get on with sending out the information I promised people yesterday.
Hopefully the presentations will be made available through the ELISA website and next year's event will be just as successful. Well done to the ELISA committee and Wendy ball the ELISA Development Officer for a great day.
The morning keynote speaker was Nora Mogey, Head of Learning Services, Information Services, University of Edinburgh on "All kinds of E-verything". Nora went through the alpahabet informing us of lots of useful tools / free stuff that she / the university are using. Examples included:
- V for Voice Thread - you can record your thoughts about multimedia images - pictures, presentations, documents for example a class could make a multimedia presentation.
- K - Kineo - described as lots of e-learning free stuff
- A - Audacity - lets you record things, simple to use you download the software and your recordings go onto a file which you can then use. Edinburgh University are encouraging staff to use it to give feedback to students.
- X - eXams - Edinburgh University are offering students the option to use computers for exams (text based ones only not possible for maths or diagram based exams) instead of using pens to write out their exam answers. a third of students have chosen this option.
- W - Wordle - lets you produce a cloud / word tag.
- J - JING - lets you take pictures of your screen, record videos off onscreen action, share instantly over the web, IM , email.
- H - Hot Potatoes - lets you construct quizzes, crosswords etc. for the web.
Nora stressed that eLearning is not about learning online, the focus is on learning (pedagogy).
Elspeth Scott, ICT and elearning Staff Tutor, Dundee City Council Education Development Service - talked about "GLOW: the national learning arena for schools". Elspeth is an experienced school librarian and GLOW mentor. In her introductory session Elspeth gave an overview of GLOW stressing that it was not about IT / ICT but about learning and that it was an opportunity for librarians both school and public. For those that wanted to know more this was followed up in the share and discussion section. Elspeth logged onto GLOW to show interested parties what Dundee had added and the various aspects of GLOW in response to questions asked. The latest news includes:
- all 32 local authorities have now signed up to GLOW with 25 of them starting to use GLOW
- there is a pilot for Parent's accessing GLOW to see their child's work on GLOW
- Teacher Training are in - they will be using GLOW next session
- there is a pilot with FE colleges - Dundee College
- local authorities can decided who they involve as partners for instances - their public libraries or other organisations that may be beneficial.
Nicola Osbourne is a Social Media Officer at EDINA who is also a student study social media who gave us "A Day in an E-Life: E-Ventures in Studying, Working and Living!" This was a fascinating insight into her personal, work and student life which she says "all overlap" and through technology is "always on". She likes doing 5 things at once and said that her learning takes place through Skype and Second Life. It is not a life that I am familiar with or would want to emulate but it is the life of many young people and a life style that educators should be aware of.
Other presentations were:
- how Stevenson College are experimenting with e-technologies including Web 2.0 tools as their VLE is not being used
- Edinburgh City Libraries - Virtual Library a work in progress which includes their Capital Collections which gives online access to some amazing and unique prints, photographs, engravings and drawings held by the library. In addition to participating in the online Enquire service (formerly ask a librarian) there is Ask Scotland which is an email service for questions about Scotland. They are launching in the autumn a community information database - Your Edinburgh.
- digital services for parliamentarians - Scottish Parliament Information Centre (SPICe)
- Waverley Care - who offer information and advice about HIV and Hepatitis C. This was an interesting insight into the work of agencies like this who found that in order to provide the information they first had to help people with skill building and confidence resulting in offerring classes (with Adult Literacy educators and other agencies) e.g. in IT, literacy, confidence.
The day finished with Hamish Macleod from the MSc programme in E-learning at Edinburgh University who talked about the programme which has part time students from all over the world and his thoughts and experiences. He did make reference to pedagogical principles and talked about capitalising on 'teachable moments' when someone wants to know something they want to learn. The term wasn't knew to me as I had come across it in the book I'm currently reading about Practical Pedagogy for Library Instructors - which I will post another time. Now I need to get on with sending out the information I promised people yesterday.
Hopefully the presentations will be made available through the ELISA website and next year's event will be just as successful. Well done to the ELISA committee and Wendy ball the ELISA Development Officer for a great day.