Study trip to Bangladesh with students from Human Centered Informatics
Went to Bangladesh with 13 students from 6th Semester, Human Centered Informatics. The topic of the trip was ICT for Development, and the students were busy visiting IT-companies; telecentres; traning facilities for learning ICT-use; Dhaka University; Asian University for Women, etc.
Also meeting with people in Bangladesh was a very important part of the trip, and thanks to our good friends at Dhaka University, there was quite a lot of interaction between Danish and Bangladeshi students.
During a trip to YPSA (Young People in Social Action), Pär-Ola and myself were interviewed for the local community radio, and the students sang our national anthemn and gave an interview as well. Great fun, and brilliant work by our friend, Vashkar, who despite his visual handicap (he is totally blind) makes some very impressive in YPSA.
Also, see Pär-Ola’s post on the eLL website about the trip here…
Autumn 2011 - these are my main focus areas for the second half of the year. Looking forward to getting settled in our new campus (as much as I admire people who can build houses, install kitchens, fit the wires for our wireless, etc., I still prefer not to have them running in and out of my office all day :-)). In two weeks time, our students will join us here, which I guess will be the real test of both the building and the organisation we are a part of.
Back to work - after a nice summer break :-)
August will be a very busy start on the second half of 2011. A number of CoED-workshops are planned at University College Syd’s different campuses; last week Tom Nyvang and I were in Sønderborg, Åbenrå and Haderslev; and in the coming week two workshops are planned in Esbjerg.
At the same time, eLearning Lab is moving to new premises at Aalborg University’s new ‘city campus’ in Nyhavnsgade 14. Not an easy task, and many colleagues are working hard to establish a good working environment in our new buildings. Looking forward to settling in during the coming semester.
On September 1st, our students return from their summer break. We will be teaching close to 600 students in our new buildings which should offer more rooms for teaching, group work, etc. We are very excited to see the potential of our new surroundings reveal itself when met with our large cohorts of students.
Teaching is about making students learn…
For the past couple of weeks I have been teaching at the bachelor programme in Human Centered Informatics. We take in around 200 students each year, so we meet large groups in the lecture halls. In the study programme there is a general interest in student centered teaching and active learning. In two recent activitites I have experimented with this:
On the fourth semester, 50 students in my course on ‘Interaction, learning and collaboration in virtual environments’ have worked with a design problem presented by a large Danish company. A representative from the company has presented the problem in two skype-sessions, and students have dealt with different aspects of the problem in small groups. On the last day of the course, students presented their design solutions and got feedback from lecturers and fellow students. Later their suggestions will be sent to the company.
On the 2nd semester, 130 students have participated in a three days-workshop on qualitative methods and communication in virtual environments. Students worked in small groups and larger groups with practical tasks (collecting data; analysing data; etc.); prepared presentations of their group work; took part in lectures; etc. Before the three workshop days, all students took part in solving some task in an on line environment, thus gaining experience with on line-collaboration AND generating data for later analysis at the same time.
This course was a collaboration with four colleagues, which made it possible to cover the many topics of the lectures very well, and furthermore to work in groups of around 25 students in separate rooms.
This week I am teaching another two days-workshop on videoobservation and analysis. This takes place in Ballerup (Copenhagen campus) with 70 2nd semester students.
