EDIN AGM Thurles May 6th

I was delighted to be invited to the Educational Developers in Ireland Network (EDIN) AGM at Tipperary Institute in Thurles last week as one of four presenter to discuss the topic 'eLearning: A Marraige of Convenience or Made in Heaven?'. My fellow presenters were Dr Kevin O'Rourke of the LTTC DIT, Catherine Bruen NDLR Project Manager and Morag Munro Acting Head of the Learning Innovation Unit at DCU.

The summary themes that I took from the discourse were:

(1) 'eLearning developers' are also 'educational developers' by default - these are not mutually exclusive roles and it adds little to the debate by imposing artificial demarcation lines;

(2) technology-enhaced learning tools must be driven by the value-added they bring to the teaching and learning experience e.g. facilitating geographically distributed students working on a group project. Pedagogy first - technology second!

(3) Ireland's competitive advantage is that we have a relativeley small educational developerment community. However, we should be more pro-active in sharing stories and strategies to support common goals - this can be facilitatied by technologies such as the ILTA web site.

Thanks to Martin Fitzgerald and Tipperary Insitiute for hosting the event, and to Marion Palmer (EDIN Chair) and the team for inviting us to the AGM.

Further EDIN information can be found at http://www.edin.ie/