Ewan MacPhee has written a journal article about the ‘Talking Hospitality Podcasts’ that have recently been released on the Spoken Word website. The article has been published in ‘The Hospitality Review’, a quarterly journal published by the Threshold Press for academic and industry hospitality purposes. Within the article Ewan ‘explores the potential of the podcast for hospitality education’ and ‘previews’ the Talking Hospitality mini-project. Unfortunately only select articles from the journal are available online but it is possible to get a hold of the article by e-mailing: editors@threshold-press.co.uk for information on back issues or contacting Spoken Word directly in order to see a copy of the article.

As we mentioned in a previous entry, some of the Spoken Word team attended the inaugural BarCampScotland on Saturday. The slides of our presentation, ‘Connecting Pasts and Futures: Spoken Word Services and the BBC’, are now available on SlideShare (without videos or audio, unfortunately). You can also download the slides as a PDF file directly from us at this link. [3.3MB PDF]

The event went extremely well, and we felt it was a useful chance to deliver our ideas to an audience partially outside, but intersecting with, the higher education community.

Given the volume of interest it’s hard to imagine the event not running again, and we hope that we might see a future BarCamp in the vicinity of GCU…

You can find more presentations from this weekend’s BarCampers on the appropriate SlideShare tag: BarCampScotland. Make sure to check out Andrew Middleton of Sheffield Hallam University’s presentation on pedagogical models for podcasting, which we unfortunately managed to miss at the time. You can also get a flavour of the event from Andrew’s podcast episode on it, featuring an all-too-short interview with our very own star of the show, Aidan Johnston, on our podcasting efforts (at 5:48).

Also, check out the Flickr BarCampScotland photo pool and tag pages.

This is the face that lead one attendee of the Nursing E - Learning Seminar to label David’s presentation there as ‘inspiring’.

Just Before Christmas, David Donald, Spoken Word’s aptly named ‘Principal Investigator’, unexpectedly ended up presenting to the Nursing E - Learning Seminar at Glasgow Caledonian University. Iain Wallace was originally supposed to carry out the presentation but had to step out at the last minute on account of a winter illness, although from the feedback it appears that David was a more than worthy replacement.

David spoke generally about the Spoken Word, including the background of the project and services, the work it is currently involved in and the services it provides in the environment of web 2.0.
One attendee of David’s presentation said: ‘This is exciting. I haven’t replied before as I was trying to remember where I got your address. I suddenly remembered this evening. I know because I am taking the Caledonian module in e - Learning and one of our group just heard an inspiring talk from David and put the address on our VLE’

On Sunday I travel to Alicante for the 10th ECDL - European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries. I will attend the conference and also give a paper at and contribute to the workshop ‘Embedding eLearning - critical success factors for institutional change‘ on Friday 22nd Sep.

Today David gives a presentation at Walton Hall, Milton Keynes in an OU seminar series. Entitled Towards ‘Writing’ on and for the Internet it starts with a brief introduction to the Spoken Word project, Spoken Word Services at the SALTIRE Centre and the most general objectives - our ‘pedagogical pluralism’ - of the learning environment we seek to create. (For an earlier exposition on such an environment see Towards a Communications and Information Technology Learning Environment (Donald et al, 2000)). It then concentrates on our presentation layer tools

Excellent audience!