Tuesday, April 13, 2010

e-learning by the people, for the people and of the people

First presentation today on some of our experiences of e-learning at Swansea and some of the lessons we have learnt. There was some interesting debate and the bottle of Welsh whisky I presented went down well. Wednesday will be a strange day as much of it will be taken up with a memorial service in the Senate, Thursday I'll be teaching on one of the MA courses on using technology in language teaching and Friday will be a planning day for the training sessions we'll be running next week. At the weekends a whole different set of students arrive at the university to take their classes, so teaching is really a 7 day a week job. I wonder what the UCU would make of that?


2 comments:

Cardblog said...

On slide 28 I was interested to see from the staff and student poll that only 84.1% of students have a mobile phone (or maybe I have misinterpreted the statistics) whereas 87.7% have a laptop.

This article from the NY Times states:

'more human beings today have access to a cellphone than the United Nations says have access to a clean toilet'

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/weekinreview/11giridharadas.html

Later this year there will be over 5 billion mobile subscritptions

In India you can get a handset for $25, texts 1c and calls 1c a minute and the telcos still make a profit.

I think the mobile should be used much more in learning and teaching. Role on the 'voting' app, but if text charges at that level were available in the western world then surely mobiles would be used much more in education

Julia Ault said...

Interesting presentation Chris, I agree with t'other Chris (what is about the name Chris and Swansea??) about mobile learning - I dont know any young person without a mobile phone, so we dont have the problem of students not having the equipment - not all of our students in Trinity have latops for example and we have very few to loan out but phones are a different matter :-)

I have enjoyed reading your blog by the way - your trip sounds as eventful and adeventurous as usual!!