Tuesday, September 29, 2009

efest unconference - morning session

Plane arrived 20 minutes late at Palmerston North & then no taxis at the airport! So had an impromptu tour of PN before getting to UCOL for the annual efest teaching & learning conference. Got in at the end of Peter Mellow’s opening presentation & morning tea.

Unconference involved breakout into 3 rooms to discuss a range of issues. I stayed pretty much in the one room where we had sessions on Smartphones, 21st century literacies & eportfolios.

Other sessions on learning management systems, teaching with technology, learning design & virtual worlds (the SLENZ project). Sessions were supposed to be consolidated and shared with other groups using the conference wiki, twitter, a info. wall etc.

Smart phones session facilitated by Thom Cochrane from Unitec. We all shared our experiences working with mobile projects & Thom did an overview of mobile possibilities.

We explored bluetooth then a play with texting to poll everywhere (Aussie site)

Then a quick tour of qik (which allows many mobile applications to run on it) eg, videos, photos, GPS which can be streamed in live & once captured can be uploaded up on youtube. The collate on lifestream which allows live streaming as well as chat.

We also cruised through geo tagging, micro blogging, txt notifications (possible within Moodle but costs!), student podcasting (Mac or iphone only).

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