Users and Innovation Programme Project Presentations ALT C 2008

T his publicaTion showcases nine projects from the Jisc users and innovation programme which presented papers at the 15th annual association for learning Technology conference (alT-c) in september 008. The Jisc users & innovation programme is a £4.75M development investment funded by the higher education Funding council for england, which aims to transform practice in uK higher education by developing technologies and innovative processes based on the needs of individual users working within institutions across multiple domains. The programme has funded 3 major projects and a wide range of benefits realisation and community development activities. emerge is the support and synthesis project for the users and innovation programme. The aim of the emerge project is to support the Jisc's forming of an " effective and sustainable community of practice " (cop) around user engagement processes. The emerge project runs a networking website and organises activities to disseminate, share and implement the benefits of the programme. user-centred design, like many other-centred practices, traces its lineage to community development learning pioneered by paolo Freire (Freire 1996). a Freirian approach emphasises activities that are authentic to the participants' cultural context. The emerge project aimed to test the hypothesis that by using community development processes, the quality of educational-technology projects might be improved. we have been using an asset-based approach to community development (Mathie and cunningham 003) that grows from appreciative inquiry (cooperrider and srivastva 1987), emphasising the strengths of the bonds and bridges between people and networks. we hypothesised that: l Developing projects in a context where there is awareness of the wider activity in a field and an understanding of the alignments and gaps in that field will lead to better projects being developed. l by using community development processes and social networking, the general quality of educational (learning) technology development projects may be improved, bringing benefits not just to the Jisc but more widely to all sectoral funding agencies and stakeholders. The association for learning Technology (alT) is a professional and scholarly association in the uK, which seeks to bring together all those with an interest in the use of learning technology. The annual alT conference (alT-c) is one of the largest academic learning technology conferences in europe. it is an important venue for information dissemination and exchange about leading-edge developments in learning technologies for higher, further and community education. These nine projects represent the range of innovation within the programme. …