Will an ‘in-house’ unconference work???

Had a little thought whilst driving home tonight..

Part of my role involves facilitating the Continuing Professional Development of a number of internal Learning Facilitators. I normally do this by facilitating some lunchtime-learning sessions, which to be quite honest receive a very poor response in relation to the number of facilitators we have on-site (part of this is due to operating a shift-pattern).

I’ve attended quite a few conferences and workshops this year and have gained a great deal from them, so I have hatched a cunning plan…

Book an offsite facility for a day with Wi-Fi access.Invite all Learning Facilitators to attend.Set up a Google Moderator series to allow attendees to choose some of the content for themselves.Invite all delegates to facilitate their own sessions (depending on the number of submissions these could be voted upon)Offer up a Flip Ultra camera (or something similar) in a prize draw to all attendees.Encourage delegates to set up a Twitter account prior to the un-conference and provide the support for them in doing this.Utilise Twitter and other Web 2.0 tools during the un-conference.

So that’s my plan to date

Any and all feedback would be greatly appreciated

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Will an ‘in-house’ un-conference work?… it appears it might!

A few days ago I posted my initial thoughts on facilitating an un-conference based around the theme of using technology to enhance learning. I was at that time a little dubious over the uptake of this, but the pieces seem to be falling into place…

… I’m really pleased to say that the support and interest over the last week has very encouraging, here’s how I did it.

Emailed all internal facilitators to invite them to the un-workshop, including details of the venue and the offer of a Flip Ultra camera being presented to a randomly selected participant on completion of the day (always helps!)Those facilitators that responded positively were sent a link to a Poll Daddy survey asking for them to contribute their ideas and suggestion for the days content. I opted for Poll Daddy over the Survey Monkey licence that we possess, as I will ultimately want to ‘poll’ the attendees and I am unsure if Survey Monkey has that functionality (note to self; look into this functionality). Google Moderator required everybody to have a GMail account, so it was a non-starter.

I have also invited out IT team along, to allow them to see the direction that we are trying to take in terms of Learning Technologies. I am hoping that this will grease the wheels of progress in the future and may allow IT the opportunity to interact more closely with their customers.

Anyway, 6 days after sending out the initial email I have 9 confirmed attendances and 1 tentative, with a week still to go it is shaping up to be a great event.

Picture: Source

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Bringing elearning back ‘in’house

During the early part of 2009 my organisation made the decision to bring its ‘self-paced’ elearning back ‘in house’ after a number of years of outsourcing.

The interview below was conducted earlier this month to celebrate 12 months of the system being ‘live’.

The interview was then broadcast over the info-screen system that we have around our site in order to celebrate the efforts of everybody involved, to maintain the profile of elearning and to provide a glimpse of what the future may have in store for us…

During the interview I mention some research that I have done into the use of Learning Technologies within schools, HE & FE, a real eye-opener for me was when I attended @jamesclays Mobile Learning Bootcamp.

It is my intention to give a little more detail over some of the modules we have created in forthcoming blog posts.

Keep your eyes peeled….

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