Waikato Centre for eLearning

The University of Waikato is committed to upholding the highest degree of academic excellence for students enrolled in all its papers and programmes university-wide.  To provide lecturers the opportunity to monitor levels of academic integrity for students and where needed provide extra support or establish evidence for disciplinary matters we use Turnitin®.

iPardigms, the provider of Turnitin® have a useful website plagiarism.org which provides useful information including a great resource on Types of Plagiarism that is worth a read.

~ MoodleMoot New Zealand 2013 - 22nd to 24th April 2013, Waikato University Hamilton Campus ~ 

WCEL are proud to be a part of organising this year's New Zealand Moodle conference in April. 

The conference is run over three days with workshops on the Monday followed by two days of keynotes, conference presentations and open spaces which are organised into three 'tracks' - technical, teaching, and everything else!  

Hosting this event is a fantastic professional development opportunity for the University and we encourage teaching staff to keep an eye out for internal communication about the opportunity to attend.

There are spaces available in the programme if you are interested in presenting.  Share your Moodle experience and help make this year's Moodle Moot a great one! Remember attendees are at all levels so even if you are new to using Moodle you can contribute. Create an account on the Moodle Moot website and submit a Proposal today!

This year's WCELfest took place on Thursday 31st January 2013 and was another successful day. We had over 150 registrations and feedback so far has been fantastic.   

In an excellent keynote address, Dr John Hinchcliff examined how we should approach the future of learning and the pressures forcing change on the academy while finding a careful balance between our engagement with technology and engaging with the person.

Recordings of the day's events, including Dr John Hinchcliff's keynote, are now available online.

ASCILITE 2012 was held this year in Wellington on November 25 - 28. This is probably one of the premiere e-learning conferences in Australasia, and so having it happen in New Zealand (instead of Australia where it usually resides) was a bonus for Kiwis with an interest in e-learning. To be fair it isn't always in Australia - there have been two conferences in Auckland and one in Singapore. Nigel Robertson, the WCEL team leader, myself, and several other University of Waikato staff attended (Katherine Brown, Diane Forbes, and Noeline Wright - apologies if I've missed anyone).  

On Saturday 15 September the world celebrates Software Freedom Day. Software Freedom Day aims to promote some thought about how important software is to our modern lives. It highlights the need to consider the importance of open software. As we come to rely more and more on technology to live our lives, fully engaged with society, it is crucial that we consider what closed systems mean and celebrate and support open platforms.

When we get information from the web it isn’t raw data it is filtered by the systems we use, the search engine or the social media tool we like. If you are under the impression that you are getting impartial information you need to think again.

It’s Digital Literacy Awareness Week at Waikato and I’ve been forced to think about how to describe digital literacy.   For me, digital literacy is about the way that we approach our use of technology and the meaning it brings to us.  

About 4 years ago, I had taken my son (who was eight at the time) to his swimming lesson.  Afterwards, he wanted to know if Mum had gotten something ready for him.  I said that I wasn't sure but that we could phone her.  He immediately replied, "But you don't have a phone Dad"...

With the three strikes law and piracy issues popping up in the news it is really good to be able to find an alternative copyright system. Creative Commons is an international non-profit that provides free licences and tools that copyright owners can use with their work. This allows creators to tell their audience how they can legally share, reuse and remix their material.

We will have a number of coffee courses that you can do online. What are coffee courses? They are not about making coffee they are made up of short, informal learning activities that can be completed in the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee. You choose the activity, the time, the place, and the beverage.

You probably haven’t heard of the Digital Literacy for Staff project yet and that’s why we are having a whole week of activities and events to raise awareness.

The Digital Literacy project team have been working hard over the last few months to organise the first Digital Literacy @ Waikato week, 3 - 7 September. We have a number of speed seminars and workshops for you to attend, quick activities to do at your desk and printed resources too. Get enthusiastic and win some great prizes, including a state of the art 7 inch tablet. Keep an eye on our site for the details of how to qualify to go in the draw.

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