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I think that this is my third JISC Enhancing e-Learning conference. During the first one I was definitely a lurker. By the second, I’d been involved in a MOOC (Plenk) and a couple of the streamed ALT-C events so I was more comfortable with the asynchronous forums and Elluminate and contributed more. (Though I haven’t had the nerve to press F2 yet.) In all cases, I was attending as an academic looking for ideas that I could use in my own practice: and there’s been a rich seam of good ideas to mine....

This is the first of a planned short series of screencasts that I am creating to help my colleagues at Swansea and further afield do more with Blackboard. One thing we ask staff to do is provide a receipt for coursework submissions. But if the classes are large, this can be difficult to do. Blackboard has an assignment tool that can be used by students to upload electronic documents. If provides a receipt; can enforce submission deadlines; and the submissions can be graded and feedback provided all from the same interface....

Learning about Moodle with the help of a couple of books and a lynda.com training course (which is really rather good!) Watching the recordings of Moodle Moot UK 2011 on YouTube (tag mootuk11) Signing up for the 2011 JISC Innovating e-Learning online 2011 conference Thinking about Non-Barking Dogs Re-evaluating Ning (Elesig) and Cloudworks And looking forward to migrating some of my Blackboard courses to Moodle. I have also just downloaded an e-copy of Rethinking Learning for a Digital Age and will be reading it over coffee....

It’s that time of year again. I just signed up for the Innovating e-Learning 2011 : JISC online conference subtitled “Learning in Transition”. Is anyone I know going to be attending? If there’s anyone at Swansea Um shall we try to arrange a group viewing of one or more of the keynotes?

With the hype following the demise of Steve Jobs, this news item slipped under the radar, and I only picked up the news that Dennis Ritchie has died aged 70, when I listened to the Tech Weekly Podcast of 19th October this morning. Here’s the opening of the Guardian Obit: “The American computer scientist Dennis Ritchie, who has died aged 70 after suffering from cancer and heart disease, was one of the co-inventors of the Unix operating system and the C programming language....