EdTechUK

Top ten...philosophers

In Our Time, the Radio 4 show which pioneered podcasting for the BBC, recently held a poll for listeners favorite philosopher of all time. Surprisingly (to me at least), Karl Marx won by a wide margin. Yesterday, in the last programme of the current series, the Melvin Bragg discussed Marx's legacy and relevance with an invited panel. The cast of the episode is available for free download for the next 6 days.

The programme's Greatest Philosopher Vote pages are also up - find out who the top ten were, listen to experts talk about them, checkout the timeline, play the quiz. It would be a really great model for a class project, and easily tweaked for any age group. Get your students to research and argue in a range of media for their top ten poets, feminists, superheros or what ever (you don't even have to restrict yourself to people - it could be historical events, or artifacts.), take a class vote and then put the whole shebang online.

UK online legal resources

Five new publications, written by Pinsent Masons solicitors, are now available in both PDF and Word formats on the JISC website:

• Copyright Law for e-Learning Authors
• Copyright Licensing for e-Learning Authors
• Accessibility Law for e-Learning Authors
• Data Protection Law for e-Learning Administrators
• E-Commerce Law for Web Administrators

Sign of the times

D'Arcy Norman ruminates on the recent US National Educational Computing Conference in general and podcasting in particular: "In the same way that a website without RSS is lame, in a year or so, conferences without podcasts will be lame."

Of course transcripts, podcasts and streamed video won't make people stop going to conferences - do promo videos and Cd's stop people going to see gigs? No. Because once people start to assimilate ideas or media into their own ways of thinking/preferences/identity, they usually want more. It's a win-win situation - people who aren't going to your conference can benefit, people who did go can reinforce and enhance their experience, the ideas you disseminate (if they're any good) will germinate within and contribute to communities of practice. & in turn, these people will most likely recognize and want to buy in to your resource in the future.

Blogs ahoy!

aclearn.net, the Community Learning Resource website which supports the UK Adult and Community Learning (ACL) sector, have announced that they're introducing a Weblog Toolkit. This will join their existing online, hosted resources - the Education Image Library Toolkit and their beta Webquest Toolkit, which provides users with templates and online tools to produce quests that can be accessed online (at aclearn.net), or downloaded for use on other sites.

It's interesting to speculate about what software they'll use - Elgg? Drupal? Either of these would provide excellent open source solutions. I'm really hoping they're not thinking of reinventing the weblog software wheel, unless they have a mountain of money and a dungeon full of developers that no one knows about.

More interesting is that the Adult and Community sector are the first to take such obvious advantage of blogging platforms to provide good read/right web services to the community they serve. Where were the NLN blogs? With government agencies stepping back from providing services and offering policy and guidance instead, will the sector continue to rely on the initiative of insightful individuals for the provision edublogging services?   

Keeping it real

Today I got an invitation to link-twin with a leading online one stop poultry shop, a site which has content in common with mine, for mutual google advantage.

I also got a mail from a friend, commenting on the picture on my about page:

"The photo on your web site looks fine, it's the fact that you keep blogs that makes you look like a mentalist. I think bloggers are a bit weird, a bit like modern day CB radio enthusiasts."

The GERI project

The 'Gender Equality and Race Inclusion' (GERI) Project is an initiative aimed at careers advice providers, including school teachers involved in careers activities. It is  organised by the GERI Development Partnership, an organisation which aims to 'implement a series of initiatives to reduce gender and ethnic stereotyping in the area of careers information, advice, guidance and choice'. GERI is implemented in several EU countries, including the UK, Austria, Finland, Spain and Denmark, and is funded by the European Social Fund.

The site already carries some interesting resources - including a mini-bank of role-model case studies, where you'll find a woman programmer, techie, and, uh, Secretary for State. No games designers yet, or edtechs, but I'm sure they'll be appearing soon.

There are some extensive focus area resources, including Science, Engineering and Technology careers for women. Some modules for teachers are available online, with guidance for key stage 3 and 4 delivery including Careers in Information Technology - Myth and Reality (comes as a huge PDF file. You also have to register at the site to access it).

Thanks to Anna Round, University of Newcastle School of Computing Science.

ALT Blog workshop

I'll be co-presenting an ALT workshop on Edublogs: the educational use of weblogs, weblogging tools and feeds on Thursday 17 November 2005, at King's College, London, along with Steven Warburton.

We'll address current theory and practice surrounding the use of weblogs and feeds within a variety of educational settings. As far as I know this is the first one day event of it's kind in the UK - I'm more than happy to be wrong though!