October 4, 2016, by Julian Tenney

Digital Learning

Through the Digital Learning project, I’ve been working with faculties across the University this year to work out how the Learning Technology team can best support schools and faculties now that there is beginning to be a greater focus on the quality of teaching and learning, not just at Nottingham, but across the entire sector. We are really lucky at this University to have such great practice going on, and I’m struck by the sheer number of great examples of real innovation in teaching and learning that we find all over the institution.

This blog aims to give greater exposure to all this fantastic work going on. We’ll use it to share the stories we find of what people are doing to enhance the teaching and learning experience through technology, and we’ll focus on examples that are relatively easy to do. We have loads of technology already: most of us routinely carry around a video camera, a sound recorder and a stills camera all the time on our phones, we have access to the internet pretty much wherever we go, and social networks allow us to create communities of learners and practitioners to learn from and learn with. The potential to make use of all this is, really, quite amazing, but most of us are still trying to figure it all out, and sometimes it’s hard to know where to begin.

A number of themes are starting to emerge from the conversations we’ve been having. There is a real need to bring greater exposure to the good stuff that people are doing, and colleagues want to know about the quick and easy things they can do to bring technology into the learning experiences of their students. We are hearing time and again that digital literacies are now a key element in the employability agenda for our students, and have already become key skills for twenty-first century teachers. And we know that sometimes making sense of all this isn’t easy, so we’re building this community so we can all learn from each other. We’ve launched a project in Learning Technology to work with colleagues in the faculties to capture stories about digital learning, in all its forms, and we’ll disseminate them through this blog. If you’ve got a story to tell, we’d love to hear from you.

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