Blogging From ASCILITE: Day 3 - Keynote

Slightly cooler today, and therefore less exhausting. This morning started with I think the best keynote of the conference. Prof Allison Littlejohn is a academic and researcher based in Scotland and is just finishing an ASCILITE scholarship. She gave her talk on Community dimensions of learning object repositories. She talked about the communities that are forming around the creation and use of learning objects and learning content and gave some great examples of effective learning object repositories. She also discussed the issue of funding for these community-based projects. In this regard it seems that the UK is further along in developing sustainable funding models for educational innovation, much of which is done by the government-run body JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee)

I found myself nodding at a lot of what Allison was saying and appreciated her appreciation for librarians and the increasing role they are playing in the effective management of learning resources. At one point she commented that almost everything she had learned in the last 2 years she had learned from librarians. That point resonated very strongly with me as I have also learned an awful lot about resource management and information access from the librarians I have been fortunate enough to work with over the past 2 years. I've also attended a few social functions organised by librarians and have yet to see a more organised BBQ. I think even the ants may have been catalogued by sub-species.

But I digress. Allison went on to discuss the trend to move away from a single, Swiss-army knife LMS with large arrays of functionality, to a collection of inter-operatable web-services which provide learners with the content, communication tools, and assessment functions they require. I very much like this notion and it has become one of the major ideas I am taking away from this conference.

Allison then covered the trend towards bringing the library and the classroom closer together. She described this as a merging of the 'formal' resources provided by the library with the 'informal' resources developed by teachers and learners alike for use in the classroom. She talked about the perceived disposable nature of learning resources created for use in the classroom which can often be just as rich and useful as the more permanent resources collected by libraries. She argued that learning resources developed for classroom use need to be better stored and managed to increase their potential for re-use. She illustrated this point by showing DIDET, a learning object repository populated by learning objects created by students as part of their classroom work.

The issue of equity is one that has come up many times throughout the conference, with delegates concerned that utilising technology in their teaching will exclude learners who don't have access to the tools required to access that technology (eg. laptops, tablet PCs etc). On this point, Allison argued that teachers need to think laterally to utilise the technology that is already owned by the majority of students: mobile phones. She demonstrated this by posing a question to the audience and having them respond via text messages to her own phone. Simple, but effective. She also argued that instead of holding back the progress of educational technologies, governments and educational institutions should be subsidising the cost of providing students with technology, just as they used to provide students with slates and pencils if they couldn't afford them. All in all, and excellent keynote. Here are a few of the community-based learning object repositories mentioned:

JORUM

Stor Curam

UHI Millennium Institute

The BBC: Spoken Word

The International Virtual Medical School

Now, back out into the heat for this afternoon's sessions.