EdTechUK

Innovation in e-learning: spam

Congratulations to Kaplan University, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for being the first people to spam me about the benefits their innovative approach to e-learning and superior VLE instruction. I'm not, of course, counting the University of Trumpton who don't hark on about their use of learning technology - just their proximity to a rich guy. I guess Kaplan are thinking that a spam-driven marketing policy will reassure potential punters that they actually know a thing or two about being online. I'm looking forward to winning an hourly-prize diploma any time now.   

Incidentally, their spam and website front page feature variations on that bête noire cliche of all women in IT: Insane Woman Laughing Pointlessly at Computer Screen.

October edubloggers meetup

The next meetup is scheduled for Saturday October 8th 2005, in Birmingham. Why should you come?

Well, Birmingham is a culturally diverse, vibrant city - the second largest in Britain - and has more canals than Venice. If you're a not huge canal enthusiast, or tempted by the excellent shopping opportunities, then why not come just to hang out with other edubloggers? And talk about edublogging stuff? I'll be there (again), but more excitingly, so will James Farmer, social entrepreneur and edublog kingpin, who's visiting from Australia!

There will be two meetup points and times - Afternoon and evening - so you can either hang out during the day, stay overnight, or both. And any beers you happen to drink during the course of the meetup will directly benefit our community building efforts.

You can sign up in the comments here or over at the wiki - where you can also leave suggestions or requests for venues. See you there!

Jisc OSS Watch get behind Creative Commons

OSS Watch - JISC's open source software advisory service, has switched to Creative Commons Licensing for all of it's written materials. Previously, OSS docs were released under the GNU Free Documentation License. Why the switch? They've very helpfully documented the decision making process.

From the summary:

To recap our rationale, we chose Creative Commons because:

• we wanted to free our users from the GNU FDL requirement that they paste the whole licence into each redistributed copy

• we wanted to make our materials discoverable via licence-specific search tools

• we wanted to create two additional categories of licensed material, one for easier dissemination and another for retention of expert contribution in certain documents

• we wanted to make it simple for our users to understand their obligations in using our material

As you can see from the sidebar - all original material over here is under a CC licence. I'm hoping OSS's decision is an early indicator of UK education organisations and funders looking into and promoting CC in earnest.

Google blog search

 

Google Blog Search in beta. About time. & here's the Frequently Asked Questions page too.

"Your results include all blogs, not just those published through Blogger; our blog index is continually updated, so you'll always get the most accurate and up-to-date results; and you can search not just for blogs written in English, but in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese and other languages as well."

You can't help wondering how the Technorati folks are feeling today...

Gender & Technology conference call

The WINIT International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Gender, Technology and the ICT Workplace
Information Systems Institute (ISI), University of Salford, Greater Manchester, UK
Tuesday 21st March 2006
Further details on the conference website: http://www.winit-salford.com/conference/

Call for Papers

The under-representation of female ICT workers remains a source of frustration for all concerned with gender issues in relation to contemporary workplaces, and in relation to ‘new' technologies. The male dominance (in both statistical and symbolic terms) of ICT workplaces continues to have immediate and wider consequences. In immediate terms, those few women who do enter the ICT workplace may have to contend with direct and indirect discrimination, issues of gender identity and isolation (Richardson et al 2005), working patterns which impact unfairly on women (Kodz et al 2002, Platman and Taylor 2004), and barriers to career progression (Liff and Ward 2001). Despite many initiatives over the last thirty years, women are still not entering the ICT industry in significant numbers. Even fewer have managed to reach the higher echelons of the profession. Indeed female ICT professionals are leaving the industry in disproportionate numbers (IBM 2003). In a wider sense, the fact that women have practically no voice in the creation of the major technological innovations currently being interweaved into our lives must be to the detriment of the industry, to society as a whole (Selby and Young 1997) and to women themselves (Faulkner 2004).

To continue and extend dialogue on these concerns, the Women in Information Technology (WINIT) team present a one day international and interdisciplinary conference based at the University of Salford, UK. Papers are invited from academics and practitioners looking at the under-representation of women in the ICT industry, including structural and cultural issues, the characteristics of ICT workplaces though a gender lens, and gender/ICT relations. PhD students and early-stage researchers are welcome. Papers may be either long (up to 7000 words, 20 minutes presentation) or short (up to 3000 words, 10 minutes presentation). Lively discussions/debates will be encouraged throughout the day. Papers are encouraged, but not restricted to, the following themes:

•  Gender & ICT workplace cultures

•  Gender & ICT working practices (flexible working, work-life balance, mentoring etc)

•  Gendered identity/subjectivity in relation to ICT/ICT workplace

•  Gender & ICT: Narratives, accounts and stories

•  Gender & technology relations

•  Comparative/‘global' studies of gender & ICT

•  The ICT workplace: gender & best practices

•  Feminist epistemologies & methodologies

•  Gender & ICT: the future?

EduBloggers Jisc List

In addition to the UK & Ireland EduBloggers Directory wiki, there is now also a JISC list for EduBlogger alerts, meet-ups and events - it seems as if there will be quite a few this year, including another meet-up in October. If you want to sign up, please head over to the homepage and click on join the list.

If your a blogger based in England, Scotland, Wales or Ireland and haven't yet left your blog's details at the wiki, please do so! Just click on the Edit tab at the top of the page.

EduSession at Bloggercon III

Via Educause, IT Conversations have put up the audiocast of the education session from last November's Bolggercon III  - it looks at the blog potential for trans or cross- disciplinary practice. The blurb is pretty naive: "We know that university life is dominated by the disciplines because universities and the people at them are forever struggling with how to create "inter-disciplinary" experiences and "cross-disciplinary" course work. How to bust out: no one's ever really solved that problem." Well, I can think of at least three disciplines off the top of my head which actively do address that problem.