A complete error on my part. Somehow, because we’d run a session last week, I had it in my mind that there was no independent study workshop this morning.
I’m very sorry that I was not here to run the session – and I’m also aware that this is the second time a mix up like this has happened this term. It’s difficult to berate students when my own attendance is hardly a model.

If you do want to see me either as a small group or individually to ‘rehearse’ the arguments you are exploring in your independent studies please send me a mail and we’ll organise a time.

I have revisited the calendar for the remaining workshops this term. They are now (and in red in my diary!)

Thursday 21 Feb 9.30-11.30 (student led progress reports)
Thursday 6th March 9.30-11.30 (student led progress reports)
Thursday 13th March 9.30-11.30 (Writing the Report: questions of style)

defaultContent

The workshop ‘Data Analysis’ originally to run tomorrow (10.01.08) has been re-scheduled to 24th January. This is due to my suspicion (and chatting to a number of students I have seen this week) that people are not yet ready to approach the analysis of data they have yet to collect.

Sorry though for the lateness of this announcement. Please use your own networks to inform any students you think may have planned to attend but will not have seen this post.

The hand in date for the Independent Study proposal remains fixed for the 19th October.

However, those students who were actively engaged with either David Davies or Simone Burrows and who are most likely to work with Wendy Moran (prospective new member of staff) should:

1. continue to seek guidance from core members of staff in support of making progress with research
2. wait for further announcement on arrangements for contacting Wendy directly, and revised proposal submission deadline.

Here are the slides from yesterday’s talk together with a link to a ‘playlist’ which gives the websites I referred in the order I referred to them. This last is a really useful tool.

Best way to learn a new language? … Hang out with the natives! So sign-up with anything you think has potential, play around, ‘tinker’, participate, have fun … and then reflect.

Informal Learning in the Blended Mix (.pdf)

Playlist

The elearning Network has organised a conference entitled:

Informal Learning, or ‘Learning despite the L&D Department’ May 25th

from the blurb:

How to put the learner at the heart of the process using new tools of collaboration, learner generated content and social networking in order to meet the learners of the 21st century by bringing together the people with the skills with the people that need it when they need it. This session will be followed up with an “e-brown bag” on-line collaborative lunchtime session to model the use of such tools in a real context.

at least the title offers one particular definition of ‘informal’ learning!

I’ve been trying to work out how my session on informal learning in the blended mix at this year’s T&L Conference could actually be conducted informally.

Tony Hirst seems to be exploring a similar idea in encouraging participants to his own session on ‘Visioning Web2.0 in OU Personal Learning Environments’ to act ‘informally’ – he doesn’t actually say that but I think that’s what he’s getting at:

at the start of the workshop, I primed the audience along the lines of: “I’m going to ramble on a theme, pop up some links on screen, mention lots of others. Feel free to chase down those links that interest you and only listen to the bits of the talk that catch your attention, ask questions whenever you like and pick me up when your googling proves something I’ve said is wrong

He also gives a couple of suggestions about how to ‘feed’ links to participants so that they can follow them up, tag them, blog them etc.

Delishow – feeding delicious links into a screen show -

http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/deliShow/55071244/informal&num=2&td=5

Links via a H20 Playlist

http://h2obeta.law.harvard.edu/home.do

Good stuff and I need to follow it up.