I have just presented at the National Workshop on Learning in Immersive Worlds yesterday at Coventry University with Julie Watson in Modern Languages.  I presented the model of the coordination and management of the University island and talked about how the communication between the five projects in the Schools and disciplines (Medicine, Modern Languages, Archaeology, Chemistry and Education) are maintained. Julie presented her work on one of the projects and also that of the M3 Project.

It was a really interesting event and there were a lot of interesting and new ideas, including augmented reality and also it was interesting to find out what has been going on elsewhere in Second Life.  I attended presentations on the use of Sloodle for dynamic interactions from Peter Bloomfield of University of West of England and also a presentation from Dr David White of Oxford University giving an interesting insight to the views of students from their Open Habitat project.  I will be providing a more comprehensive update to the Second Life interest Group via the mailing list (secondlife-info) which can be subscribed to through the majordomo lists at http://www.lists.soton.ac.uk

If you are interested in how the University of Southampton has been using virtual worlds to enhance education and research, please get in touch with  Fiona Grindey in LATEU.

A new date, Monday 14 December, 1-30 – 4.40, has been confirmed for this workshop, which was originally scheduled for 6 October but cancelled due to illness. Further details and an application form are available on the LATEU website.

The workshop will introduce approaches to pastoral care and dealing with difficult situations and provide information on the services offered by the University that you can tap into to support students.

We have added three new dates for this workshop: 11 December 2009, 11 March 2010 and 9 June 2010.

This course is designed to provide an insight to the history and application of relevant regulations and good practice guidance within clinical research. Delegates will be introduced to the principles of Research Governance and Good Clinical Practice and will be equipped with skills to ensure good conduct of clinical research. Further details here.

LATEU met with colleagues who were involved in staff development activities within their schools to share good practice today.  It was agreed that the group of colleagues who were nominated by their schools would remain in contact with Fiona Grindey in LATEU to share relevant activites that were happening in their Schools and that the network would share themes generated from the Staff Development folder within the LTERAP.   Notes from the meeting will be sent to the group shortly.

Fiona is also going to keep the LATEU web site up to date with information about good practice across the University.  Anyone with an interest in utilising this network and would like to share good practice in education should get in touch with Fiona Grindey.

The awaited response of the Government to August’s Select Committee Report into Students and Universities was published on the 20th October.  A copy can be found on the parliament website at  http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmselect/cmsctech/991/991.pdf

The E-Learning Implementation Group (Chaired by Rosalynd Jowett) and The E-Learning Strategy Group (Chaired by Hugh Davis) have now merged to form the Technology Enhanced Learning Steering and Implementation Group (TELSIG).  this new group will be able to contribute and respond to the new University strategies for education as they are put in place.  The Group will report via Hugh to the Education Committee and will help to drive forward technology enhanced learning initiatives and innovations at University level.

Professor Hugh Davis although head of ECS Learning Societies Lab is also University Director of Education with a responsibility for E-Learning.

The date of the next meeting will be Thursday January 21st – any items for consideration at the meeting need to be sent to Fiona Grindey by Monday 4th January to allow two weeks notice for the Group.

It was recently announced at the DHoS meeting that the funding via the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Fund would no longer be available.  However, possible funding opportunities may arise through other University projects or external funding. 

There are other sources of external funding for learning and teaching and many opportunities for these are circulated through the learningandteaching-info@lists.soton.ac.uk mailing list.  This list may be subscribed to via LISTS.

As you may or may not be aware LATEU have been instrumental in coordinating projects working in Second Life, on the University Island.  They have been running for nearly a year and have proved to be very successful (full evaluations etc will be available in due course).  It seems though, that we now have to think about the future direction for virtual worlds (not just Second Life) as we are all facing reduced funding (or even no funding!)  To that end, I am going to get a steering group together to look at how we move this along.  The initial aim will be to ask the project leaders to be members of the group as they have had first hand experience of using virtual worlds for teaching and research and also to gain input from other interested members of the University community.

I hope that this group will be able to review the experiences of the last year and use this to guide us along.  It does seem reasonable that we should extend the good work that has been created as a result of the efforts over the last year.

As soon as any progress is made here, I will report back to this blog with an update.   Again, if anyone has any questions about this or who would like to be involved please get in touch.

LATEU is organising a meeting between all Schools and LATEU in order to arrange sessions on sharing good practice across the University in a more relevant way.  It was clear that the Schools already arrange a lot of staff development activities (even if they don’t call it that) and so it was decided that instead of holding separate sessions in the form of ‘Good Practice Lunches’ that we would find out in advance what was happening in Schools and then try and coordinate by inviting other Schools along at the same time.  Hopefully this will raise the profile of the Schools sharing the good practice and also save time and money in the long run by bringing the schools across the University together.

That is the plan anyway.  the first stage was to contact all the Schools and find out who we could contact and now that we have done this the second stage is the first meeting.  From the responses I have had so far it looks like it will be on Monday 2nd November – room yet to be found!

I’ll post back after the meeting to let you know how it went.   Any questions please get in touch!

LATEU is running a lunchtime session about TeamPoll, an online peer feedback system, on Tuesday 13 October from 12.45 to 2.00 in the LATEU training room (25/3077). A buffet lunch will be provided for all people who book a place – please email lateu@soton.ac.uk and note that we are limited to 20 places.

TeamPoll is an online peer-review system that enables students to provide the other members of their group with feedback on their teamwork. It uses a simple traffic-light analogy to indicate overall performance and also requires the selection of two comments that provide more specific feedback, such as “good attitude” or “better contributions needed”. It should be noted that each student has to rate their own performance as well as that of their team members. The feedback generated can be used in a formative way to encourage improved performance, and/or summatively to modify the final grade achieved by each student.

The session will start at 12.45 with lunch, a short presentation and discussion about the peer review process. From 1.15 until 2.00 there will be a hands-on session that shows the process by which a tutor creates a poll, students vote and all view the feedback that results.

TeamPoll was developed by Dr Kenji Takeda (Engineering Sciences) using a grant from the University’s ‘Learning and Teaching Enhancement Fund’. If you cannot make the session, more information is available at http://www.elearning.soton.ac.uk/guide/peer_review.htm including three short videos that show how the system is used. It also includes details on how you can request an account and use TeamPoll in your teaching.