Wednesday 7 October 2009

ALT-C Day three

This post is courtesy of Leo Appleton because I didn't attend day three, unfortunately I had to get back to my day job.

Surprisingly on day three, there were still plenty of delegates around for the final morning of the conference. This may partly have been due to the fine conference dinner that we enjoyed in Manchester Town Hall on the Wednesday evening. The students of Manchester’s various catering college’s provided about 350 of the conference delegates with a gastronomic delight, and those dining enjoyed the presentation of the ALT-C awards by Martin Bean, who had been a particularly inspirational speaker during the day’s keynote. Sadly we didn’t win the best poster presentation for our ‘Learning 2.0 @LJMU’ poster, but I am certainly tempted to get a LJMU entry into one of the ALT-C awards next year, especially considering the great collaboration we have enjoyed this year between The Learning Development Unit and Library and Student Support.

There were a couple of parallel workshops and a final keynote to attend as part of day three, but particularly of note was the demonstration workshop delivered by our own Alex Spiers and Will Reid. The workshop was put under the ‘Redesigning Systems’ strand of the conference, and I am still a little puzzled as to why it was placed here, but the abstract in the conference proceedings was obviously clear enough, as we got plenty of Web 2.0 enthusiasts attending the workshop. Alex and Will then presented an overview of the Learning 2.0 project that we delivered earlier in the year, but on this occasion it included a live demonstration of the Learning 2.0 content and e-portfolio. Alex was very brave to demonstrate this in front of such an audience, but that was the name of the game here. It paid off, as the technology worked and the workshop attendees were able to see exactly how we had gone about delivering Web 2.0 training through our institutional VLE. The delegates were all learning technology staff and they seemed genuinely impressed with the collaborative model that we had adopted in order to develop and deliver our ambitious programme. Alex and Will also spoke a bit about the impact that the programme has had on our staff and their skills and competencies, and the eventual impact that it will have on our students as we strive to support them in out Technology Enhanced Learning.

I thought Alex and Will did a great job with the workshop presentation, as did Stephe Fletcher with the poster design, and it was great that LJMU had such a presence at ALT-C, which is a conference that none of us had presented at before. This shows the great relationship and collaboration that our two departments have, and how our output is of genuine interest to the rest of the Learning Technology sector. Well done Learning 2.0 Team!