I’ve been pulling together more blog posts from the people JISC sponsored to attend the SEDA summer school.
For Barbara Newland, the summer school was a useful prompt to consider how the blended learning policies she draws up impact on individual academics and learning technologists. She also found time to complete a draft project plan inspired by the summer school, which she will discuss with colleagues back at the ranch. Barbara’s blog post
Jane Secker found the summer school particularly useful, and produced a great series of blog posts about the event. Highlights for her were: a sense of professional identity as a learning technologist and a greater understanding of her role as a change agent; greater appreciation of all the things that need to be in place to translate a strategy to meaningful action on the ground; and lots of personal learning points. Jane’s blog posts
Jane O’Neill found much of the content and format useful, and came away with some useful questions to keep teams focussed on the final outcomes of projects: What would it look like if we were successful? What would people be doing differently? What would the impact be on the students? Jane’s blog post
Daniel Clark chose to focus on staff digital literacies, and used his experiences at the SEDA summer school to inform the development of the University of Kent’s e-Learning Summer School, to give staff a chance to share effective practice with technology and learn in context, in a supportive and hands-on environment. Daniel’s blog post
Overall, recurrent themes among the summer school bloggers were the usefulness of techniques such as action learning sets, reflections on their own practice, plans to incorporate changes into any staff and educational development they run, greater appreciation of change management and the impact of change on individuals. Ideas about whether ‘digital’ is really different (our own Lawrie Phipps) and on the benefits and challenges of open practice (Lindsay Jordan, DIAL project) also seem to have resonated.