da blog

For the second year running, ULCC organised a successful and interesting Future of Technology in Education (FOTE) conference, held on October 2nd at the Royal Geographic Society in Kensington. The programme had a particular focus on two hot topics, Cloud Computing and Social Media. There is a wealth of information on the FOTE website, including slides and videos of the presentations. The event was widely Tweeted, live-blogged by Andy Powell, and ran in parallel in Second Life.

We used the opportunity to include a short presentation about our CLASM project, and I shared the platform for one session with James Ballard, our resident Learning Technologist and ace Moodle hacker. The full video and slides (with audio) of our talk are available from the FOTE website; the slides are also on Slideshare.

I was particularly pleased to make contact with Jane Secker of LSE, who knows more than most about CLA, and I am looking forward to discussing some issues with her, as we try to refine the work done on the CLASM plugins and produce a finished package. Jane also published an excellent account of the day’s events on her blog

The audience was a bit different from the JISC Information Environment crowd I’ve made presentations to before, so my talk was a very high-level overview of repository work in the sector, with a few ideas about where trends and technology seem to be leading us. One particular advantage I see is that interoperability between web applications should enable us to focus on using the “right” tools – portfolio, VLE, blog, repository, etc, maybe even VW – at each stage of the institutional/educational workflow, rather than using over-ambitious and over-complicated systems that try to do everything. “Small pieces loosely joined,” and all that.

Unfortunately, while the slides on the FOTE website include audio, the video there doesn’t include the slides, which robs the talk of some context. I have, by some dark means, managed to create a new version which combines the video and slides and upload it to YouTube. (To keep it short and relevant to DA Blog readers, I’ve only included my part of the presentation.)

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