EDIN AGM Thurles May 6th

I was delighted to be invited to the Educational Developers in Ireland Network (EDIN) AGM at Tipperary Institute in Thurles last week as one of four presenter to discuss the topic 'eLearning: A Marraige of Convenience or Made in Heaven?'. My fellow presenters were Dr Kevin O'Rourke of the LTTC DIT, Catherine Bruen NDLR Project Manager and Morag Munro Acting Head of the Learning Innovation Unit at DCU.

The summary themes that I took from the discourse were:

(1) 'eLearning developers' are also 'educational developers' by default - these are not mutually exclusive roles and it adds little to the debate by imposing artificial demarcation lines;

(2) technology-enhaced learning tools must be driven by the value-added they bring to the teaching and learning experience e.g. facilitating geographically distributed students working on a group project. Pedagogy first - technology second!

(3) Ireland's competitive advantage is that we have a relativeley small educational developerment community. However, we should be more pro-active in sharing stories and strategies to support common goals - this can be facilitatied by technologies such as the ILTA web site.

Thanks to Martin Fitzgerald and Tipperary Insitiute for hosting the event, and to Marion Palmer (EDIN Chair) and the team for inviting us to the AGM.

Further EDIN information can be found at http://www.edin.ie/

EdTech2010 - Huge Contribution from NUI Galway

The EdTech2010 conference is being held on May 20-21 in Athlone Insitiute of Technology.

This event is the main annual technology-enhanced learning conference for the Irish user community and once again a wide diversity of NUI Galway initiatives will be showcased at the event.

NUIG has seven papers/presentations across practitioner, research, Pecha Kucha and Technology in Action strands - the largest representation from any Irish university or IoT. So congratulations to: Peter Cantillon; Mary Flemming; Fiona Masterson; Mark Campbell; Niall McSweeney; Oisin Keelen; Andrew Flaus; Mary Dempsey; Paul Gormley; Liam McDwyer; Tony Hall; Bonnie Long, and Sharon Flynn.

We look forward to seeing innovative uses: of Turnitin to support student writing and feedback; the uses of wikis with Irish and German operational engineering students; mmolecules and movies in biochemistry; and the use of online meeting rooms to facilitate primary care clinicians' teaching and learning (to name but a few NUIG highlights at the event).

Registration for EdTech2010 is now open, and looks like being an inspiring 2-day event. Registration details available here.

Celebrating the Jennifer Burke Award for Innovation in Teaching and Learning

I was honoured to chair the judging panel of the second Jennifer Burke Award for Innovation in Teaching and Learning in DCU's Helix recently. The judging panel consisted of Karlin Lillington (Irish Times), Muiris O'Connor (HEA), Sheila Porter (IBM) and Brendan Tangney (TCD).

John O'Connor (DIT) won the award for his Second Life project 'Virtual Environments: Is one life enough?'. The four other short-listed projects were all truly innovative and captured the spirit of the Award perfectly. More information on the finalists and the process is available from the Award web site.

From a judging perspective, the decision making was very difficult due to the high standards set by the finalists. We thoroughly enjoyed the experience and Karlin has written about her take on the process in a lovely article in the Irish Times.

John will be presenting his project at the EdTech2010 conference in Athlone IT on May 20-21, and will be presented the Jennifer Burke Award for Innovation in Learning and Teaching to close the conference. Registration is now open for EdTech 2010. Click here for details.