2nd Global Conference: Experiential Learning in Virtual Worlds

Dear Friends and Colleagues

I would like to draw your attention to the above conference, which will be held in Prague from 12-14 March next year. The call for papers has just been published and can be found here.

The conference is part of a programme of research projects organised by Inter-Disciplinary.Net under the subject umbrella, At the Interface. It aims to bring together people from different disciplines to share ideas and engage in dialogue within a community of practice, learning and inquiry. The conference, which is intimate in scale, offers a unique and rewarding learning experience that larger conferences find difficult to emulate. It’s also a great place to cut your teeth if you’re nervous about presenting a paper at a conference! Do please consider submitting a proposal for a paper.

On behalf of the conference steering group, we look forward to receiving your abstracts and to seeing some of you in Prague next year.

Best wishes

Jim

Two Upcoming Free Events: RepoFringe11 and #GECOhealth

This is a bit of slightly shameless promotion! I’m involved in organising two events in Edinburgh in August that may well be of interest to many here as both relate to collaboration, technology and learning in different ways:

The first is an event on open source, geo and health and the ways in which these areas overlap. Anyone working in health or health education will realise how important geography can be in health education and promotion work, epidemiology, etc. Myself and colleagues on the #jiscGECO project are keen to see how open source and open geo data in particular connects to health and are therefore holding a free workshop in Edinburgh on 9th August to explore these issues. More information on our blog and booking form here: http://open-geo-and-health.eventbrite.com/.

We’ll also be holding some further geo related events for the GECO project across the UK – if you’d like more info on these as they are announced do drop me an email: nicola.osborne@ed.ac.uk.

The second event is the Repository Fringe 2011 unconference (#rfringe11) and takes place in Edinburgh from 3rd-5th August 2011 at the Informatics Forum of the University of Edinburgh. This is always a really fun look at all ideas and issues around repositories and how repositories are in use in the academic sector – for teaching and learning materials, for research materials, for publications, etc. It is free to attend (booking form here) and there are always opportunities to contribute to the programme so if you’d like to take part (in person or virtually) then please get in touch. You can email myself or the official email address for the event: repofringe@gmail.com.

Both events will include a lively amount of blogging, tweeting and repofringe should also be videoed for viewing online afterwards so I’d be excited to see any fellow MSc-ers along in person or online to join in the discussions.

Huge thanks for reading this far and have a super summer all! 😉

– Nicola.

Online ‘manifesto’ events starting Monday 18th April

hi everyone,

Just a quick reminder that we’ll be opening the wiki space for the SWO project manifesto – currently called “teaching online: a modest proposal” – on Monday, and are inviting all students on the MSc (past and present) to contribute your ideas, questions and comments to it.

The wiki space will be located within the Holyrood Park wiki at http://holyroodpark.pbworks.com.

If you’re free on Thursday evening (21 April), please also join us in Second Life for a discussion about the wiki activity – 8pm UK time.

All the details are on the events page.

Hope to see you online next week!

Jen

‘Back to Free School: Drawing out the archive’

‘Back to Free School: Drawing out the archive’ public event at Kilqhanity free school in Galloway on Friday 15th April.

http://backtofreeschool.wordpress.com/

Participants in this residential ‘symposium’ will be displaying outcomes from a week long consideration of ‘free’ school methodology. Friday 15th April will be open to the public, with food, drinks and live music. All welcome.

http://kilquhanity-childrens-village.co.uk/html/info-faq.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilquhanity_School

Education Free for All

During April Routledge are offering free access to their entire education Journal collection of over 200 titles. Click here to start browsing all Routledge Education journals! Pass it on to your friends and colleagues.

During April Routledge are offering free access to their entire education Journal collection of over 200 titles.

Click here to start browsing all Routledge Education journals!

Pass it on to your friends and colleagues.