Next up, Sarah Chesney (Independent) and Melissa Shaw, U of Cumbria on the story of introducing personal learning and performance and professional development review (PPDR) at the U of Cumbria (UC). Session wandered a bit, and so did yr notetaker, and there was another staged dialogue (just doesn’t work for me); but this was about the implementation of a learning space at UC to support staff in their continuing professional development. Having used Blackboard at Northumbria to do the same (and readers of this blog will know how much I love Bb) I was interested in how this might go. If I got it right, there was 90% uptake among staff which was very impressive.
They used Pebblepad, I believe. There were tensions about who owned PPDR. This is sometimes solved in e-portfolios by giving the portfolio wholly to the user, and assessors asking for rights to view certain sectors of it. Not sure why this wasn’t applied to staff. They finished with an excellent quote from Helen Beetham at her keynote at the 16th Annual SEDA Conference, where she pointed out how technology can be used for surveillance purposes, for standardization and normativisation, etc. Good to end on that cautionary note. Technohype is the last thing we need.
[Added at the weekend] Next up was our session on iPads and legal education (the iPads in Legal Learning project — iLEGALL), and one point we were making was how we needed to avoid the iPad hype — treating it like a cargo cult object, eg — and design around it a sophisticated mobile learning environment. And of course we were talking about the effect of the mobile environment on the personalization of learning. Slides here.