CIES Reward Programme - December 2009

Doesn't time fly when you're enjoying yourselves? Here we are again for another very busy and productive event at the University of Ulster with seven teams beavering away in a supportive and creative environment. The Staff Development team are developing a framework for e-portfolios; Art Design & The Built Environment are trying to assess student proficiency with CAD systems; the School of Sports Studies group are offering e-facilitated feedback in the form of audio and podcasts; the Department of Hospitality & Tourism are also offering podcasting along with blogging as a means of assessment and feedback; Career Development are developing a CPPD module entitled "Reflect on Me" to start students thinking about lifelong learning; the Ulster Business School team are working on an online student assessment handbook; and the School of Environmental Sciences are developing a wide-ranging tool to help Masters' students visualise and plan their dissertations. With all that going on, there's a real buzz about the place.

CIES Reward Programme - University of Ulster

Back in Ulster for the third Programme themed around "Community building and use of communication tools". We have seven highly motivated teams from four faculties plus information services, with an ambitious and innovative range of proposals including use of Web 2.0 social networks, 3D and mobile devices. As always, the event is extremely well organised, thanks to Colette Murphy and her team who do a great deal of behind the scenes and preparatory work to ensure that the Programme is a success. Find out more at the CIES Reward & Recognition website

CIES Reward Programme - University of Ulster

Here we are back again at the Ross Park Hotel at Kells near Ballymena for another informative and productive two-day event organised by Colette Murphy and colleagues from the University of Ulster. There are 28 participants across five Faculties plus the JISC Regional Support Centre, eight facilitators from RLO-CETL and CIES and three multi-media developers from the Access and Distributed Learning Unit.

The theme this time is Learner-Centred Activities and five teams are working on a range of projects: "Discourses in visual culture"; "A guided process to academic writing"; "The development of a Problem-based learning resource centre"; "Integrating VLEs and virtual worlds for learner-centred, task-based activities"; "A model for multi-media task-based language learning".

Interesting to see how these initial ideas change and evolve over the two-day event as the teams view each others' presentations that inform their thinking and work together on the poster templates as they iteratively refine their content. The process is one of reification as ideas begin to take shape and the boundaries between that which can be realistically achieved and that which simply can't, become more sharply defined.

The teams have 12 weeks to develop their resources. Watch this space!

The Wolfson Reward Programme - December 2008

We've just had a very hectic and successful three days where 37 academics, developers and students came to Wolfson College and RLO-CETL, Cambridge to meet up and work collaboratively on learning object projects.

We started on Monday 8 December with an introduction to the Wolfson Reward Programme for newcomers – what it is and how to get the best out of it. Local academic coordinators presented ongoing work from each of the partner institutions and Tom Boyle gave an overview of the priorities and challenges for us as we move into our final funding phase 2009-10.

In the afternoon, participants split into groups to conduct teamwork. A large group from Nottingham and a number of partner universities focused on the SHOULD (Supporting health occupations’ understanding of learning disabilities) project. This is a very exciting project, being completely student driven. For more info see: http://www.nottinghamnetlearning.com/nursing/sonet/projects/should/

The developers are working hard on Version 2 of the GLO-maker tool (see V. 1.0 at http://glo-maker.org and they got together for a techy Flex tutorial, continued on Day Two.

In the evening we had a jolly fizz reception and sit-down supper at Wolfson in the Combination room.

Mini-project team-work continued the next morning and afternoon. Jenny Piggott, Director of NRICH Maths, came along to give a great interactive presentation of some of the many resources plus audience participation in a very interesting rope trick! Maths doesn't have to be difficult or boring. See http://nrich.maths.org/ for much more.

That evening we were lucky enough to be invited to the Master's Lodge at Magdalene College for a Reception before sitting down to a splendid candlelit dinner in Hall. The Master, Duncan Robinson, gave a highly appropriate after dinner speech highlighting the importance of teaching and sharing and this struck a chord with all of us.

Numbers somewhat depleted on Wednesday morning (wonder why?), we regrouped for a final session with presentations of work so far from the students on the SHOULD project, Alan Williams from Nottingham who got some feedback on his design, and Tom Boyle rounded off the morning with an overview of the developer wiki where they get up to all things technical.