Here you find events Pontydysgu is/was organizing or is/was involved.

At the end of August I am going to the Association of Medical Education in Europe (AMEE) conference in Barcelona. Although I work more in the construction sector, the Learning Layers project is working to develop technology to support informal learning in two sectors, construction and healthcare. I’ll be joining the Layers team from healthcare at the conference, where we are organising a barcamp as well as an exhibition stand. On the stand we will be presenting a number of apps developed and trialled in the healthcare sector in the UK, including a ‘portfolio’ or evidence building app, Bits and Pieces, and Confer, a communication platform for collaborative work in solving problems and developing policies and procedures. And we will be showing the context aware flexibility of the Learning Toolbox app, originally developed for the construction sector, with a special stack of miniapps developed specifically for AMEE.

AMEE is a big conference, with over 3000 delegates attending annually. Although still hosting traditional paper presentations it is increasingly branching out to support a range of different presentation formats. And I think I am right in saying this is the first barcamp staged at AMEE. Having long been keen on more unconferencing events, it is good to see the larger and more formal conferences experimenting with such ideas. One of our problems is to explain to delegates just what a barcamp is. for that reason, I have hacked together the video above. Its a nice example of reuse of open educational resources. The original German language video was made by the University of Graz to report on a barcamp in Austria they had organised. With their permission I have added a new introduction and ending to the video and English language translation and subtitles.

If you would like to know more about our activities at AIMEE drop me a line. And for those interested here is the ‘rules’ we have written for the barcamp:

1st Rule: You do talk about BarCamp.

2nd Rule: You do blog about BarCamp.

3rd Rule: If you want to present, you must write your topic and name in a presentation slot.

4th Rule: Only three word intros.

5th Rule: As many presentations at a time as facilities allow for.

6th Rule: No pre-scheduled presentations, no tourists (either make a contribution or move on, you should move groups in order to participate).

7th Rule: Presentations will go on as long as they have to or until they run into another presentation slot.

8th Rule: If this is your first time at BarCamp, you HAVE to present. (Ok, you don’t really HAVE to, but try to find someone to present with, or at least ask questions and be an interactive participant.

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Call for papers: British Education Studies Association Conference

Glasgow, June 26-27 June

Glasgow University cc Venana

We would like to invite you to submit an abstract as a contribution to this important conference. This year the conference takes place in the University of Glasgow, making it the first time the conference has been held in Scotland. The key theme of this year’s conference is: “The politics of education studies: pedagogy, curriculum, policy”

Some of the suggested topics for papers are the following:

• Alternative voices in Education Studies

• Innovations in Education Studies

• Education Studies: Contemporary debates

• Researching Education Studies: critical issues

• Student perspectives on Education Studies

Please note this list is not exhaustive.

SUBMISSION DETAILS:

Abstracts for the conference should be no longer than 400 words, and include:

1. a clear description of the aims and objectives of your inquiry
2. the methodology and methods employed
3. results and key conclusions.

You can submit an abstract by following this link: SUBMITTING AN ABSTRACT

NOTE: You must log in or register on the  site to be able to submit an abstract – you will have this opportunity when you visit the above page.

The Submission deadline is Friday 28th February, 2014.

Please contact Mark [dot] murphy [dot] 2 [at] glasgow [dot] ac [dot] uk if you wish to discus your abstract before submission

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RadioActive101 in cooperation with the Centre for Lifelong Learning at the University of Strathclyde is organising a *free* dissemination event on the 13th of November 2013.

RadioActive101 promotes the engagement, informal learning and employability of disenfranchised young people through internet radio and social media. RadioActive101 is an approach to radio and social media that catalyses, organises and legitimises the digital practices, content production and critical and creative potential of disenfranchised young people – to provide a new and original community voice.

Please join us:

• For a discussion of the impact of radio with disenfranchised young people
• For a presentation of the evaluation of the advanced pilot
• To learn how to get involved and roll out Internet Radio in your community

Registration can be done via this link.

Any questions of suggestions, please don’t hesitate to contact me at cristina.costa[@]strath.ac.uk (remove [ ] when emailing me)

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its that time of year when we turn our thoughts to the annual Christmas ed- techy fest that is Online Educa Berlin. For the last few years we have run live conference radio – The Sounds of the Bazaar from the conference. And a lot of fun it has been, too.

But this year we wanted to do something a bit different. We wanted to provide a workshop for those interested in internet radio. And we wanted to experiment with new formats. So here is the line up.

Wednesday 30 November – 1800 (near the bar)

Live Radio:  Welcome to OnLine Educa

Our first day programme will capture delegates’ expectations of this year’s conference and highlights from the pre-conference workshops. We will be talking to the organizers about the behind-the-scenes activity, some of the exhibitors about why Educa is important to them and giving speakers the chance to advertise their sessions.

Thursday 1 December – 11.45  (room to be announced)

Live radio: Question Time

Educa’s very own live radio debate with a colourful panel of experts responding to your topical, polemic or simply whimsical questions about technology and learning with plenty of chance to fight back.  Audience and speakers will be kept under control by our ruthless chairman Graham Attwell.

Thursday 1 December – 15.00  (room to be announced)

Workshop: Have fun with internet radio

What is it? How can it be used for teaching and learning? What equipment is needed and how much does it cost?  Also your chance to create content, structure programmes, learn presenting, interviewing and studio skills and put them into practice in Friday’s live radio show!

Friday 2 December – time to be announced (near the bar)

Live Radio: Live on Friday

A full hours’ programme of news, views and gossip.  There are interviews with speakers, a chance to catch up with key issues from sessions you missed, feedback from delegates and opportunities for you to contribute.  For the first time at Educa, the programme will be produced by participants from Thursday’s Radio workshop.

Join us

Are you coming to Educa? if so there will be lots of chances to join in – as part of the audience in Question Time or through the workshop and live programme on Friday. or perhaps you have an idea or project you would like to talk about on the programmes.

And even if you can’t make one or more of the sessions, we are always happy to catch up over a pint in the bar! Just twitter, email or skype us.

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This Thursday sees the final session in our autumn series of open on-line seminars run jointly between the Evolve network and Educamp.

The seminar, which takes place on the Elluminate platform, is on Mobile learning and Augmented Reality, with presentations from Mark Kramer and Same Easterby Smith, both of whom are leading developments in the use of this technology for learning.
Mark says: “The application of computer-generated imagery in live-video streams on mobile devices, as a way to expand the real-world, is finally available for the masses on an affordable basis. Augmented and mixed-reality scenarios are now a common fixture of our technology arsenal of methods to acquire information about our surroundings. This emergence of augmented reality (AR) also has great potential to support individual and group learning. I will share thoughts and experiences on how AR will change the way we view and experience learning in a situated context.”

The seminar takes place at 19.00 (UK time) / 20.00 (CEST) (check your local time).
Link to Venue: Elluminate

Link for more information: Seminars

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For some time now I have been following the development of the Manchester Personal Learning Environment – now called the mPLE.

As Mark van Harmelen explains the “mPLE was first conceived of a response to a perceived lack of usable open source software to support communities and learning in those communities.

Informed by social constructivist and constructionist perspectives mPLE is designed to support individual and group learning activities. The intent is for mPLE to be used by self-directed and peer-assisting groups of learners (possibly teacher-led, but without any special status for teachers in the PLE). In order to support this vision of learning, mPLE combines a social software layer with advanced multi-user multi-media spaces where learners can meet and collaboratively perform learning activities in real time.

mPLE is close to the start of a release cycle, and will be released open source. mPLE is intended to be hosted either by an educational institution, a community group, or a less formal group of individuals. To facilitate easy hosting, one of the distribution media will be virtual machines for SUN’s free VirtualBox, making for a particularly easy install on Windows and Linux machines.”

You can read more about the mPLE on the Hedtek blog.

Hedtek Ltd will demonstrate and discuss the Manchester Personal Learning Environment (mPLE) at two fringe events during the ALT-C 2009 conference.

• 16.00 – 16.40 Tues 8 Sept (Atlas Rooms, Kilburn Building)
• 16.30 – 17.10 Wed 8 Sept (Lecture Theatre 1.5, Kilburn Building)

The Kilburn Building is next to the conference location.

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This coming week is the annual Alt-C conference. And, as is becoming standard for conferences these days, many of the sessions will be freely available on line. Alt-C themselves are broadcasting the keynote sessions through Elluminate.

The keynote speaker schedule (all times UK) is:

• Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, Tuesday 8 September, 09.25 to 10.25 ;
• Martin Bean, Vice-Chancellor Designate of the Open University, Wednesday 9 September, 11.55 to 12.55;
• Terry Anderson, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Distance Education at Athabasca University, Canada – Canada’s Open University, Thursday 10 September, 11.55 to 12.55.

Just head over to http://elluminate.alt.ac.uk/ to access these sessions.

But it is not just the keynote sessions that can be followed online. Many other session organisers are planning some form of on-line participation.

Tuesday, 8 Steptember, 1340 – 1500 UK time sees a debate on the future of Virtual Learning Environments, entitled “The VLE is dead” with short (and lively!) contributions from James Clay, Steve Wheeler, Nick Sharratt and Graham Attwell.  The event will be broadcast on Ustream. Deatils to follow.

Wednesday sees a Jisc Emerge symposium on Institutional Change entitled “Emerging practice and institutional change symposium: a user-centred, learning technology R&D support-community network“. Speakers include George Roberts, Isobel Falconer, Josie Fraser and Graham Attwell. The symposium runs from 9.00 to 10.20 UK time. You can watch the Ustream for this session on the Emerge portal and of course contribute through Twitter.

For those of you living near Manchester but not enrolled for the conference, the wonderful fringe programme organised by F-Alt is open to all. Check out the programme on the F-Alt wiki (hash tag #falt09).

And of course, many other sessions can be followed on line. More details on the official conference Croudvine site or follow on Twitter on the #Altc2009 hash tag.

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The Evolve network seminars are back. We have planned a series of open seminars for the autumn in conjunction with the upcoming Educamp Event (November 6-7, in Austria). As the blurb says:

“Once again, the online sessions will be supported by the JISC sponsored EVOLVE Community. Graham Attwell and Cristina Costa, two of the co-founders of EVOLVE, will co-moderate the online events. Together with Martin Ebner they will organise these events. Three sessions will be offered prior to the face to face event in Graz, Austria.

The themes under discussion and the guest speakers of each event are listed below.

• Event #1
  Theme: Open Content
  Speakers: Martin Weller / Martin Lindner
  Date / Time : September 14, 2009 / 19.00 (BST) / 20.00 (CEST) (check your local time)
  Link to Venue: Elluminate
  Add to calender: Link

• Event #2
  Theme: PLEs (Personal Learning Environments)
  Speakers: Ralf Klamma / Erik Duval
  Date / Time: October 8, 2009 / 19.00 (BST) / 20.00 (CEST) (check your local time)
  Link to Venue: Elluminate
  Add to Calender: Link

• Event #3
  Theme: Mobile Learning
  Speackers: TBC
  Date / Time: October 29, 2009 / 19.00 (BST) / 20.00 (CEST) (check your local time)
  Link to Venue: Elluminate
  Add to Calender: Link

The online round tables will be in English and are open for the ‘worldwide’ audience. Elluminate will be the online conference platform used. (A tutorial on how to join the session is available here). The recording of the sessions will be made available afterwards on this website.

Further information about each session and speakers will be published one week prior to event to take place. So check this place often, and also follow the Evolve network on Facebook.

We look forward to the interesting discussions. Stay tuned and help us spread the word about it (when mentioning it on twitter, blogposts, your social networks, etc please use the following tags: #ecg09 #educamp09 #EduCampGraz #ort09).”

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Yes, F-Alt is back by popular demand. F-ALT is a fringe event organised to coincide with the annual UK Association for Learning Technology annual conference. This Year ALT-C will be back in sunny Manchester!

As the F-Alt09 wiki says: “Spurred on by the fantastic success of F-ALT 08, we’re looking forward to an even more fabulous series of unconference events.”

F-ALT 09 will consist of a variety of sessions held in public, conference and university spaces. Delegates are encouraged to experiment with format, with slots focusing discussion and allowing participants and bystanders to experiment with an alternative conference format. Participants pick the topics they are most interested in debating and negotiate session delivery on the F-Alt wiki.

So don;t forget – if you have session ideas – stick them up on the wiki and the detail can be worked later. And if you are coming to F-Alt, don’t forget to signup

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