Excellence in Learning and Teaching?

Tuesday saw the first Swansea University Excellence in Learning & Teaching Conference - part of a post RAE plan to raise the profile and status of learning & teaching. I only got to attend half the conference as I was chairing the sessions in one of the breakout rooms. Although it wasn't a technology enhanced learning conference, over half of the presentations involved the use of technology in learning and teaching. What I particularly liked was that, in the presentations I saw at least, it was about the teaching and learning use technology was put to not the technology itself. Technology Last - yay!

Reflective learning seemed to be an underlying theme of the conference and I really like Michele Raithby's idea of reflection as a pensieve.

"The Pensieve is an object used to review memories. It has the appearance of a shallow stone basin, into which are carved runes and strange symbols. It is filled with a silvery substance that appears to be a cloud-like liquid/gas; the collected memories of people who have siphoned their recollections into it. Memories can then be viewed from a third-person point of view. "
http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Pensieve

Could be a useful analogy for the PDP work here.

Overall a pretty successful day - the sun was even shining :-)