EdTechUK

Alt-C 2006 Edinburgh edubloggers meetup

Frances Bell & Anne Hewling, originally uploaded by Josie Fraser.

Despite some logistic Ceilidh-related issues on the night, a bunch of us managed to get together to talk about out current projects and do some planning for the December conference, which will be scheduled to tie in with the third Edublog Awards show.

Chat around the table was about platforms, projects and what’s next, and themes and schemes for the big conference next June.

Andy Pullman, Andy Worth, Steven Warburton, Russell Dyas, Jenny Booth, Graham Attwell, Anne Hewing, Frances Bell, Christopher ‘witness protection’ Sessums, Brian Kelly, me and Terry Wassall all managed to follow the trail of crisps to the edubloggers table.

What is pretty urgent is that we come up with a new name for blog.ac.uk, for two very good reasons:

1. It’s obvious to everyone that the focus and interests of the group have superseded blogging. Two years ago, the landscape was very different – as were the common tools and practices. Blogging is now only one element – and for many people, not even the focal element, within the web 2.0/read-write web landscape/arsenal. Personal Learning Landscapes (PLEs) represent a really significant conceptual shift with respect to this – taking the implications and possibilities of distributed conversations, communities and identities of practice and thinking them through in terms of formal, (as well as the existing, already extensive, informal) experiences of learning.

2. ac.uk is only available to FE and HE institutions within the UK. We want to be an inclusive organisation that recognises the importance of working across sectors, institutions and qualifications. We had a big discussion again about the shelf life of the organisation in terms of the development of fractions and more focused sub-groups. For me, the organisation is an essentially transient one, like most of the other communities I’ve belonged to. It’s being put in place to deliver some specific objectives – primarily around raising the profile and strengthening the network of UK educators who are passionate about the use of new and emerging technologies to support learning and promote learner communities and autonomy. I’ll be more than happy to see it made redundant and dismantled by its members once more useful way of working emerge.

James Farmer's Dad asks: what's up?

James Farmer's dad, Dr. Mike Farmer, has just entered the family edublogging business. He's just posted his fustration on getting started wordpress in particular and blogging in general. Rather than just send him a link to Elgg I left a round up of what's currently available in for people wanting to get started, which I'm repeating here for anyone who hasn't yet discovered Mike's blog:

"Hi James' dad. Have to disagree with your last poster about the non-existence of the edublogging community - there are both UK and international communities (not to mention those in all the other countries) - they are pretty new, but very much kicking.

Also - there are training and support events for new edublogger/rss explorers. Why not come along to the next ALT edublog workshop, which isn't advertised yet but will be on Tuesday 4th of May (book early because the last one was completely over-subscribed)

There is an edubloggers mailing list you can join which will keep you up to date with any key UK activities, and a UK & Ireland edubloggers directory. There’s also the third UK edubloggers meetup taking place in London on the 4th of February, where we will be finalising the plans for the first UK edublogger conference which will be taking place in June, as well as brainstorming, swapping information and socialising.

Don’t forget ALT-C this year, which will attract a lot of bloggers and podcasters because of the pro web 2.0 themes. I’m also on the ALT-C blogging group this year, and it will be our job to make sure that there is support available for people who want to try blogging out at the conference – I’m also going to submit an overview of the edublogging awards, as a practical introduction to the wide range of learning practices being supported by blogs.

Internationally, there’s a ton going on, as James is well aware of! For a start you could check out the International Edublog Awards (founded by your son). You could also take a look at the International edublogger Frappr Map.

Good luck to Mike & to everyone else getting started with blogging this year!

Ana/mia (annorexia/bulimic) Communities

OK. I've been immersed in community recently, running the Edblog Awards an all. And for me it's been a positive, engaging and constructive experience (all of it, including the disagreements). I've also been very involved in (and am committed to continuing to be involved in) anti-censorship and access issues, particularly those where children young adults and their rights are concerned.

This post then has been a while coming because it's something that still bugs the hell out of me, and something that I am working towards being able to articulate my objection to in a reasonable, or at lest, un-harmful, way. I've been following Liz Ditz recent series on blogging and Moral Panic with real interest, not least because it ties in well with issues that the edublog community are reckoning with and organising in response to right now. Part IV - Real Risks is out now and addresses bullying and victimisation - topics that we really need to face up to right now. What it leaves out, and what I'd like to draw attention to here, is equally as complex: Identity communities that are life threatening or explicitly nihilistic. I really, really don't want to match these communities in terms of their own (sometimes very accurately portrayed) melodrama, at the same time I'm totally weirded out that no one else is posting about ana/mia (or ana/mia/ed) blogs and blog rings. Ana/mia is short for (& I'm sure that some of you reading this will already know) anorexia, bulimia, ed for Eating Disorder.

It was about six years ago that I became aware of ana/mia sites, and of course the ease and accessibility of web 2.0 was going to extend to these kind of sites and girls and women (and some men) in search of these communities, this kind of voice. I didn't really want to think about it, suddenly, I find myself thinking about it more and more.

Ana/mi blogs and blog rings - you can find a whole load, covering Live Journal, Xanga and MSN Spaces blogs and communities. It isn't hard to find them - you can search under ana/mia or look under diet. They typically consist of tips for hiding not eating from the people around you, reports about not eating, and pictures of models and anorexics. This is a formula that hasn't changed in the last however many years.

I'm certainly not putting this post forward as a reason we need to crack down on young peoples internet access even further. I really want to be able to engage in a realistic dialogue about how the internet is being used by children and young people, including all the crappy, hard to deal with ways, because I know that this is part of a wider dialogue about how we educate and engage them in society and politics. So I want to make it clear that I'm not judging these bloggers or shouting "eat some pies!" at them, neither of which would make the slightest difference to when this current crop of bloggers live or die - neither am I at all pro-ana. It's obvious that they get a lot of the same benefits from blogging as I do - community building, self affirmation, belonging. And maybe one in fifty of these blogs are recovery based. But...

SuprJosie

Finally got five minutes to stitch together some stuff over at Suprglu - so there's now a single subscription available for those of you greedy for my edtech related content. I finally got in on an ap early enough to snaffle Josie as my url id! & sadly, at this point in my life that makes me pretty happy. The new address is http://josie.suprglu.com/ - even if you're not that bothered about my ramblings, you'll want to go check it out just to live the small-pieces-loosely-joined dream.

I'm very much liking the key word feature. You'll see one of the combined feeds is a blog I threw up yesterday for some recent blog workshops - there are a few good resources I've made over there including a comparison chart of web-based blogging services (James & D'arcy having pretty much wrapped up multi-user reviews).

I'll come back soon, link up this post properly, tell you more about the OS in education conference, and also announce the 2005 edublog awards, which I'm taking over from James Farmer this year - nominations will be open very, very shortly.

EdTechTalk 18

Over at EdTechTalk they've just put up their 18th audio cast - when do they find the time to actually work? Jeff Labow and Dave Cormier were kind enough to invite me along for the chat, which was recorded yesterday. Thanks for having me over guys! You can see the list of topics covered over on one of their handy new notes style pages, amongst which were Skype, wikipedia, and eduforge.

Dave's also got a new blog up: Dave's Educational Blog: Education, post-structuralism, and the Rise of the Machines. A man after my own heart. Check out The Feedbook post - Dave's idea for an opml present time audio resorce for students.

No Garlic Please

One of my favorite bloggers - Régine Debatty of media art blog We Make Money Not Art fame has opened up another lovely shop - No Garlic Please cataloging design, illustration and fashion, "what's beautiful or interesting in Europe".

Régine's posts are consistently fascinating and constantly reproduced by the A list. If you're at all interested in what's on the horizon in art, design, and technology you need to be subscribing to at least one of her feeds.

More on multi-user blogs

Readers will probably have already seen D'Arcy Norman and James Farmer's contributions; Robin Good recently got a commission to review multi-user blogs. He compares Silkblogs, Drupal, Manila, 21Publish, Typepad and Wordpress MU - with Drupal coming out as his favorite. The reports should be available in two PDF's but they aren't responding at the moment.

http://soleagent.org/report-full.pdf
http://soleagent.org/report-small.pdf

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. 

Blogger download for Word

OK - I've been a little off my blogging stride recently, & I guess you've all already picked up on this - but I'm impressed. Being dyslexic and an English (UK) writer, one of my biggest dependencies is on any quick and reasonably accurate UK spell checker. So I'm no stranger to the twilight world of cut and paste, in fact, I think I've been granted dual nationality.

OK - Will Richardson's established that Blogger is not an appropriate classroom tool, and lord knows I'm not in the League of Gates.

On the other hand... how many of us who are running hands on sessions are using Blogger to demo to others how quick and easy it is to set up your own blog, and show that there are high quality free tools available to educators (obviously not as high quality as James Farmer's wonderful, free, edublog.orgs service). And how many of our participants come familiar with word already?

Thanks Jane!

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.

Near Near Future

Haven't blogged about Régine Debatty's blog, Near Near Future before - so it's about time. Currently my absolute favorite feed, Régine's site (aka we make money not art) is a must for all cultural junkies, and the first place emerging, pervasive and hands-up bizarre technologies seem to surface.

She's recently blogged about location-based mobile phone game Scoot, research into altering public perceptions of pollution, and Chanel’s new Tokyo headquarters.

So I'm recommending it here and also in the recent interview I did for the Merseyside Center for the Information Society on (what else) blogging. It's in PDF and it's called 'Inside the mind of a blogger' .

Is it just me or are the psychological overtones of the title a bit scary? & not helped by the categorisation of the article under 'case studies' ;-)

Caterina Fake interview

I've mentioned Flickr a few times before - one of the best resources for people interested in democratic photography, moblogging and/or photo-sharing on the web. Engadet posted an interview with Flickr's fantastically named co-founder Caterina Fake last week and it's worth a minute if you missed it.

Engadget are also currently going head-to-head with Gizmodo for the Best Tech Blog in the 2004 Weblog Awards. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for them - as well as actually voting, and not just because I write for them (very occasionally). I think they've been doing a great job establishing themselves as the most informative and entertaining tech blog over the last 9 months, and they really make an editorial commitment to acknowledging that women are as interested in technology as men. 

the future of elearning needs us more than it needs you!

Go and check out John Rowett's Workblog (now formally divorced from his non-work blog) for some recent, really funny diagrams. Here he is, teasing us with how good his service orientated milkshake is. And here he is again, playing with Mindmanager X5 pro.

Scot Aldred's e-learning

Scot Aldred, a Learning Designer somewhere in Rock Hampton, Queensland, Australia (Scot your CV PDF won't open!) has just started up what looks to be an excellent new blog, e-learning. Stephen Downes and Alan from CogDogBlog have already mentioned it - Alan helpfully provides the RSS feed Blogger are hiding: http://e-learning-engagement.blogspot.com/atom.xml.

There's some interesting stuff already - I'll just mention a post called What's Wrong with Group Work? which points to the SPARK self and peer assessment kit, which as well as the open source software provides some good references to the litereature on group work. From the site:

Abstract “Group projects aren't fair” is a frequent student response in higher education. Group work is used to facilitate peer learning and encourage students to develop collaboration, a crucial graduate attribute. Since assessment strongly influences learning, any course objective to improve peer learning and/or collaboration must have assessment that promotes it.

Self and peer assessment is a valid solution for promoting these objectives and overcoming potential inequities of equal marks for unequal contributions. Group members are responsible for negotiating and managing the balance of contributions and then assessing whether the balance has been achieved.

SPARK enables confidentiality to students rating their own and their peers' contributions. A range of criteria related to team tasks and maintenance promotes fair acknowledgment of individuals' contributions. SPARK automates significant data collection, collation and calculation problems that academics would otherwise face. The factors produced by SPARK are used to change group marks to individual marks. Without this automation, academics with large classes simply could not consider self and peer assessment.

As with all educational technology the essential caveat applies: Careful and thoughtful student-centred integration is vital for success!

James Farmer's Graduate Certificate in Higher Education Website, Weblog & Wiki

Check out James's amazing new site – it’s like a sweetie shop over there at GCHE. Treats are organised into the following flavours: Communication, Collaboration & Community Online, Evaluation Online, Assessment Online, Culture and Internationalization Online & Using Online Resources.

Also:

"Guidance and purpose in using a weblog (I'm using WordPress here) and a wiki in this context... I've done a quick step-by-step for the wiki for any Tiki enthusiasts out there."

Go leave some feedback!

Auricle - the case of the UKeU debacle

Auricle is one of my favorite UK edublogs.

The public blog of the University of Bath’s e-learning team is consistently interesting and thought provoking, typified by their recent couple of posts on Learning Material Repositories - Rafts or Battleships? (part 2 here)

They’ve been tracking the case of the UK e-University debacle (and the mystery of the disappearing economies of scale) for a while too. Special mention has to go to UKeU: The Movie, Derek Morrison's breakdown of the UK Parliament's video stream of evidence about UKeU given to the Parliamentary Education and Skills Committee in June.

Very much recommended reading/feeding.

UKeU UPDATES: OBHE article tones down the UKeU Platform
UKeU: the financial fallout
UKeU - Peeling the Onion - layer 2

Furl

Since I gave a heads up to Bloglines this week, I thought I’d also mention Furl - another free resource I've been using (for both work & not-work. I’ve been starting to collect different translations of Rilkes Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes recently – you can check out my public archive here). There are also some great articles about Furl & things to do with it about at the moment.

Of course you can check out the official Furl FAQ, where you’ll find out how Furl works, how Furl is different to a blog, and perhaps most obviously, why is Furl better than just using your bookmarks?

Amy Gahran, who keeps the excellent Contentious blog, has written some interesting things about Furl – most recently this entry about Furl, File Sharing & Copyright. She also came up with 10 Cool Things to do with Furl, currently one of the most Furled articles around. In More Furl Tricks she also rounds up the current crop of Furl related pages.

Software Subversions

Robert O'Toole (University of Warwick)'s Software Subversions has moved from its old home to its new home here. What a transformation! It’s gone from an austere modernist aesthetic to a beautiful explosion of soft colour. Really makes me wish I had the time to do my own changing rooms here. Maybe in the summer.

Where have your trackbacks gone though Rob? And an about page would be nice.

EdTechAZ

I've just come across CogDogBlog, Alan Levine's excellent blog. Alan Levine is an instructional technologist at the Maricopa Community Colleges in Phoenix, Arizona – the hotbed State of Instructional Technology.

Alan has a great writing style and there are some handy resources to be found there too, like this entry on Jo Moxley’s Teaching Wiki. I’m hoping he’ll be blogging pretty soon about The Arizona Technology in Education Alliance (AzTEA) Westside chapter’s third annual Way Out West (WOW) Technology Conference, which took place yesterday.

Key EduBloggers

I've just added a list of urls to my sidebar for people I consider to have the most essential RSS feeds in edublogging right now. I’ve selected on the grounds of active blogging, tied to the quality and relevance of posts. Of course these are the feeds I find the most informative and interesting – so there’s plenty of room for contention.

Let me know what you think.

School Blogs: Reply to Peter Bolger

Yes indeed!

Peter Ford is your man, someone who I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting but who I’ve mailed a few times - and has been unfailingly helpful and affable. The man’s passion for blogs in education is award worthy! He and Adam Curry set up SchoolBlogs: “The aim is to make available the potential of weblogs to the educational world. To that end, anyone involved in education can create and maintain an individual SchoolBlog here free of charge.” You’ll find loads of information and great examples there (or via the RSS feed) on the current state of blogging in UK Schools.

He also writes The FordLog: Organised Chaos, another great source of information (with a feed too).

If that wasn’t enough, his ICT consultancy runs the Weblogs4Schools project, an initiative aimed at unleashing the potential of weblogs in schools in the UK.

I’m aware that I’m risking sounding like I’m either his mum or stalking him, but the guy’s great and a big inspiration to me in kick starting my fledgling blogging career.