1st day at ALT-C

Day 1 at ALT-C by Stuart

Having no battery power and lack of available power sockets at the ‘largest growing’ university in the UK, I am consolidating today’s (not too exciting) events into a single summary.

Hans Rosling (Prof. International Health, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden) started off the proceedings with his keynote which was effectively an advert for Gapminder (www.gapminder.org) developed by his family, excitingly demonstrating lots of interactive graphs on demographics. Not much more to say other than rather than use an infra-red pointer he choose to teeter precariously on the top of an 8-foot step ladder waving a 10-foot pole around the whiteboard. A fan of PowerPoint too – we don’t use enough of its power, apparently.

I went along to a parallel session on alternate reality games (each of 15mins, including 5mins for questions). So the first one, ARG for inclusive induction, the presenter (Nicola Wilson, Manc. Met.) decided to turn up rather late. Oops! No time to present other than to say her paper would be on a JISC project using ARG to induct students into the city of Manchester, meeting people and information skills. Shame really because it might have contained useful ideas for the Applicant Portal/pre-enrolment support work. Nicola had her 5mins of questions in which I found out that they developed the software in-house linking with Facebook and Blogger, and that they will be developing a framework that other HEIs can use as part of their funding outputs.

The second ARG paper was on Innerstate (Mark Johnson and Peter Lager, Bolton), a project to develop game style software in which users can visualise the complexity of their environment (be it work, social, health service), and use the software to experiment with different strategies for coping with their environment, and to provide a common ground for communicating with others. Then they spent 10mins demonstrating Pam’s diner using conveyor belts as a metaphor for managing one’s environment (http://innerstate.lagers.org.uk/), but didn’t really get much from this.

The final paper was An alternative reality for HE? (Alex Moseley, Leicester), which started off as a 5mins literature review on ARGs which he presented while the delegates were hunting under tables among all the discarded chewing gum to retrieve business cards containing Perplex City quotes. (Apparently that’s Perplex City – multitasking). Alex then presented on his year-long research project in Perplex City in which he concluded that the key features of ARGs for education are: problem-solving, progress and rewards, narrative devices, influence on outcomes, regular delivery of new problems, potential for large and active community, and are based on simple existing technologies.

Hunting for any papers on using learning technologies to support assessment, I did find a session titled ‘Forcing feedback’. Only to find that it was the more or less same paper that I had attended 10 days previously at the EARLI conference – different title, different presenter. It was on the development of the OU’s Open Comment/Open Mark assessment system (which is incorporated with Moodle) to ask questions requiring free-text answers which can be assessed automatically.