Queen Sonja visits Sandnes

Today we had the pleasure of the company of Queen Sonja in Sandnes at Vitenfabrikken (the science museum) who received a demonstration of one of Nettop’s latest projects, a touch screen information service for the ‘Who is Sandnes’ project . Hans Storhaug, leader of the Norwegian Emigration Center (http://www.utvandrersenteret.no), who have commissioned this work from UiS, did a great job of presenting the project to Her Royal Highness.

The installation includes several touch screen registration screens, where visitors can enter their background details, and what they think about Sandnes. The largest touch screen includes displays of the information gathered showing demographics, nationalities and opinions. There is also a web cam station where participants can choose to have their photo taken to make up a visual of ‘the face of Sandnes’. This project is part of a continuing initiative to chart cultural and demographic changes in the ever expanding town of Sandnes.

Members of the team present: Petter Mordt, Arne Thomas Lund Nilsen, Mari Linn Larsen & Joanne Kleppe. Petter, Arne and Ole have worked on the project. Mari Linn and Joanne were invited by the mayor as guests for the event.

Nettop at Cambridge

Two of us from the team at Nettop, Atle Løkken and Joanne Kleppe were able to attend this years OER 2010 conference at Cambridge UK, as the guests of our partners, SONET e-learning centre at  Nottingham University. We would like to thank them for this opportunity and the conference team for putting on an excellent event in reusable digital learning resources, and being very welcoming hosts.

We met a lot of people from both UK and Irish universities and were impressed by a lot of the speakers. There was a strong presence from the Open University, Cambridge and Oxford universities including partners in CETL (Centers for excellence in teaching and learning) projects from over the whole of the UK. In addition to representatives from universities, The Higher Education Academy, JISC ( the main conference sponsors), and Jorum (repository host for online educational resources) and the 4C Initiative, Dublin were also present.

We enjoyed our stay in Cambridge and appreciated the social mixer event sponsored by Intrallect and gala dinner sponsored by Jorum at the Great Hall, Clare College.What a fantastic setting!

Our participation has been invaluable for our work at Nettop, and will directly aid us in future projects. It was a very informative conference, fromwhich we have made some good contacts.

Atle, far left takes in the session

Clare college with Kings Chapel to its right

Gala dinner sponsored by Jorum at the Great Hall Clare College Cambridge OER 2010 conference

UiS had a poster presenting Nettops latest work

Joanne from UiS in blk/wh and Richard from SONET sitting in the row behind

The Nursing Project at Online Educa, Berlin

At Online Educa 2009 Atle Løkken participated at a demonstration session with the abstract named Interactive PDF-Documents by Flash-Multimedia – A New Breed of Multi-Purpose E-Learning Applications. This was originally a tree hour demonstration session, but due to a huge interest, we where not able to leave the session room until one hour after the session was closed.

The idea behind the abstract was to present what NettOp at UiS during the latest year or so had been working with: To integrate Flash elements into regular pdf documents, creating e-learning content with exceptional functionality. The key element in creating this content is the use of InDesign in CS4.

The feedback from our audience was that extraordinarily positive and Atle was rapidly out of business cards.

Atle did his job well, and talked constantly for four hours. We reached out to a very wide audience.

Hello world!

Welcome to the University of Stavanger’s blog for the distance learning bachelor degree course in Nursing. Here you can catch up on developments and news about the project, and comment on related events and issues. We hope that making this blog will inform people about what we are doing and act as a way to network and share views.

The Nursing bachelor is the first of the University of Stavanger’s courses to be launched for distance learner students. NettOp, the department for e-learning at  the university has developed an interactive pdf (course compendium supplementary to text book study) and launched podcasts and a media streaming service to support distant learner students. You can download some of these podcasts at iTunesU.

We are currently enjoying successful partnerships with Nottingham University, UK and the University of Agder, Norway and also employ freelancers to assist us in our work from all over the globe. In the future we hope to establish more partnerships with universities and are always interested in hearing about distance learning and e-learning in general.

The team at NettOp wishes you welcome to use the blog and find out more about us in Stavanger!