eLearning 2.0 Technologies and Concepts

This is my second visit to Plymouth, UK and like the past year I was welcome by warm people and lovely weather. Anything that would trigger this time fire alarm in my hotel, the fire of eLearning was distributed among the all participants of the 6th Plymouth e-Learning conference :) .

I had great chance to see the remarkable presentations of keynote speakers as well as of the educators and eLearning professionals during thematic oriented sessions thanks to the host and chair of the conference Steve Wheeler. Steve (@timbuckteeth) is diligently working on the field of technology enhanced learning and teaching and I would say that this year the conference was organized under the motto of the keywords “emotional technologies”. A wide range of technologies and good practices of their implementation was presented that induce exciting thoughts and charged me with more energy and new ideas. Technologies inevitably affect teachers and students emotions in a positive or negative way and this factor must be considered, researched and discussed.

The keynote speaker Stephen Heppell (@stephenheppell) presented new concepts about the design of effective learning places and spaces, including the importance of furniture, fixtures and equipment and Stephen was looking for good examples in virtual spaces that could be translated in real learning situations. Fascinating presentation provoking reflections about technological impact on educators and students’ emotions at organization of supportive, comfortable, engaging and attractive learning environments.

John Davitt (@johndavitt) speech was captivating with ideas for going out of content gathering style in organization of learning activities. The wonderful metaphors from musical area are weaved to present learning as a dance where we mustn’t forget the music and choreography. The learning event generator and the RAG generator of thousands learning opportunities were demonstrated. John Davitt sees future like “age of agility”, walking through many paths, celebrating our own learning curve, opening the bandwidth of talents, thinking broad and innovating.

The session that I attended summarized the experience and achievements during the Atlantis project. Oliver Schneider from University of Applied Science, Darmstadt, Germany presented their system Coherence that works like content management system adapting the content according to learning preferences. He is looking for free content in a given course from the area of Computer science to prepare further experimentation with this

system and if you posses such content you can connect him. About usability of learning software and evaluation of the usability of the concrete application CoCoMa (Collaborative Content Manipulation) was the presentation of Tillman Swinke. Michael Schulmeyer accented on learning tools interoperability with the focus on concepts and tools related to IMS Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) specification. This IMS Standard allows web based learning tools to be easily integrated in LMS as native ones. If you are interested in LTI module for Moodle LMS you can download BasicLTI4Moodle.

I chose the participation in the workshop about Mobile web applications leading by Mark Power from University of Bolton and James Clay (@jamesclay) from Gloucestershire College to understand the potential possibilities of mobility for teaching and learning. Attractive speakers with wonderful humor walked us through the galaxy of web mobile applications and its usage.

What do I present at the Plymouth e-learning conference? I shared the experience gained in applying augmented reality technology for teaching and learning during the Computer graphics course. The students’ reflection about adoption of augmented reality technology related to their visual knowledge perception of several algorithms and knowledge reproduction in their projects is analyzed and discussed. There were several questions about the software for AR applications building and discussion about the students’ opinion and advantages of AR technogies was formed. Thanks to my chair Mark Lyndon (@marklyndon) for the organization of this pretty good Augmented reality session.