CEL263 Learning Technologies Symposium 2015

On Friday afternoon, 20th February, we had a very enjoyable event here in CELT. During the afternoon, nine of our participants on the Learning Technologies module, as part of a PG Dip in Academic Practice, presented on their projects. All participants are members of academic staff at NUIG.

The project specification is quite simple:

You are asked to identify and complete a project, based on the material covered in the module, to incorporate Learning Technologies in your teaching.You are given free scope in identifying a technology or technologies and what you want to achieve. 

For the symposium itself, participants had to present for about 10 minutes and were required to use Prezi, to demonstrate competency with that tool.

During the afternoon, both I and the PG Dip Course Director, Simon Warren, tweeted about the event, and we were joined by some members of the class, and some external people using the hashtag too. See below an archive of the tweets from the event, gathered using storify.

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Academic Writing and Wikipedia

Yesterday, the Times Higher had an article called Wikipedia should be 'better integrated' into teaching, based largely on a study carried out in Australia, but largely ignoring a lot of the work being done by the Wikipedia Education community in the UK and, to a lesser extent, in Ireland.

Last November I wrote about the EduWiki 2014 event which was exactly on this topic. While integrating Wikipedia into teaching isn't widespread, there are a number of people who are doing this, and have been for a number of years.

Our first Wikimedia event at NUIG was in November 2014, when we organised an Editathon on Vicipéid (the Irish language wikipedia) and Wikipedia. This involved MA students taking Irish translation modules, with a view to providing authentic translation opportunities. The event was very successful, and you can see Oliver Moran from Wikimedia Community Ireland talking about it in the video below.




Following the success of that first event, we are now planning further Wikipedia (and Wikimedia) projects. The next one will be in collaboration with the Academic Writing Centre at NUI Galway. Through this workshop/editathon we hope to stress the importance of research and referencing when creating or editing  Wikipedia articles, and link this to the skills required when doing academic writing for assessment or publication. Because the event will take place within the library, students will have resources immediately on hand, as well as the support of library staff.

I'll let you know how that goes!

With thanks to the Learning Technology Team in CELT (Blaneth, Fiona, Grainne and Labhaoise) for the filming and editing required to produce the video.

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