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Bayne, S., Gallagher, M. S., & Lamb, J. (2014) Reflections
Being back ‘at’ university over the last seven weeks, after so long outside of more formal education has been a challenging, but invigorating experience. This week we’ve been building on previous themes around online environments, community and spaces to think about our experiences as distance education students, and what it means for us to be…
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Online environments and Minecraft – first thoughts
(Please note this has been written before I’ve given Minecraft a more than a initial trial. It’s just intended to capture some early ramblings on this). Although I’d never consider myself a gamer, on reflection my experiences in this area have always involved ‘big spaces’. This goes way back to early ‘point and click’ adventures…
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Metaphorical concepts
So it seems that how we think, act and speak is influenced by the metaphorical choices we use to conceptualise ideas. Another eye-opener in week 6, this time from Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980). As someone who resorts to metaphors quite often in language (in my on-going battle to articulate myself with clarity), it…
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Cousin, G. (2005) musings
Week 6 of IDEL and I think we’re moving into more familiar territory. Although digital environments is a very broad term, and Minecraft is still very much an unknown, we’ve begun to start using terms such as VLE, which is a bit closer to home. Cousin, G. (2005) has been a really interesting read, and…
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Communication channels within IDEL (so far…)
Using Canva, I’ve put some thoughts on each of the communication channels we’ve used so far on the IDEL course. While this is a departure from interpreting and discussing the recommended readings, I felt some consideration of this could have some useful bearings on my course development in the ‘day job’. Am looking forward to…
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Themes and terminology
In the spirit of IDEL, I thought it was about time to start experimenting on this blog with a few different online tools. I’ve pulled some of the recurring themes and new terminology (for me) that I’ve picked up during the course so far and pulled them into a wordcloud. It’s not hugely different from…
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The challenge in choice of terminology
Bayne, S. (2015). intertwines with similar themes as the paper I critiqued, namely Hamilton, E., and Friesen, N. (2013). While Friesen looks at the approaches to research in the relationship between technology and education, Bayne raises some another difficulty (and one that could be argued that contributes to the same blinkered viewpoint) in the term…
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A critical analysis of Hamilton, E., and Friesen, N. (2013)
One of the key aspects Hamilton and Friesen (2013) argue is that studies into the potential of technologies, and the pedagogical value of these, are limited by the approach often used in the conduct of the research. This echoes studies by McDougall & Jones, 2006 and Roblyer, 2005, that research into this area has “struggled…
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Skype chat – a reflection
Today I hit a bit of a dip. I’m sure it happens to most participants at some stage, but all of a sudden the reality of what I’ve got myself into dawned on me. After struggling but persevering through the readings from week 2 (some of them I found more accessible than others, namely the Gert…
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The automated teaching assistant aka ‘teacherbot’
The developing potential in it was clear to see in Sian Bayne’s paper (Bayne S. (2015) Teacherbot: interventions in automated teaching. Teaching in Higher Education. 20(4):455-467) on the ‘teacherbot’ developed by a team at the University of Edinburgh, and used in an earlier MOOC. The twitterbot examples we’d found as a collective were by their very nature…