Arena360 Experimental Week 'The igloo'

Many of you may have noticed the 'igloo' outside of the Rolle Building this week. I had a sneak peek with the EL CETL Immersive Vision team. The Igloo has appeared as part of the Immersive Digital Arena Experimental Week. There is some very interesting content to view, so worth a visit. Perhaps you do a lot of fieldwork work with your students? ...It may conjure up some fieldwork ideas that could be used in the Immersive Vision Theatre.

Information on the 'Innovation for the Creative and Cultural Industries' (ICCI) and who's who is available on their site.

Peer Assisted Experiential Learning (PAEL) in extending fieldwork practice in the Earth Sciences

I have been working on a project with Dr Mark Anderson & Dr Meriel Fitzpatrick, as part of the Experiential Learning CETL. In this project we enhance PAEL using PDAs loaded with the MScape software.

Our experiences and findings have been recently presented at the GEES 2010 conference 'Overcoming Barriers to Learning in the Geosciences', University of Birmingham.

Further details are available from the abstract. However in a nutshell, we are using Trimble Juno SC PDAs with the latest version of MScape software installed. The PDAs are GPS enabled so ariel maps can be programmed with automatic prompts when students enter specific locations of interest. Students entering these 'zones' are prompted to carry out specific tasks or observations, that enable a better inderstanding of the surrounding geology.

Dramatic Writing in Second Life

A very interesting project that utilised Second Life as a stage set for dramatic writing students. This came about from a successful Teaching Fellowship Award project developed by Becky Freeman (Faculty of Arts Learning Technologist), Anthony Caleshu, (Programme Manager for English and Creative Writing, School of Humanities) and Mark Pannell (Learning Technologist, EdaLT).

I was pleased to provide some support on the two days the sessions ran, also filming the students over the two days. ...Before you ask "but this is not a science subject?", I had my Experiential Learning CETL 'hat' on for this piece of work and it was an opportunity to work across schools with some very talented learning technologists..



The video was filmed using a Sony HDR FX1 camera, editing was carried out using Adobe Premiere CS3. CS3 is now superseded by CS4.  If you have the bandwidth, the video is best viewed in HD.

Further details on Becky Freeman's project can be found here.

I would like to thank Plymouth University Television and Broadcast Services for help and assistance, and also the Plymouth University Library Media counter for use of their editing suite.