Author Archives: Isabelle Brent

ALT Conference 2011

Posted on September 12, 2011 by Isabelle Brent

Last week the Association of Learning Technology (ALT) held their annual conference at the University of Leeds. This was my first time at the conference and I presented a paper relating to the Collections  project (the presentation is available on … Continue reading →

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Notes from User Testing Session

Posted on August 2, 2011 by Isabelle Brent

Last week we carried out a user testing of our fledgling methods site and a small focus group at Manchester University. We had five volunteers from a range of backgrounds including a learning technologist, PHD sociology student, and lecturers from … Continue reading →

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Tags, Taxonomies and the Collections Website (or how to tag a kettle)

Posted on June 30, 2011 by Isabelle Brent

Here is a short test: how many tags can you apply to an electric kettle? Three? Four? What about fifty-two? This is how many I counted on Amazon for one standard kettle.  A review of the tags demonstrates the chaotic … Continue reading →

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OER2011: Promoting OERs

Posted on May 17, 2011 by Isabelle Brent

Last week the OER2011 Conference took place in Manchester and on Thursday I went to the keynote speech by Bob Strunz, Chief Technical Architect of NDLR (National Digital Learning Resources). The NDLR supports the collaboration and sharing of learning and … Continue reading →

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The Perils of Describing Digital Resources

Posted on May 17, 2011 by Isabelle Brent

Having decided on WordPress as the front-end for the Collections Project we are currently working on the ‘video of the week’ section. This is intended to be a series of recommended videos that will be rotated week by week and … Continue reading →

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Digital Natives and OERs

Posted on March 10, 2011 by Isabelle Brent

One of the unexpected themes to emerge from our expert workshop related to how digital resources are evaluated by students. Although reservations were expressed about particular aspects of OERs, our participants did make use of digital materials in their teaching. … Continue reading →

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In Google We Trust

Posted on March 10, 2011 by Isabelle Brent

Question: How do you want to find Open Educational Resources? Answer: As mentioned in my last post, our expert workshop included user testing several OER sites including JORUM, Merlot, Xpert and Connexions. To this list must be added Google, whose … Continue reading →

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Notes from the C-SAP Expert Workshop: the value of small numbers

Posted on March 3, 2011 by Isabelle Brent

We are currently going through the valuable material gained from last Friday’s expert workshop that was held in Birmingham. Many thanks must be given to the six participants; Alan Bryman, Antje Lindenmeyer, Sara Ryan, Dave Harris, Sean Moley and Kate … Continue reading →

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OERs and WordPress

Posted on February 6, 2011 by Isabelle Brent

This is my first blog post since taking over from Darren Marsh on the C-SAP Collections project. Coming from the ‘learning’ rather than ‘technology’ side of ‘learning technology’, I wanted to thank Peter Robinson from the TRITON project for his … Continue reading →

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