Exploratory Learning Objects with Pearltrees

Every year, around this time, I make a presentation to Level 3 Engineers and Sports Scientists as part of a series of briefings on their dissertation project. And every year, this presentation Research Techniques and Tools serves to highlight a new web-based presentation technology. Back in 2008, I used a…

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Sugata Mitra star turn at ALT-C

Without a doubt, the star of ALT-C 2010 (at least so far) was Prof. Sugata Mitra (who tweets as @sugatam). His keynote, The hole in the wall: self organising systems in education, was entertaining, mind boggling and exptremely inspirational. You can get a pretty good flavour of the talk from…

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New Tool: WebSlides

Just a quick note to draw your attention to an interesting new service that I discovered today. WebSlides (slides.diigo.com) is a service of Diigo.com that can turn an RSS feed or a set of tagged bookmarks into a slide show. This is a great way to create a learning object…

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Practical Advice for Teaching with Twitter

This interesting post from the Prof Hacker blog in the Chronicle of Higher Education discusses how you might use Twitter in your teaching. The assumption is that students will be expected to contribute to an ongoing class discussion, which might not be how you’d want to do things, but for…

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Diigo – A social bookmarking site for the tenties?

Today, I participated in the weekly early #lrnchat on Twitter. And very useful it was too. Today’s topic was Knowledge Management Tools and during the discussion a couple of new ones that I was not aware of were mentioned. Of these, I think it’s worth talking a bit more about…

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Twitter Community List

If you visit the Swansea Learning Lab blog regularly, you may have noticed the Learning Lab on Twitter feature at the right (if you are reading this in a Feed reader, please visit the live blog page now!). At the moment this shows the top 4 “tweets” posted by @swanlearninglab…

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Passion in L&T

Kathy Sierra is an inspirational educator who created the excellent “Head First” series of self-learning books for O’Reilly. She famously ended her public blog “Creating Passionate Users” and stopped appearing in public after receiving death threats back in April 2007 … an incident that made national news at the time.…

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Social Media Aggregators

On the lookout for a social media aggregation tool, I came across 7 Social Media Aggregation Tools To Simplify Your Streams, published earlier this year on the socialmedia today blog. Amongst the usual suspects, Hootsuite (which I have yet to try), Netvibes (popular with some learning lab folks), and Tweetdeck, there…

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OpenScholar – A Tool for Building Staff and project websites

Blackboard is a great tool for building course web sites. The Content Management System (CMS) used by the web office and various departments on campus is a reasonable content management system that Colleges, Schools and Departments can use (with training) to build decent Departmental teaching and Research Group showcase sites.…

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