The Caledonian Academy

Professor Allison Littlejohn recently gave the keynote presentation at the JISC conference 'Using Learning Resources' Her presentation was entitled 'Collective Use of Learning Resources' and summarised some of our current thinking on how we can prepare learners for the modern global workplace.

The slides from the event are available as a PDF file from: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/events/2008/01/allisonlittlejohn.pdf

The student learning experience can benefit greatly from teaching in which research plays a part. Traditionally this might be through research-led teaching, where research interests shape the curriculum, but teaching may also be research-oriented (seeking to instill a research ethos), research-based (curricula designed around inquiry based activities) or research-informed (consciously drawing on systematic inquiry into the teaching and learning process itself.)

In the past few months we have been examining Research-Teaching linkages at GCU as part of our institutional commitment to the current QAA enhancement theme on Research-Teaching Linkages (RTL) to enhance graduate attributes.

We are pleased to announce a new Learning Communities event:

March 8th 2008: Academy Futures Room at 3pm (tbc)

Sian Bayne: Learning in a strange space: Second Life at the University of Edinburgh
Second Life is an environment which is both alluring and problematic when used as an educational space. I will be talking about some of the ways in which we are using Second Life for teaching and learning on the University of Edinburgh’s online MSc in E-learning, in particular how it works to give our distance students a sense of community and presence. I will give a brief tour of ‘Holyrood Park’, our in-world teaching space, and describe the rationale behind its design. I’ll then go on to talk about student reactions to Second Life and to consider what this shift into another ‘reality’ might mean for us as learners and teachers. I will draw in particular on the idea of Second Life as an ‘uncanny’ space, thinking about how it might function as a learning environment which nurtures a creative sense of dissonance, troublesomeness and ‘strangeness’ in both learners and teachers.