EdTechUK

ALT-C 2006: PLEs

The read/write web certainly hit ALT-C this year. If I had the time to make a cloud tag of the event, learning objects would be in tiny, tiny letters, and web 2.0 would only be beaten in size by the word Blackboard, who stormed into first place on the wave of animosity that their software patents have whipped up.  There were some interesting sessions on blogging, podcasting popped up, along with wikis. For me, of course, this has been the year of the Personal Learning Environment, and it’s probably not good practice to say so but I really enjoyed the PLE session the most. It was also cool to finally meet up with Dave Tosh of Elgg/Curverider fame. Also really great to get to work a little with Terry Anderson, although I managed to miss bumping into him for most of the conference.

The low point for me was probably the mushroom risotto along with the giant playstation uninteractive things outside of the Dynamic Earth Center.  I was also sad to miss Brian Kelly’s session that clashed with ours.

I’ve put up the PLE photo set over at Flickr – if you took part in the session, please do head over and contribute some comments or information about yourself (“that’s the back of my head!”). And don't forget to re-live those precious moments with Graham Attwell: Live at Edinburgh.

e-mint, Nancy White, blogs and communities

Nancy White, originally uploaded by Josie Fraser.

A couple of weeks ago I was fortunate enough to be able to attend my first e-mint event – an informal seminar around blogging and communities featuring the wonderful Nancy White, online community guru, consultant and blogger, which turned into a very lively group discussion which included the old familiar (and currently on the boil again as poorly informed myspace moral panics emerge as US legislation for those of you who didn't catch it, DOPA was passed by the House of Representatives.) interweb tension of control vs. chaos. I’m firmly against filtering and gates –walled garden solutions might be useful in terms of licensing and liability, but like other filtering solutions they don't encourage a culture where young people are supported to take responsibility for their own actions and to equip themselves for dealing with unwanted encounters with materials or people.  My new role on the DfES backed Safe Use of the Internet steering group sees me having to sharpen up my act when it comes to what exactly constitutes useful e-safety education, not to mention to knock-on implications of DOPA.

It was great to be able to thrash some of this out with some very experienced community builders and moderators, and beer. I’ve only recently become a member of e-mint.org, the association for online community professionals, and it’s inspiring to be around such a buzzy group.

The e-mint post on Nancy’s visit is up, as is a post on the event by David Wilcox, as has Robin Hamman from BBC Five Live who co-organized the event along with Lizzie Jackson. Lilia 'Mathemagenic' Efimova came along and it was great meeting her for the first time.

If you don't already subscribe to their podcast feed (what's up with you?!) you’ll also want to listen to the 2005 International Edublog Award winners and EdTechUK favorites EdTechTalk crew Dave Cormier and Jeff Lebow's EdTechTalk 55 - A Discussion about Communities with Nancy White.

And to finish up, why not check out Nancy Whites own excellent series of recent posts on online communities:

Blogs and Communities - some thinking out loud
Blogs and Communities part 2
Blogs and Communities part 3
Blogs and Communities part 4
Blogs and Communities part 5

 

Online conference/seminar

I’m in the process of organising a couple of online conferences and in the market for some good advice. Has anyone had good or bad experiences with particular services or approaches? The elements I want to include are pretty standard: Speaker presentations via webcam, presentation slides and a chat facility. Is there something else I should definitely factor in? I’m currently looking at WebEx (as the most obvious place to start).

Fat Chance John Cage

Rosie Cardiff, E-Learning Curator at the Tate writes:

"Tate has launched a new online resource exploring Bruce Nauman’s installation 'MAPPING THE STUDIO II with color shift, flip, flop, & flip/flop (Fat Chance John Cage).'

As part of the EU funded project Inside Installations: the preservation and presentation of installation art, Time-based Media Conservation and Digital Programmes have collaborated to create an e-learning package designed to provide a rare opportunity for the public to go behind the scenes and explore the challenges of collecting, installing and caring for complex installations.

The site includes interviews with Bruce Nauman and his assistant, Michael Short and explores the roles of the curator and the conservator and a range of themes including preservation and co-ownership. While the site presents information of interest to a general audience, it also provides technical material not commonly available to the public. This e-learning package aims to provide a rich source of information to enhance an understanding of this work, provide a tool for adult learners, and a resource for colleagues in other institutions interested in the care and management of installation art.

This is the first time the Conservation Department at Tate has been involved in creating an e-learning resource and as such, the project presented many new challenges around how to present quite technical information."

Educational Freeware

Freeware author Marianne Wartoft has been producing software available as shareware or freeware for education for over a decade. She's set up a great new site, Educational Freeware, and writes:

"During my years as a freeware author, I have come across many good pieces of educational software that I would like to share with others. That's why I created this site.

The line between downloadable, installable software and online resources is getting less and less sharp - both kinds of software often serve the same purpose. I include them both on this site. The downloadable programs all run under Windows, and in some cases under Linux as well. The online resources are, of course, generally available under any operating system."

It's a fantastic project, and I wish her all the best in what will prove to be an invaluable resource for many learners. teachers and parents. On my wish list for future developments would be a submission form for readers favorite freeware sites, and perhaps a voting/comments form for sites people have used. I'd also like to see country of origin flagged up - especially important for literacy resources! 

Foord's MindGenius Wiki

David Frood, ILT Champion extraordinaire and E-Learning Staff Development Co-ordinator at the University of Derby, has created a Wiki to support the use of Mindgenius - one of the commercial mind mapping programme adopted by many UK institutions (including ours). You'll find information on:

Tips on using the software (Version 2005)
Tips on using the software for Mindgenius Version 1
Teaching and Learning Tips
How to guides

He writes: "The software tips will obviously be specific to the version that you are using. the teaching and learning tips I am hoping with apply to both versions. The version 1 tips should show up in red as hasn't any information added, hopefully a Mindgenius Version 1 user will start to build this area of the site for us."

Mind mapping programmes are fantastic, and should be one of the basic programmes offered by all institutions, and introduced during induction. They're great for staff and students (with or without learning disabilities), and can be used for brainstorming, project work, planning, and presentations.

Additional resources:

Mind Map at Wikipedia

Mind Mapping from James Cook University Study Skills Online, Australia

FreeMind - Java-based free open source Mind Map software

50+ RSS Ideas for Educators

Excellent (& very recently updated) pdf from Quentin D’Souza's Teaching Hacks.Com.

Brief, because I'm ill & expect this has been blogged everywhere already. Can't resist that diagram though!

Rubber band physics

Ohmygoshmysonisgonnalovethis! Like most children, my son is fascinated with rubber bands - their stretchiness, their pliability, the fact that they are freely available from most office environments and their battling potential. I've often wondered, was the regularly wheeled-out warning example of the child whose eye was irretrievably damaged by rubber band tom-foolery an actual child, or just an urban myth designed to stifle creativity and keep insurance costs down? Must every school have a sacrificial one-eyed student, and if so, how do you avoid getting chosen?

Anyway - none of this is an issue when you can study rubber bands officially, and thus gain access to protective lab goggles. Check out the Guide to Shooting Rubber Bands - a fantastic site  (although I notice the Safety tips section is a bit wonky) from shootologist Tim Morgan, which includes a little bit on the physics of winning rubber band shoot-outs.

Caught this over at Pasta & Vinegar, another great site that you'll want to spend some time exploring, this time by research assistant Nicolas Nova, which he describes as "research + daily scanning about location-based tech, video games, tangible interactions, ubicomp, hci/cscw, user experience analysis, innovation and various weird things".

BlogSafety

Via Will Richardson ("put the blog down Will...walk away from the blog...") Blogger hosted BlogSafety blog by Larry Magid, which takes a pro-education stance to the thorny issue of teen blogging, providing teachers and parents with a bunch of reassuring, good advice resources including  Safe Blogging Advice for [non-blogging] Parents, a Teachers Guide, Teens Guide (I'd take the word rules out of that if I were you Larry). Part of BlogSafety.com, which also links to advice from the excellent Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The Poetry Archive

The Poetry Archive is a great new UK based project with site sections and resources for teachers, students and librarians, and The Children's Poetry Archive - a dedicated site for poems written for younger readers and listeners. Well worth a good look around.

Andrew Motion, the UK's Poet Laureate is the driving force behind the new site which aims to make oral recordings - especially those read by the poet themselves - freely available. There are interviews, historic and newly commissioned recordings, and also guided tours of the archives available.