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.

Choosing an eportfolio and Gremlins

One of my “summer jobs” was to produce an emagazine supplement on choosing an ePortfolio. This is basically a mini site which looks at different interpretations of what an ePortfolio is and what questions you need to ask when choosing one. It was also a good excuse to create a cartoon using www.Toondoo.com and embed a flickr image, including notes, using Mbedr.

It has now been published and can be viewed here and if you like it and you’d like to add it to a website or VLE, you can download a zipped version here.

This week I started my Open University course. I wish I could say its going without a hitch, but there are teething problems. The first action I had to complete was access a blog page which had supposedly been set up for me. It hadn’t. My second task was to update a Wiki. Unfortunately I was using Chrome, the new browser from Google, and there were problems. James Clay has blogged about the reasons for this here better than I could.

It’s really made me appreciate how one or two small problems can really knock the confidence of a learner, particularly if they happen at the beginning of a course.

On the plus side, my tutor and fellow students seem to be a helpful and interesting group, and the forums are filling up nicely. Let’s hope there are no more gremlins.