Barbara Denton of Birkbeck College attended the JISC TechDis and ALT Rewiring Inclusion conference in February – in this blog post she writes about her experience of the conference.

JISC TechDis would like to thank Barbara for her contribution.

I look after assistive Technology for Birkbeck College (providing evening degrees as part of London University), so I approached this conference wanting inspiration, innovation but more than anything practical solutions.

Unusually it plunged straight in at 9:00 with 5 parallel workshop sessions (I unfortunately missed the previous evening’s plenary session). I chose “Using Mind Mapping” by Dave Foord. We already use Inspiration at Birkbeck, but I am looking at pros and cons of competitor products, and wanted to see if I was missing any tricks in my training sessions. We got to play with Mind Genius (2 to a laptop), and were taken through the stages of building a map – emphasising the importance of adding structure, colour coding and using boundaries to judge the balance between arguments. For me this definitely ticked my practical solutions box.

Then at 10:00 the delegates all got together for the Opening Plenary Session introduced by Jane Seale from the University of Southampton. This prompted some excited debate about ‘Design for Diversity’ vs. ‘Design for All’, interesting – but not really what I came for.

By just gone 11:00 we were back in workshops. Mine was “Academic skills development – any time, any place” by Carol Elston. I was truly impressed and inspired by the ‘can do’ attitude of this team of overworked study skills tutors. They turned an impossible situation of too many students, not enough tutors, into an exciting project creating an interactive study skills e-learning module to complement their courses and their one to one work. Its freely available for anyone to use: http://skills.library.leeds.ac.uk.

I took 3 things away from this workshop: ‘can do’ attitude is all important; Articulate software seems very effective and easy to use; ownership of content is crucial (skills adviser created one or two topics each).

My next workshop was Creating Content with Xerte by Julian Terrey who developed Xerte for Nottingham University. Xerte is a free tool for developing e-learning content, and it was useful to contrast it with Articulate. We have Xerte installed and ready to go at Birkbeck, so I was picking up ideas on how to use some of the 40 templates – they had a member of the audience create an interactive quiz using a image to show it isn’t hard.

The outstanding feature of Xerte is the built in accessibility – for example the user can change the font size and colour, have text read aloud and navigate by keyboard. I am not sure the end product looks quite as flash as content developed with Articulate, but it is free.

Lunch followed. The venue – National College for School Leadership (NSCSL), Nottingham was extremely comfortable and well suited to hosting the many workshops, and the lunch was amazing.

My last workshop was ‘A freely available Access Toolkit for Technology Enhanced Learning’ by E.A. Draffan. This was a bit of a hotchpotch of different ideas. It started with a freebie – the Access Toolkit on a memory stick. Then the problem of testing Web 2.0 technologies was discussed – specifically the lack of tools to use for testing and problems about approach (www.web2access.org.uk was suggested as useful tool). We looked at a new menu developed by Lexdis for the Access Apps to make it more pertinent to members of staff. The new JISC Techdis toolbar was introduced. I think I was getting tired because I had trouble following the thread, but I have tried the toolbar, and looked at the web2access tool, and tried to use the memory stick since I got back – so lots of practical ideas there.

The day was closed by a Plenary session including a summing up of the days events, and for me an inspirational talk by Alison Mills from the Manchester College on how technology really can change lives if it is used in an innovative, creative and relevant manner. My feelings at the end of the day  – when is the next one going to be?

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We blogged a little while ago about the upcoming “Rewiring Inclusion” conference organised by ALT & ourselves. We really pleased to announce some of our plenary speakers for the event:-

1. Prior to the dinner on the 8th February, Julian Harty from Google will be running a plenary session titled “Wave, Chrome OS, Online Docs and Android. What impact will they have on the environment for learning?”
Julian will also be running a 40 minute workshop on the morning of 9 February.

2. On the 9th February, Artur Ortega, Accessibility Evangelist for Yahoo! Europe will speak in the opening plenary about the Yahoo! approach to accessibility. Artur will also be running a 40 minute workshop on the morning of 9 February.

3. During the closing plenary on 9 February, Alison Mills, Head of Assessment for Learning at The Manchester College will be talking about how a large urban college is taking inclusion to the heart of its operations.

The full programme is now available for the event from here:
http://www.alt.ac.uk/docs/rewiring_inclusion_feb09.pdf

And a large print version is available here:
http://www.alt.ac.uk/docs/rewiring_inclusion_feb09_lp.pdf

Just to recap the previous details of the event, Rewiring Inclusion: Strategies, Tools and Techniques to promote barrier-free learning is a national one day conference being held at the National College in Nottingham on 9 February, with an optional evening session on 8 February.

The conference is being jointly organised by ourselves and ALT for any staff whose work and role affects learners and learning.

The costs to attend are:
£120 for Members of ALT
£160 for non-members of ALT
£100 dinner, bed and breakfast at the National College

The booking deadline is approaching fast so visit http://www.alt.ac.uk/conferences.php before Tuesday 2 February 2010 to ensure you get a place.

We’ll see you there!

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I’m sure most people have wanted to search for more information in the past but, either because they don’t know what it’s called or can’t describe it in a way that the search engine understands, haven’t been able to. For quite a while now I’ve been hoping that an image-based search engine would appear.

Google Labs have recently launched Google Goggles for their Android platform. Users can take a photo of something (a landmark or book cover, for example) and use Google Goggles to identify it and search for more information. It’s still in development and works better for some types of image than others, but I think it has huge potential if development continues.

It appears that Google will eventually launch this on other platforms and I’m really looking forward to playing with it when they do. In the meantime I’ve read that Kooaba and SnapTell for the iPhone have similar functionality so I’ll be experimenting with those.

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Rewiring Inclusion: Strategies, Tools and Techniques to promote barrier-free learning

A national one day conference organised jointly by ALT and JISC TechDis for any staff whose work and role affects learners and learning

Tuesday 9 February 2010 at the National College, Nottingham

http://www.alt.ac.uk/conferences.php

Event flyer [~140 kB PDF]

http://www.alt.ac.uk/docs/rewiring_inclusion_flyer.pdf

*Call for workshop proposals*

http://www.alt.ac.uk/docs/rewiring_inclusion_call_for_proposals_05112009.pdf

If you or your organisation has good practice to share in the inclusive use of technology to support learning, we invite you to submit a proposal to run a 45 minute workshop at the conference.

To submit a proposal, please complete the proposal form by 12.00 noon on

Friday 4 December 2009: http://tinyurl.com/yjog4pb. We will let proposers know the result of the selection process before Christmas, to give those invited to run workshops plenty of time to prepare.

We will meet reasonable travel and subsistence costs for those selected to present; in each case for up to two people involved in the presentation. We will meet the costs of overnight accommodation for one presenter if staying overnight at the National College; the second presenter attending would be at cost.

Depending on the nature of proposals received we may require presenters to run their workshop twice during the day.

If you are not presenting but would like to attend, please note that further information about the conference will be distributed widely later in November.

Book online to attend – http://www.alt.ac.uk/conferences.php

Costs to attend

£120 members of ALT

£160 non members of ALT

£100 dinner, bed and breakfast at the National College

To register your interest for the event, and to be kept informed about arrangements, please join the relevant low-volume email announcements list at http://www.alt.ac.uk/lists.html.

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