Last week was ALT-C, the annual conference of the Association for Learning Technology. This year it was down in Manchester, and – much to our surprise and delight – it was beautiful weather throughout the three days that we were visiting. Kerr Gardiner, Niall Barr and I (Sarah Honeychurch) all had presentations to give.
I was first, presenting about a teaching and support intervention started 5 years ago by Lorna Love and Shazia Ahmed with help from me. This was a very well attended talk, with interest from the audience afterwards about adopting our model for use at other institutions. Shazia was my co-presenter on this but was unable to attend as she was already presenting a similar paper on behalf of both of us at the MSOR conference.
Next was Niall, presenting a very short introduction to his new classroom response system, YACRS (geek joke – this stands for Yet Another Classroom Response System – he already has his anorak on!). Professor Quintin Cutts, MBE was a co-presenter on this talk, but did not attend the conference. Again this was a well attended talk, with considerable interest from other delegates from other institutions. As Quintin has said elsewhere, the unusual thing about YACRS is that it was designed by working with academics such as Quintin in order to ensure that the pedagogy drives the technology.
Then me again, presenting a paper about an online community that I am part of. I’ve already linked the slides and recording
on my own blog. As well as getting to meet and present with 3 of my online friends, many more were in the audience making this a very special memory for me.
Last of us to present was Kerr. As his slot was on the morning of the final day attendance was sparser than on the previous days, but this did not stop Kerr from giving a lively presentation – beginning in Welsh and dropping in some Scots later on.
![IMG_20150910_200059563[1]](http://glasgow-telt.academicblogs.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/37/2015/09/IMG_20150910_2000595631-169x300.jpg)
As a final note – here is my delegate badge. Haha!
![IMG_20150910_200059563[1]](http://glasgow-telt.academicblogs.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/37/2015/09/IMG_20150910_2000595631.jpg)
As a final note – here is my delegate badge. Haha!
Interesting.
Our students in med school don’t like the uni to use FB because most of them want to keep work (uni) and private time apart.
FB is for privat things in their eyes.
Personally that would go the same for me. I don’t necessarily want to share my holiday pictures with uni-people whom I don’t personally know.
We’re trying to get the students going in Blackboard forums. But students just tend to go their own way and e.g. use the their self constructed groups in WhatsApp.
Hi Ronald
I can appreciate that some students might prefer this separation – we’re in the process of surveying incoming 1st years at the moment to ask them.
The point of using groups, though, is that you do not share any personal information with other groups members. It’s not like friending them at all – you just communicate in the group, you don’t see anything that they post outside that group and they don’t see anything you post.