TEL Away Day - Morning - eTools

Away day for our section within IET -

TEL - Technology Enhanced Learning.

In the first part of the session we divided into groups to discuss the various tools such as Wikis, Twitter, blogs.

Martin reported back from our group about Wikis - we felt there should be a clear focus for their use e.g. to support meetings where people can add to or correct texts.

Eileen reported on Twitter: what would you use it for? the barrier between work and other parts of your life...Twitter however was considered a safer area. Eileen liked the brevity of it. Patrick commented on the life-work boundary, conversations of which were more likely to occur over coffee...in our case me, Agnes and Doug discussed Richard Dawkins. I said I disliked his manner, felt he did not argue his points very well, and was pompous.

Doug - distinguished between social use and work-based used. Do tools like Twitter help to 'get work done'.

Patrick aiming to get five point action plan:

- let's give twitter a try - no cohersion, a place for people to gather
- encourage people to blog - can be put into aggregator
- have a look at Cohere and Compendium
- have a look at telsns.ning.com

Martin: Broadcast strategy review followed by a self created movie. Concept of Edupunk. ...Everything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger

Broke up into groups: discussed what makes people get involved with these tools...why do people choose certain tools and not others? How we might present PhD thesis on FlashMeeting.

Question about whether people read the notes made at meetings.

Questions of quality raised by Anne - also issues of being 'extra work' but as educational technologists we had to do it. Issue of needing the extra support to help us develope these skills.

Issue of quality is an area which often comes up in these talks - BBC quality is virtually unattainable but the 'rough video' thing can work and give something different. These are probably skills that we need to develop. Martin talked about the motivation that he had where he was doing it for fun. Robin talked about making little audio and video clips and how these can make things more interesting.

It' great that we can feel free to type and use computers at the same time as the talk is going on.