For details of the 2012 ALT conference please go to http://www.alt.ac.uk/altc2012.
This networking site for ALT-C 2011 (a.k.a the ALT-C CrowdVine site) is publicly viewable, including the conference programme (PDF version on ALT website) but registration is limited to delegates, who can update their profiles, participate in discussions, add comments & send private messages.

I really enjoyed this talk by Jimmy Wales at LWF11. Jimmy Wales is the US Internet entrepreneur and wiki pioneer best known as the founder of Wikipedia. “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge” Jimmy asks us in this talk and discusses how Wikipedia has grown, the impact it has made and the people who contribute to its creation. Jimmy discusses future directions and plans f... [read more]
I thought Gilly Salmon's claim that "there is little innovation in Australia" was in poor taste and I did approach her about it afterwards. In terms of learning technology (and after all, isn't that what we are supposed to be focusing on?) Australia is very well respected in the field of instructional design and has been for a very long time (names like John Hedberg, Ron Oliver, Catherine McLoughlin, Joe Lucas and many more....). You don't need t... [read more]

Five citizens of the Reich were sitting in a railway waiting room. One of them sighed, another clasped his head in his hands, the third one groaned loudly and the fourth sat with tears streaming down his face. The fifth one looked at them, and shook his head. ‘Be careful , gentlemen. It’s not wise to discuss politics in public.’ Lukes, Steven; Galnoor, Itzhak; illustrations by Michael Heath. (1986) No Laughing Matter: A Collection of ... [read more]

On Wednesday again I went into College again for student inductions - they have been going really well and by our third day we are getting into our stride. A few other matters cropped up that I wanted to sort out so it was a bit later by the time I set off to Leeds. I got to the conference for lunchtime (again) so in good time for the keynote which was Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology presented by Karen Cator. The... [read more]

The final keynote speech at ALT-C 2011 was given by Professor John Naughton, who read directly from his notes with his head down, and used no visual media to support his at times somewhat mumbling and occasionally difficult to hear presentation. The message however, was quite compelling. The key theme in his 'the elusive technological future' speech, was that the future has already overtaken the music, advertising and publishing worlds, because t... [read more]

I am writing some more reflective stuff on ALT-C, but wanted to post this about FE at ALT-C. There has been a fair bit of coverage of day one of ALT-C by FE Week, a new publication for FE. Article and page spread. Details of the winners of Learning Technologist of the Year 2011, would be nice to see some FE winners next year, so why not enter. Blogs about ALT-C, a feed of blogs about ALT-C, this will expand as more people reflect on the conferen... [read more]

Watch live video from jamesclay on Justin.tv Note that I’d just got soaked walking between the buildings… talking about talks, about Twitter, about the conference…
It was good to see people at the meet up. If you want to provide URLS or other materials, why not post them here? The Sussex E-learning team blog is at http://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/elearningteam and it gives some examples of what we've been doing.

It makes only sense that I spend my last post about ALT-C 2011 on the final keynote and final session of the conference. And, although I do understand some of the remarks I’ve heard about the keynote by John Naughton (how cool is it to have your own Wikipedia page?), I did enjoy it. Yes, it was scripted and he read it from his iPad without using any other media (no video, no graphics, not even a PowerPoint slide with his name on it). And yes, ... [read more]

I’ll admit it: I did not know who Dónal FitzPatrick was when I decided to attend his session. I had read the title: “I Have a Blind Student in My Maths/Science Class, Should I panic? How to promote inclusion for blind students” and found that interesting enough to attend. So when he said that he wasn’t going to use slides during his talk because that would make us realize how it is for a blind student to attend a lecture, I at first thought that... [read more]

"A lot of you need churchin' - And some of y'all need birchin' " I was subject to significant ribbing regarding how easily the role of banjo playing, bible thumping, traveller preacher man came to me. In a session with more and weirder accents than a Bulgarian PC keyboard, what I said in a vignette of the old west was fairly close to the kind of thing I say anyway - as I think, in a way, it was for all of us.We chose our roles freely - Amber the... [read more]

We have enjoyed an interesting, intense and invigorating few days at the ALT-C event in Leeds this week. It was wonderful to encounter face to face so many people who I have previously got to know on Twitter. The days were filled with papers and demonstrations, symposia and workshops, some excellent, some thought provoking, and a few that could perhaps do with a little more development.... There were some interesting new features at ALT-C this ye... [read more]

The PechaKucha sessions were really excellent and because of the fast pace had to be interesting and capture the attention of the audience. The sessions I went to were on the Tuesday afternoon. The presentation is a demonstration of the ePoster that was submitted. The ones I really enjoyed were Tim Neumann's Matchmaking Learning Technologists and Flourishing Collaborations and also Steve Bunce's Arduino culture – Creative collaboration inside a... [read more]

Today was the first 'proper' day of the ALT conference although there were pre conference events yesterday including workshops. The conference is held this year at Leeds University which location wise is good for me as it is relatively near home / work however the campus and buildings themselves are quite spread out and it takes a while to become orientated (& why do they have that gravel outside the EC Stoner building?). Apart from that it's f... [read more]

Being a curious soul, I decided to Wordle the tweets I'd done during ALT-C 2011 to see what key themes or words emerged. Interestingly, tech balanced evenly with learning... and noticing the prominence of my 'elearningbingo' tag* in there - it's clear that there's still a fair bit of jargon kicking around. What is good though is that there isn't tons of mention of particular tools - things that stand out are education, change, need, listening, ... [read more]
I wonder if anyone thinks that twitter could be a useful way of getting students to ask questions during lectures-as they think of them? The lecturer could use 5 mins at the end to visit them!

Not long now until ALT-C is done for another year. This year has involve schlepping up to the University of Leeds... a city which has fully delivered (in terms of the weather!) on the promise of it being grim up North. Three days of rain and gales but as ever some thought provoking stuff to take away... some slightly depressing stuff to take away... and some stuff which fell neatly into the 'well, that was odd category'. But all good in many ways... [read more]

An excellent #altc2011, and particularly an excellent John Naughton keynote address, was soured for me by the announcement of the themes for next year's conference - concerning "a confrontation with reality". That kind of language sets my teeth on edge, as the "reality" we are expected to confront is not the usual, empirical, kind of reality that we can verify with our senses or with data. There are no questions about the educational technologis... [read more]
Hi all As some are interested, I am available to do a workshop/presentation session on Moodle 2 tomorrow. I can go through /demo whatever features people who come along want to see such as repositories/portfolios or anything else. Post below if interested and we can sort a time. G

Final Keynote: John Naughton Many of the most important technological developments in computing and networking have come as surprises – pleasant and/or unpleasant – to professional communities and commercial organisations, including those which are supposed to know what the future holds. How does this happen? Why are we so bad at anticipating the technological future? And what would we need to do to improve? Naughton read from a script, wit... [read more]

As a final workshop session, where I wanted to engage with the JISC team (I will be a ‘superdelegate’ at the JISC online conference later this year), I went to ‘From Challenge to Change’. I’d already been to the full day workshops in the past, but it’s good to re-engage with the exercises and think how these could be effectively into use in my own institutional context(s). After 3 intense days of thinking/listening/engaging, it was also good to ... [read more]
Last chance to collect your copy of Emerging Practice in a Digital Age from the JISC stand. Limited print copies available.
Looking forward to 'From challenge to change' assessment and feedbak workshop with Mark Russell, Sarah Knight and Ros Smith in room ECS 8.9 at 10.30. Promises to be highly interactive!
My WikiQals project mentioned in my talk yesterday is described here; http://wikiquals.wordpress.com/

The dinner was held in the Refectory (where The Who (and lots of other bands) have played in the past. ‘Bubbles’ provided by Google first, followed by dinner… The starter Get me, beat @jamesclay to posting my pic… just Main course Me, just before I deserted dessert and went to sleep! As the puddings were arriving, the speeches and the awards, this is what I was seeing:

Continuing with the task I began yesterday, here are my initial thoughts on today’s talks and workshops at ALT-C 2011. Social media and professional identity I began the day with Anne-Marie Cunningham’s talk on professional identity in the context of medical education. Anne-Marie herself has a complex identity, as practitioner, educator, researcher and student, and when she began blogging and tweeting in order to combat the isolation she som... [read more]

It was a shame that only a small number of people had managed to find their way to the The Bragg Cluster for the session titled “Standards-based Assessment – Creating Innovative, Interesting, Interoperable Resources Using QTIv2.1″ by Sue Milne, Niall Barr and Graham Smith. It may have been the great number of steps that you have to climb to get to the room. Personally I enjoyed getting an update on the status of QTI 2.1 in particular related to t... [read more]

Dragos Ciobanu, Neil Morris and Alina Secara showed how at the University of Leeds, they are experimenting with Adobe Connect Pro. Here too, they luckily choose to just demonstrate instead of explain in words only. We had received the URL for their Adobe Connect room so anyone with a laptop, iPad, iPhone, Android device could participate during the session. Alina Secara provided us with a remote overview of the use of Adobe Connect for remote re... [read more]
Colleagues wanting to explore the leadership and practitioner tools we discussed with you in the session can get access via the links on the last few slides of the attached ppt; or do come and see us on the LSIS stand tomorrow; look for the big greeny G. Terri and Nigel

Yvonne Bain, Uni of Aberdeen Working on a project, not with her own learners. In 1989 were talking about the possibilities of computer mediated learning. Notion that is woven in – do people really engage with the thinking of others and come up with something different? Tensions in literature – were students really using the benefits of e.g. Asynchronous discussions. Not looking to compare online/offline, but really what were people experiencing ... [read more]

Simon Booth from the University of Stirling and Colin Dalziel from Pebble Learning gave an overview of the use of LTI as part of the ceLTIc project. LTI stands for Learning Tool Interoperability and is a mechanism with which it should be easier to connect different systems. For example, you have Moodle as your VLE and want to use PeddelPad. Through the LTI support available in both systems, you can easily set up a link between the two tools, pro... [read more]