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Wednesday, March 08, 2006

Women@Tech

Womentech

I've got to get up early tomorrow so I'm rounding off my International Edublogging Women's Day 2006 celebrations with a post to the great stuff HUMlab are getting up to. 

"Wednesday the 8th of March is International Women's Day. On the eve of this day many women will blog in support of women's rights. We, at HUMlab, will liveblog the experience of being a woman from two stations, one on the university campus and one in downtown Umeå. We will attempt to capture 'being a woman' through audio, text, picture, collaborative sidewalk art, as well as giving women a change to blog in their own words. There is a twist, however! You get the chance to participate by sending in your digital pictures to our flickr account. The theme is, of course, 'on being a woman'. Each picture submitted to the following address will be tagged 'mobloggingwomen' and can be found in our flickr slideshow (link to be added). The event will be kicked off by liveblogging the seminar, Att ta plats och äga rum. Hur kan kroppar förlängas genom digitala artefakter? - en spekulation i seminarieform, by HUMlab's own Jennie Olofsson who will give a seminar on Tuesday the 7th at 13:15 in the lab."

Wonderful stuff - I would have loved to have been there.

 

Edublog award nominees - the women

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She-Blogger Image from Tild, you can buy stuff with it on here.

International Edublogging Women's Day 2006, continued:

In case you didn't get a chance to check out all the fantastic women nominated in December's Edublog Awards, here they are again:

from the best individual blog category:

bgblogging, Barbara Ganley

“Since 2001, I’ve been using blogs and multimedia narrative, and now podcasting in my classes at Middlebury College where I am a Lecturer in the Writing Program. I keep bgblogging to reflect on my teaching-with-technology journey, to weave in developments in the field and to entice both peers and students into discussions with me about their experiences with social software and emerging technologies. A couple of recent posts that show the kind of synthesizing I try to do: from October and from September.”

Barbara's also written a great International Edublogging Women post
for today, celebrating the women who have influenced her own blogging.

From the best example/case study of use of weblogs within teaching and learning category:

Rhythm in Architecture: Dafne Gonzalez

“Wow! This is really a surprise. I found out about my nomination in the Webheads in Action list. I am Dafne Gonzalez, I am a Full Professor at Universidad Simon Bolivar in Caracas, Venezuela. The blog which has been nominated was created for my English for Architecture students, ages 19-22, and the Web page of this blended course can be seen at: http://dafnegonzalez.com/id3125-05/ . I created the blog to show the world the wonderful brain maps created by the students for the unit Rhythm in Architecture. It includes their brain maps, links to their blogs, and some audio recordings. I am sure my students will be enthralled with this nomination.”

Assessment by blog: Ethical case studies assessment for an undergraduate business management class: Carol Cooper & Lyn Boddington

“Lyn Boddington is a lecturer in business management within the Commerce Division, at Lincoln University, New Zeland. She specialises in the areas of human resource management and organisational behaviour. Lyn is also interested in improving teaching and learning in large class settings, especially those which have students from diverse backgrounds. Carol Cooper is Manager of Teaching & Learning Services. She has been involved in using technologies in learning & teaching for two decades, as student, teacher and academic support.

This was our first try out with blogs in a class situation so we are amazed and chuffed to be short-listed. The students were taking a 200 level paper (equates to a 2nd year undergraduate class) in business management. The class (160 students) was a mix of domestic and international students, many of whom were second language learners. So as well as providing a useful tool to enable learning about business ethics, we hoped that blogs would provide a way of promoting interaction between students and in particular to enable students to learn from each other.

The students learnt a lot and so did we. What did we learn? Read the paper :-)”

From the best teacher's  blog category:

The Open Classroom: Jo McLeay

“My name is Jo McLeay, newly appointed Head of English at my school, an Australian secondary school for girls from age 12 to 18. This year I have had two classes of Year 9 and 10 students (ages 14 to 16) for a semester long Writers Workshop class called Recreating the Writer. I started blogging for myself after some months reading teachers and other educators’ blogs. When I saw the potential and pleasure of blogging I helped the writing classes set up blogs. These classes came into contact with Clarence Fisher’s class in Manitoba, Canada. The rest is history. I think both classes had fun and learnt lots about writing for an audience and about people in different communities.
You can see some students feedback on the project. ”

Edublog Insights: Anne Davis

“My name is Anne Davis. I am an American from the state of Georgia in the USA. My job title is lead information systems training specialist. I work in the Instructional Technology Center in the College of Education at Georgia State University. I am a former elementary teacher who still is fortunate to teach in the public schools. I have done many blogging projects in elementary schools (10-11 year olds) and at the high school (ages 15-17) and university level. (18+) Those projects can be found through the links on my blog. I really think blogs could be a platform to redefine education. I want that redefining to include the voices of students. Writing in my own weblog gives me a way to model the writing process for students and emphasize the need for using writing as a meaning-making process and as a tool for learning. The possibilities are limitless! Two posts that I feel capture the essence of EduBlog Insights are Seize the time! and Lessons Learned.”

From the best library/librarian category:

The Shifted Librarian: Jenny Levine

“Jenny Levine is the Strategy Guide at the Metropolitan Library System, which is the consortial headquarters for libraries in Chicago, USA, and its southern suburbs. In this role, one of her goals is to educate member librarians about new technologies and how they can improve library services. The Shifted Librarian blog is a site that helps librarians understand the coming impact of ubiquitous, always-on internet (and hence ubiquitous, always-on information) on our profession.”

Librarian.net: Jessamyn West

“I’m Jessamyn West, I’m based in Bethel Vermon, USA and I’ve been maintaining librarian.net for the past six and a half years. It started out as a generalist library blog and over time has focused into a library blog about libraries, technology and politics. I work sometimes as a libarian, sometimes as a technology educator and most of the time as an advocate for more sensible use of technology in libraries, and the importance of this in the face of the digtal divide.”

Joyce Valenza’s NeverEnding Search: Joyce Valenza

“Neverending Search welcomes librarians, other educators, any other folks involved with young people to discuss emerging technologies, searching, and the critical skills and behaviors associated with information fluency!

I am the teacher-librarian at Springfield Township High School in Erdenheim, PA and the techlife@school columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Currently I am also a student in the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program at UNT’s School of Library and Information Science. My research involves the impact of school library websites on teen information seeking. You can visit my library website and my personal site .”

Caveat Lector: Dorothea Salo

“Caveat Lector (”Reader Beware!”) is the backup hindbrain of Dorothea Salo, who was recently hired as Digital Repository Services Librarian (caretaker of the MARS project) at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA, USA. The scattered and idiosyncratic array of topics addressed at Caveat Lector includes librarian education, text-markup languages, online-library usability, open-access publishing, amateur programming, and the DSpace institutional-repository platform.”

From the best designed/most beautiful blog category:

Professional Lurker: Lois Ann Scheidt

“Lois Ann Scheidt is a doctoral student specializing in Computer-Mediated Communication at the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University Bloomington, USA. She is a Future Faculty Teaching Fellow at the School of Informatics at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis (2005-2006). Her research focuses include adolescents in online venues, Human-Computer Interaction, and human subjects’ issues and policies relating to online research. She is a founding member of the Blog Research on Genre (BROG) Project at IU. As part of the BROG Project she is a 2004 EduBlog Award winner for the paper Bridging the Gap: A Genre Analysis of Weblogs. She was also a 2004 nominee for Best Research Based Blog. Her 2005 nominated weblog design is currently being used as a design example in several New Media design classes.”

The HUMlab Blog: Linda Bergkvist, Digital Artist

“The HUMlab blog is a very important part of HUMlab. We have decided to make this blog our principal English (institutional) presence. The blog and our regular Swedish website are different (with different affordances) rather than just a mirror of each other. It also has an informational, collaborative, curatorial, experimental, archival, and connective function, as well as being almost a physical link to the lab- somewhere where we can try new technologies and ideas out (just like we do in the physical HUMlab). The design of the blog is important, of course, and this is something we will continue to develop. In general, we would like to think of the blog as an adaptable and flexible space.

Check out the HUMlab Women@Tech project and event - it's been running yesterday and today - & you can still join in!

I can't wrap up without a shout out to Rinna Vuorikari of the Flosse Posse - the most kick-ass woman in open source; Therese Örnberg and Stephanie Hendrick from HUMlab; Beth Harris, one of the driving forces behind the excellent SmartHistory; Kathleen Nolan and Vi Macers from the iTeacherEd project; Susan Stiff and Diane Hammond from the YES I Can! Science team; and saving one of the best until last - the wonderful Barbara Dieu.

The night of the edublogging women

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Differential Analyzer

Karyn Romeis is an instructional designer working in the UK. She's commending Viki Davis, although doesn't sound too convinced that there's a need to have a woman focused blog-fest. Is there an International Men's day? she asks. Karyn, somedays it seems like every day is international men's day. This edublog fest isn't meant to in anyway reduce or belittle the contribution of the men edubloggers, it's just a day to raise a glass to all that women bring to the table.

Celebrating Edublogging Women

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Happy International Edublogging Women's Day 2006! I'm posting this in the evening UK time, I've been working with teachers (fittingly, an all women group) all day, spreading the endless joys of the wiki tool in Moodle.  Picked up my son from my mother's house, came home, fed the cat, child, myself and my son's neopets, sorted out the bills, and finally got online to blog for 5 minutes!  This isn't untypical of my general blogging - I'm fitting this in between answering which animal or insect I would be if I could be any, making coco, bath time and the bed time story. I'll be back later though to do some more dedicated Edublogging Women posting.

Over at Technorati, there's 17 posts so far - I've got to admit I'm disappointed that more people aren't running with this, since there's so much great work being done by women in the field.

Anyhow - check out these bloggers who have been waving the edublog flag high for women today:

Jo McLeay contributes a profile of Bronwyn - who is a prolific commenter and supporter of students blogging.

The wonderful Anne Davis has been running a series of posts to tie in with International Edublogging Women's Day and to celebrate women edubloggers: She posts about Josie Fraser (that's me! Hooray!), Barbara Ganley, Hillary Meeler, Amy Bowllan, Vicki Davis, Jo McLeay, Nancy McKeand, Kelly Neville, and then a whole bunch of women on her Celebrations Roll Call, and then finishes with Vera B Price.

Anita Belzic writes about a post she found through Anne's International Edublogging Women posts, written by Vicki A. Davis.

Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Getting the Guardian tangled up in distributed conversation

In case you missed it today, Steve O'Hear wrote a great piece for the Guardian Newspaper today about e-portfolios and Elgg: A space on the web that we control.  What makes the piece so good is not just Steve, who is an edublogger as well as a journalist, is involved in the discussions that are currently going on around e-portfolios and personal learning landscapes, but the distributed conversation the edublogging community brought to the Guardian's party: Steve published the trimmed version over at his blog, the inexhaustible Miles Berry published his response to the research questions over at his(Elgg) blog, Ben Werdmuller also published the text of his and David Tosh's replies, and so did Terry Wassall.

As Leon Cych comments over at David Tosh's post on the interview, "I love all this - how everything builds up like a coral reef around the subject providing more and more insight . John Clare recently addressed the Naace conference and spouted a few contentious issues about education - he doesn't have a feedback mechanism on his website equivalent - for him a letter page is the nearest he's going to get to a dialogue. Marcel Berlins article on Wikipedia recently was another point in case - he would have to raise his game if he had a comments feature and was open to reply. Great to see Steve giving everyone permissions to release the interviews. This is what journalism should be."

EduGeek.net North Conference

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I’m pleased to see that since I last wrote about EduGeek.net, the UK-based online community by and for IT professionals working in education, they’ve pretty much gone from strength to strength.  They recently opened registration for their latest conference - EduGeek.net North, taking place on 19th April 2006 at Rochdale City Learning Centre. Organizer Russell Dyas explained the shift in location:

“After our first conference last year, and all the positive feedback we had, the only negative aspect was that people in schools and college further north wanted conferences and workshops closer to them. The northern conference is our first conference and we plan to do a second one in south later this year, as well as several workshops in conjunction with the ICT Register and Specialist Schools & Academies  Trust.”

The day covers iLife & iWeb (Speaker From The Apple Centre Manchester), Blogging (me!), Thin Client 101 (Ric Charlton), Helpdesk 101 (Tony Sheppard), and Microsoft Vista (Nick Umney) – all in all a great CDP op for your techies.

You can get further info about the organization and the conference over at the official site. Please do pass this on to your friendly local Web Developers, Systems Managers and IT technicians – they’ll thank you for it. I know some really useful work has been going on at the forums over there, and the whole site has become an invaluable resource for IT services workers.

Monday, March 06, 2006

Stephen Downes: Hiatus

I haven't resorted to including extracts of dictionary definitions since I was a first year undergrad, but Stephen Downes's Hiatus announcement has left me in need of the reassurance of belief in the possible clarity of definition:

"A gap or interruption in space, time, or continuity; a break: “We are likely to be disconcerted by . . . hiatuses of thought” (Edmund Wilson).

Linguistics. A slight pause that occurs when two immediately adjacent vowels in consecutive syllables are pronounced, as in reality and naive.

Anatomy. A separation, aperture, fissure, or short passage in an organ or body part.
[Latin hiātus, from past participle of hiāre, to gape.]"

I think that we need to be equally clear in our support and appreciation. I hope you will take the time to let him know that his contribution most certainly far exceeds anything that could be reasonably expected.