Ascilite Day One
I sorry that I’ve not been able to blog earlier, but have been suffering from a bad mix of dead battery and fried RAM!
Yesterday’s conference was an interesting start to the proceedings. Mike Spector from Floria State gave a witty, and perceptive keynote on his work on how experts and novices figure things out, ie that the process that professionals use in deciding how to do the things we do.
Next up there was a session on ICT Strategies and Institutional change. One of the speakers was Grainne Conole, from the Open University, formerly of Southampton University in the UK. The OU has decided that their Learning Management System from February will be the open source software, Moodle. This has feed right into the very vigorous debate that is happening in e-Learning work around the software that you pay for, and the software that you don’t. Of course it’s naif to think that moving to a LMS like Moodle or Saaki has zero cost implications. With a lot of Open Source material you have to pay for support, or where support isn’t available you have to make this resource available in house. Recently Charles Sturt made the strategic decision that they would go with Sakai. I guess we will watch what happens with the OU’s experience of Moodle, and what CSU experience of Sakai will tell us. Though maybe the future of elearning isn’t about a LMS at all, and where the interesting stuff will happen in the area of social networking…hmmm, more on that anon.
The afternoon was given over to podcasting. We at VU don’t have any real infrastructure for podcasting at the moment, but I hope to sort this is sooner rather than later. I know there are pedagogic issues around ‘just putting lectures on the internet’, but I think that more and more students are beginning to expect this sort of service as a routine thing. This sort of development will be incremental, but at VU we do have some exciting projects that we’ll be able to talk about soon.
I’m looking forward to hearing from Scott Wilson, this morning. Scott works for CETIS, which is a research arm of JISC in the UK. He’s going to talking about a JISC funding project on ‘personalised learning’.
Back into the hall!
David
