JISC/Wimba Event 13th July.

Wimba jisc 13 july

View more presentations from Bex Lewis.

Please check the Learning Network Forum for a summary of feedback from the session.

Twitter for JISC (Webinar)

Twitter For Jisc 1 March 2009

View more presentations from Bex Lewis.

I was hoping to get the podcast from this event, but I never received it.

JISC E-Learning Fair

Many of those at the JISC E-Learning Fair were from FE, but there was also a lean towards HE, and I (in my role as Blended Learning Fellow at the University of Winchester) picked up a lot of useful information, and got to meet others working in the local(ish) area who will be useful contacts.

Read full blog entry.

CAMEL Project (2006)

The CAMEL project was a pilot to explore the development of a Community of Practice amongst e-learning, systems, and learning technology practitioners working on aspects of promoting Lifelong Learning across institutions. The project was led by JISC infoNet in partnership with JISC, the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) and the Higher Education Academy.

CAMEL is short for Collaborative Approaches to the Management of e-Learning. CAMEL was a project funded by the HEFCE Leadership, Governance and Management programme. It set out to explore how
institutions who were making effective use of e-learning and who were collaborating in regional lifelong learning partnerships might be able to learn from each other in a Community of Practice based around study
visits to each of the partner institutions.

This short publication highlights some of the things CAMEL participants found out about e-learning and about each other. One of the most interesting aspects of the project was, however, the model itself. We believe the CAMEL model could have widespread application for many types of people wanting to share experience and learn from one another.

The model is discussed briefly on the site and you can order a free accompanying CD-ROM that provides a Do-It-Yourself guide to setting up a CAMEL network from the publications page at www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/publications.

Although CAMEL started out as an acronym we found the name summed up certain things about what we were doing. Camels are versatile animals and can operate in the harshest of conditions, surviving on the poorest vegetation and through extremes of temperature. They produce milk for nutrition and dung for fuel as well as providing transport. There are a lot of parallels with the versatility of e-learning in making learning happen in places where it wouldn’t otherwise be possible and we saw some examples of this in the project. There is also a resonance with the nomadic element of the project as our groups travelled to a location to
share a meal together, network and show their wares.

Download the PDF for free.

JISC e-Learning Models Desk Study Stage 2: Review of e-learning theories, frameworks and models (Terry Mayes & Sara de Freitas, 2004)

"This review is designed to inform practitioners, policy developers and other stakeholders who want to reflect more deeply upon their practice or gain a greater understanding about how theory and practice can be  mapped together. It is argued that reforming practice requires transformations of understanding of principles that are assumed – sometimes implicitly – in the practices. This review offers a framework for understanding where a particular implementation of e-learning is positioned in the complex current landscape of technology-enhanced teaching in UK HE/FE. It does so by attempting to offer a set of questions to be posed of an e-learning development – the answers to which reveal the underlying pedagogic and pragmatic assumptions.

There are really no models of e-learning per se – only e-enhancements of models of learning. That is to say, using technology to achieve better learning outcomes, or a more effective assessment of these outcomes, or a more cost-efficient way of bringing the learning environment to the learners. It is all the more important, when implementing elearning approaches, to be clear about the underlying assumptions. A model of e-learning
would need to demonstrate on what pedagogic principles the added value of the ‘e’ was operating. Where, for example, the ‘e’ allows remote learners to interact with each other and with the representations of the subject matter in a form that could simply not be achieved for those learners without the technology then we have a genuine example of added value. However, the role of the technology here is primarily to get remote learners into a position to learn as favourably as though they were campus-based, rather than offering a new teaching method. In such a case the enhancement should be seen as pragmatic rather than pedagogic, achieving cost effective access to learning, rather than a new way to achieve deep understanding of a concept. Even something that looks like a new paradigm for achieving learning outcomes, a peer-to-peer learner-matching tool, for example, may represent only an incremental advance in pedagogic terms, though its educational value may be enormous if it could be exploited through an educational infrastructure which integrated its use with quality assurance methods. It is important, therefore, not to take too narrow a view of what constitutes e-learning, or of where its main value might lie.

Nevertheless, the main goal of this paper is to examine the pedagogical frameworks for elearning, and to set out the underlying assumptions about learning that should provide a rationale for the technology."

Read the full paper.

The Networked Learning in Higher Education Project

The project was designed to create a coherent picture of students' experiences of networked learning in UK higher education, and to provide an analysis of relationships between:

• Students’ approaches to networked learning
• Salient features of networked learning
• Learning outcomes

Networked learning is defined as that in which Computing & IT is used to promote connections: between one learner and other learners, between learners and tutors; between a learning community and its learning resources.

Visit the site here.