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The BCS has filmed a series of videos on e-learning videos with the following panel:

- Clive Shepherd, Chair of the e-Learning Network
- Samantha Kinstrey, MD of 2e2 Training
- Laura Overton, MD of Towards Maturity
- Lars Hyland, Director of Learning Services at Brightwave
- Jooli Atkins of Matrix FortyTwo and Chair of the BCS Information and Technology Training Specialist Group.

The panel feedback on topics like saving money through e-learning, is classroom training finished?, which learning technologies can help and how to get the learning blend right.

As interesting as these videos might be, I'm not a fan of producing video debates and just sticking them up online. There's no option to comment on these videos, no transcript for both accessibility and learning purposes, and as a learner, I was left with no sense of connection with the debate or the BCS. It's very much a broadcast of e-learning opinions that doesn't actually use any of the good advice given in the videos.

Have a peep at video 3 where Clive Shepherd very clearly states that he views Twitter as a communication tool, rather than a learning tool. It's not to say that Twitter can't help learning - but he's quite right in saying there are tools better suited to it.



Other debates in this series are:

IT's help in the Credit Crunch
Data Security and public confidence
IT policies and your green credentials
Solving the IT skills supply and demand cycle

Donald Clark will be speaking about Weapons of Mass Collaboration at Learning Pool's Public Sector Learning Conference on 20th May. He sees WMC as a big opportunity and quick win for public sector organisations.

Donald's talk has its roots in the fact that local authority spending on training per annum is over £500m and two thirds of this spend is duplicated (Audit Commission statistics).

So there's opportunity for savings through collaboration. And I'd imagine those savings aren't just fiscal - joint content creation and commissioning will save time. And there's always the hard-to-measure advantages of collaboration - I always find that in well-managed collaboration, creativity, innovation, engagement and learning increase.

To find out what Donald thinks are the Weapons that enable Mass Collaboration you'll have to catch the talk or podcast. I'm a huge fan of Donald's blog and twitter stream, so it'll be great to see him in the flesh.

Other speakers at Public Sector Learning Conference include:

Ben Page, MD, Ipos MORI
Major Roy Evans, British Army
Charles Jennings, Duntroon Associates
Henry Stewart, Chief Executive, Happy Computers

I'll be attending too to give a class on creative content creation - more on that later.

Get more information here or call 0207 101 9383.

Dublin Institute of Technology host an MSc in Applied eLearning. It's a part-time, blended delivery programme over 2 years.

The programme modules include:

- Learning Theories
- Instructional Design and eAuthoring
- Research Methods
- eLearning Project Module
- Supporting Virtual Communities
- Trends in eLearning Technologies
- Academic Enterprise, Strategic
- Project and Change Management of eLearning

The design and development of an ePortfolio is cited as being critical to the programme learning outcomes.

You can get more info from the website: http://learningandteaching.dit.ie/html/msc/index.html or by emailing roisin.donnelly@dit.ie

Eoin from www.irishdictionary.org works hard to bring Irish language resources to as many people as possible, for free. His online English Irish dictionary is a great example of this.

It's a wiki dictionary (wiktionary) - created by submissions from its users. The dictionary has over 1,500 entries, and it's growing every day. You can also download a pdf containing all the dictionary entries.

Eoin's aim is to have a simple, accessible dictionary with fast search. You can search in Irish and in English. Eoin himself is the first to admit his dictionary isn't perfect - but he believes it's better to have something than nothing.

Eoin's approach and goals can be summed up in two old Irish proverbs:

Tús maith, leath na hoibre - A good start is half the work
and
Trí na chéile a thógtar na cáisléain - In our togetherness, castles are built.

Ádh mór ort (good luck)!

I don't have a lot of science to back up what I'm about to say, so if you need footnotes, look away now. But my observations are built on life experience.

Learners who have confidence in what they're learning or doing learn better. Learners who have confidence in their teachers will learn better.

Confident language learners will learn quicker and talk more and faster than unconfident language learners. Confident language learners are prepared to make mistakes. Unconfident learners stay quiet in case someone laughs at them - and so their language learning slows.

Confidence keeps a learner engaged. Confidence can keep a learner learning long after an unconfident learner has given up. Confidence helps a learner overcome criticism and keep moving forward.

So what's this got to do with 1 star reviewers? Well, I flitted onto this page following a tweet from Tim Ferris (the irritating 4 hour week guy who manages his 4 hour week by having the money to hire a million people to do all the stuff he can't do in just 4 hours).

The post 'You Can't Please Everyone' is a collection of 1 star reviews from Amazon on great literature, music and movies. Here's a few highlights:

Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon
"Why this album is so popular will always be a mystery to me. I guess if you take a lot of drugs anything will sound good. The lyrics are meaningless, the songs drone like, the production very dated. Don’t waste your money."

F Scott FitzGerald's The Great Gatsby
"The book had no point beyond the obvious, and if you found something deep within it, you are obviously a very stupid person who had little understanding of life before reading this novel. You all should be ashamed of yourselves"

The Wizard of Oz
"the wort movie ive ever seen .I mean they clorized once color tv came out and there special effects are lame ,the costumes are ugly the props are ugly so never buy this film!!!!"

Criticism is all around us. And sometimes the critics are ill-informed, malevolent or lazy. Even when the critics are 'experts', they've been wrong time and again - wrong about Elvis, wrong about television, wrong about the Internet.

I believe that constructive criticism is a fantastic aid to learning (I'm afraid I'm not a fan of giving everyone in the classroom a gold star just for turning up!).

But we also need to infuse learners with a sense of confidence that can help them overcome mindless criticism - both from others and from themselves.

Content like Cynical-C's post are a good way of getting learners to realise what mindless, destructive criticism is like.

However, getting learners to recognise self-criticism is more difficult. Self-criticism in learning is common. And in e-learning, where you may lack the support of classmates to support you in the coffee break, or the chance to get a reassuring smile from the teacher at the top of the class, your confidence in your ability to learn, and your confidence in the materials you're learning from, will be key in your learning journey.

Providing constructive criticism is something I feel is done best in a face-to-face environment, or one-to-one online. It's difficult to do digitally. Encouragement that you know was written into an e-learning programme 6 months previously and is being automatically returned to every learner on the same course does not have the same confidence-building effect as a simple 'well done - good essay' from a respected teacher.

I'm not sure how to build learner confidence in their learning journey - I'll be experimenting with this in the language-learning materials I'm putting together for Talk Irish. And when I need a little confidence boost when creating e-learning content for invisible students who may think it's all a load of rubbish, I remember this quote:

"Do what you feel in your heart to be right. You'll be criticized anyway."
Eleanor Roosevelt

Works for both learners and teachers!

Packt books have published Moodle Course Conversion: Beginner's Guide by Ian Wild. This book promises to help teachers and trainers get "existing teaching material online quickly and easily".

Getting your teaching material online quickly and easily depends on what material you want to put online, and how much of it you have. But you can certainly use Moodle Course Conversion to make the process quicker and easier.

Moodle Course Conversion is written in plain English. It's laid out simply, and takes you through what you need to know on a step-by-step basis. It doesn't get over-excited about the bells and whistles. It gets stuck in right at the start with what you need to know about Moodle and what you need to do to get your course online.

Chapter 1 covers the basics - Moodle history, logging on, editing your profile, deciding your role, and moodle themes.

From Chapter 2, you're creating your courses. You learn about course structure and format, enrolling students and assigning teaching roles.

Chapter 3 focuses on adding documents and handouts, while chapter 4 deals with including multimedia content.

There's lots more - with advice and practical tutorials on everything from how to communicate effectively online to setting and marking assignments.

The book is NOT aimed at techies who are setting Moodle up from scratch. It's for teachers, trainers and lecturers who want to (or are being forced to) convert existing materials for Moodle.

Best way to get a handle on whether or not you like this book's style is to read over the sample chapter pdf you can download from here: http://www.packtpub.com/files/moodle-course-conversion-beginner-guide-sample-chapter-5-moodle-makeover.pdf

You can also learn more about the book here: http://www.packtpub.com/moodle-course-conversion/book. Packt have other Moodle books - I can't vouch for them, but you can visit http://www.packtpub.com/moodle-books to check them out for yourself.

I missed blogging about great women in technology on Ada LoveLace day. I was feeling pretty guilty about not participating. Janet Clarey a researcher at Brandon Hall put me on her list of Role Models in Educational Technology and I felt even more guilty about not blogging on the day.

It's not because I can't think of loads of great women I've met in technology (Mary McKenna, Director of Learning Pool, Clare Dillon and Martha Rotter, Microsoft gurus, Jane Hart, Learning and Performance Technologies queen, Fiona Quigley, an e-learning expert in Aurion, Belfast and Sabrina Dent - a crankypants web diva, to name just a few (sorry - I could go on and on).

I also met the inspirational Alison Malloy (Eastman Kodak) at the ACE unConference in Derry - her story of teeter-tottering for years between bankruptcy and riches before selling her company to Kodak was just amazing. But I struggle to name other role models - as did Maryrose Lyons of Brightspark Consulting in her Ada LoveLace post.

Maryrose's post got me thinking. I've got tired of being referred to as the token female for some of the classes, events or talks that I attend. A fellow Girl Geek summed it up comically at a Belfast Girl Geek Dinner - 'Sometimes you just feel like you're the only Girl in the Village'.

It's really not like this always. But some events make me feel a little like I'm drowning in a sea of suits. And because I'm small, stand-up networking events irritate me - there's always a whole conversation going on above my head while I get a crick in my neck from looking up. That's why I'm a real fan of sit-down networking or perching on a high stool to talk with someone - we get to be much more on the same level.

Anyway! Karen Virapen has heard my woes and sent me this lovely lovely Muppet Ladies clip. It has cheered me right up, and given me an urgin to go be a great surgeon! Watch and enjoy :)

Slagsmålsklubben - Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

Thanks to Karen Virapen, who is an e-learning guru in the University of Ulster, for sending me this link. It's a fantastic animation, and I just love the way information is embedded throughout the story. It got me thinking about unusual ways of displaying or teaching what we already think we 'know'.

@leelowe, @mairinmurry, @martharotter, @kievia, Christian @silverspoon, myself and one brave male all had good food but much better craic in Madisons. There was twittering, installation and testing of gravity, brainstorming and discussions about networking. A twitter pilgrimage was planned and a red car may or may not have been hijacked.

Girl Geek Dinners are great fun - but it's a fast pace. The pace at the ACE unConference in Derry last week was slower (a good thing for me - I couldn't last three days at a Girl Geek pace). I had some interesting chats there with folk like:

- Paul McLaughlin of Lionhead games
- Ian Hughes (aka epredator) - a metaverse evangelist
- Darryl Charles, a lecturer from University of Ulster with a passion for serious gaming
- John Farren, creative director of 360 productions, an independent production company who are doing some interesting interactive experiments
- Aidan O'Duibhir, director of Grrr Charge Games
- David Wortley, Director of the Serious Games Institute

I got to pitch to a panel of American and Irish financial and business experts, who gave me some great business advice during the formal pitching session and lots more advice in the informal sessions afterwards in Peader O'Donnell's bar.

I've had a stretch of meeting interesting people and talking about new ideas in the last week or so - it's fantastic. My head is bubbling with new blog post ideas after months of feeling like my brain was a dried up pea rolling around in dust. Yay :)

Today we got our 1000th member on www.talkirish.com - over 700 people have joined the community in the last 30 days. Our Irish Word a Day blog is our most popular feature, followed by the forum, then our games, dictionary and media galleries. Over 200 folk follow our Focal an Lae on Twitter (@talkirish) and we're getting great feedback on the content so far...and lots of requests for new features.

It's been a pretty intense week for me, so I'm off out this evening to the Belfast Girl Geek dinner - I'm sure a small glass of something celebratory is a good idea.