Nottingham trip

Our second big day out was to Nottingham to visit Gary Priestnal and Mike Sharples (and teams).  In addition, we managed to tempt Claire Jarvis from The University of Leicester up the M1.  Due to time constraints, we had to split up with Ben visiting the Jubilee Campus to meet Mike while I stayed on the main campus with Gary and Claire.

Claire and Gary are both involved in the SPLINT (SPatial Literacy IN Teaching) project which is headed by Claire and Nick Tate as PIs.  The SPLINT project  is concerned with spatial literacy, mobile technologies and VR.  SPLINT is a consortium of three institutional partners: the University of Leicester (lead), University of Nottingham and University College London . It aims to enhance the teaching and learning of spatial literacy. Each of the partner institutions run internationally renowned and successful M-Level programmes that focus on geospatial technologies and spatial literacy. They also offer undergraduate programmes and postgraduate research degrees that include geospatial technologies and spatial literacy.  The SPLINT group represent a good use of cutting edge technology for developing interesting and stimulating teaching material.  For this reason it was important that we engaged with them as part of our scoping project.  A nice summary of part of the SPLINT work can be found here.  Claire and Gary brought along Gemma Polmear and Jen Dickie who have been heavily involved in the SPLINT project.

Meanwhile across the City in the Jubilee Campus, former home to the Raleigh bicycle factory, Ben met with Mike and James Goulding and Liz Brown.  Mike is Director of the Learning Sciences Research Institute at the University of Nottingham. Mike’s research interests include human-centred design of new technologies for learning, mobile and contextual learning, and the application of studies of human cognition and social interaction to the design of novel interactive systems.  He is the author of the report into the Big Issues in Mobile Learning.

James is involved in the D-Scent project jointly funded by EPSRC and the Home Office. A key element of this study is an exploration, within a location-based gaming context, of new ways of integrating geospatial, communications and behavioural data.

Liz Brown’s background is in teaching and her research interests lie in educational technology. She is currently collaborating with colleagues in the Centre for Geospatial Science to find out how geospatial data might inform and enhance learning experiences for a wide variety of end users.

From that session there seems to have been much discussion about clouds, APIs and thin clients which may mean more reading for me as my explanation of what a cloud is was rather woolly, or should that be fluffy? Anyway, it was another very useful and productive day out.  Here is a nice picture of the swanky new library on the Jubilee campus, certainly nicer than the Main Library in George Sq, Edinburgh.

Nice Building, oh and Ben

Uuurgggh!

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