Blogs

Subtitled “Aiming for excellence in STEM learning and teaching”, this was the first annual HEA Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) conference, held at Imperial College and the Royal Geographical Society.

The opening plenary set the context that in the turbulent times ahead for the HE sector the challenge is for us to look forward, be positive and creative, and work in an interdisciplinary way. Interdisciplinary working and the transferability of pedagogy between different disciplines turned out to be a key theme throughout the conference.

Edutecher

I've recently come across an interesting feature that is hidden in Windows 7, which might be useful if you want to produce how-to guides for software.  It's called the Problem Steps Recorder and you access it by typing its name (or the abbreviation 'psr') into the search box in the Start menu.

Our friends at the Teaching and Learning Institute have blogged about a useful service for editing YouTube videos.  SnipSnip.it lets you isolate a specific segment of a video so that you can link to it from your Powerpoint presentation or from Blackboard - it's a similar concept to the new playlists functionality in UniTube.

Read more on the TLI blog

The learning without frontiers conference is a yearly event which brings together some of the most influential people in technology based learning. It has a huge array of guests from the online and the offline world. This year’s key notes speakers included Ed vaisey (MP), Stephen heppell (heppell.net), Saul Nasser (controller of BBC learning), Lord David Puttman and Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia). It was a conference which encouraged frank exchanges and lively debate with a focus on how technology can be used to drive educational and social change over the next 5-10 years.

Back in June, Sue Folley wrote about how Twitter had changed her conference experience by providing a "back channel" of comments and discussion in real time alongside the session.  The concept of a back channels predates Twitter.  Paul Shabajee described it as "real time peer review" in the THES as far back as 2003 when IRC was the social network of choice.