Alt-C, AccessApps and EscapePod

Last week I was at the Association for Learning Technology Conference (ALT-C) in Leeds.

There was some useful stuff:

• James Clay looking at UMPCs and other mobile devices, microblogging, Flickr, Seesmic and Qik.
• Alister McNaught from TechDis talking about Xerte which creates accessible learning objects including flash
• The launch of the new JISC publication Effective Practice with e-Portfolios
• Gapminder.org who have some really good interactive graphs which display information about social, economic and environmental development at local, national and global levels.

There was also some ideas that I don’t think have been developed enough to be useful products yet, but are still interesting:

• A demonstration of how to create an interactive whiteboard for about £40 with the remote of a Nintendo Wii and a modified sonic screwdriver
• Bluecasting – Using bluetooth transmitters to send information to mobile phones

Moving away from ALT-C, Techdis and RSC Scotland (South West and North East) have been working on collating a number of open source applications which can be stored on a 2Gb USB stick.  Click here for more details, there’s even an advert:

Last week was the first  official week of my OU course.  So far I seem to be putting in alot more than the recomnded 15 hours a week just to keep up, but hopefully that will calm down as I get used to it.

Finally a quick mention to Escapepod, this site produces a high quality weekly podcast of SciFi stories.  They last about 30-40 mins and i’ve really enjoyed listening to them on the drive to work.