Posts

So, yesterday I was browsing my twitter feed and favourited a post from Helen Keegan tagged #whyIteach accompanied by the #ccourses hashtag. Today I noticed a tweet from DML Research Hub “Channelling Engelbart: Augmenting Human Education” in which Howard Rheingold interviews Gardner Campbell — also tagged #ccourses. Digging a little deeper I find that #ccourses refers to the Connected Courses course and realised that it’s another connected MOOC-like thing facilitated by some of the usual suspects....

I am very excited by Smallest Federated Wiki (SFW) – the latest project from Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki. I’ve been watching the videos and playing with the software most of yesterday and today. I’ve also been inspired by Mike Caulfeild‘s explorations of the teaching and learning applications of SFW on his blog and on YouTube. Follow up After a bit of a struggle, I have managed to install my own copy of SFW as a node app, backed by a MongoHQ database on Heroku....

I’ve watched and found two videos the week by Greg Wilson to have been very instructive. The first, presented and recorded (slides) at PyCon 2014, introduces lessons learned in developing the Software Carpentry (teaching lab skills for scientific computing) movement. This was slightly revised and presented again at SciPy 2014 (the videos have just gone up on YouTube). I’ve embedded the recording of the latter talk here. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1e26rp6qPbA?rel=0]Greg’s talks are not really about programming or software carpentry but rather are about teaching and the fact that very little of the large body of research about teaching actually informs what goes on in the class or training room....

There is a Google Apps for Education User Group running today at the University of York. There are live hangouts to be found on YouTube (search for GEUG14) and here is the Twitter feed for: #GEUG14 Tweets!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?‘http’:‘https’;if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+"://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,“script”,“twitter-wjs”);

I’ve just joined the 2014 (second) run of the Open Course on Technology Enhanced Learning that is being supported by the Association for Learning Technology (ALT). You should expect to see the hashtag #ocTEL in my posts on this site until mid June, but hopefully that will be compensated for by an increase in activity and reflection. Amongst the Week 0 (induction) activities we are asked to reflect on your work experience and ambitions for developing your teaching...