Aaron Sloman, Honorary Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science at the University of Birmingham, reflects on what is known about learning, and on the difficulties that exist in understanding it. These reflections were prompted by watching remotely part of the panel presentations at the 23 May launch of the Ufi Charitable Trust.

Team SCARLET introduce the SCARLET (Special Collections using Augmented Reality to Enhance Learning and Teaching) project discussing its creation and development, as well as its use of Augmented Reality (AR) in education, including content development, evaluative processes, and the implemented technology.

Peter Wren introduces the Supporting Learning and Teaching Programme he runs at Imperial College London.

Simon Kear reports on and evaluates the use of the Blackboard Collaborate 11 virtual classroom for delivering the Follow the Sun 2012 conference.

Following on the conference theme we have three reports on recent conferences:

• Adel Gordon and Julie Usher report on the Blackboard Teaching and Learning Conference held in Antwerp, Belgium.
• James Clay reports on the Ireland and UK Moodlemoot held in Dublin, Ireland.
• Catherine Cronin, Farzana Latif, Matt Lingard and Santanu Vasant report on the Plymouth Enhanced Learning Conference (PELeCON) held in Plymouth, UK.

New to the ALT Newsletter is a feature on the ALT Special Interest Groups, with the first article introducing us to the work of the ViTAL (Video in Teaching And Learning) SIG.

Finally, for our ‘Week in the life’ series, Sarah Sherman from the Bloomsbury Colleges provides an insight into her life as the Bloomsbury Learning Environment Manager.

If you would like to contribute an article to the ALT Newsletter, please see our submission guidelines or send an enquiry to Julie Voce (Acting Editor).