SocialTech

ALT-C 2008: Radio, edubloggers, edupunks & digital divides

So this is my round up of some of the highlights of my ALT-C2008, and links to some of the stuff we made & documented. Thanks to ALT for an excellent conference, and to everyone who I was lucky enough to get to hang out with this year. As Steve Wheeler's already noted, it was a excellent one.

A bunch of us delivered F-ALT this year - the first ALT-C fringe, designed to give delegates new spaces and new ways of collaborating and taking forward ideas and topics. The idea was to support activity that fell outside the typical conference format and structure, and allowed for a more creative and inclusive approach. It was a reckless and experimental approach to take, and by and large it worked out really well - it attracted a lot of delegates and demonstrated and started to explore ways in which participants could organise conference space for themselves. There were a variety of sessions - the Learning Objects session failed to attract enough interest to take off while others were very popular - I really enjoyed the EduPunk session, and the Microblogging session which took place during this years Edublogger meetup. I've added a bunch of stuff over at the wiki, I'm pretty much done for now. If you have F-ALT related goodness to share or link to, please do help make the site better. Also, you can check out some of the distributed action over at Twemes (welcome back Twemes! We really missed you!)

The 4th ALT-C Edublogger meetup went down a storm, we had a great time and managed to take over a substantial section of the pub. I've posted the list of attendees and blog links over at the F-ALT site - again, please do edit your entry/add yourself in if you were there.

I co-hosted a live radio show with Graham Attwell at the conference for Emerge - one of the series of Emerging Sounds of the Bazaar shows. It was probably the most fun it's possible to have at a conference (for me anyway, Scott Wilson didn't seem to enjoy his surprise interview quite so much). Cristina Costa did a fantastic job facilitating the live chat room for our international audience and Joe Rosa an equally amazing job with the production. If you missed it, you can recapture the craziness over at Graham's blog.

I also helped run an official conference workshop session, Learning About the Digital Divide, along with Frances Bell, Helen Keegan and Cristina Costa. Our session built the experience of our first slam workshop the year before, which encouraged participants to create and perform what we are calling slams (after the style of Poetry Slams http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetry_slam), that time around their experience of engaging with web 2.0. Our slam are really shorthand for a rapid, creative approach to creating a performance and/or object which engages with, and encourages others to engage with, an aspect or description of a topic. In this way we're seeking to do a few things. The approach is designed to support innovative, conversational and light weight content creation, acting as a counterpoint and compliment to traditional academic processes and methods.

You can go view the amazing contributions people created and delivered during the session over at the wiki, and also (until tomorrow night) vote on which is your favorite. My slam - I <3 Public Libraries is included in the vote list, but please don't vote for it! It's only there because I was really rubbish at getting it up in time and into it's proper place in the sample slam lists. The text I've included with the slides includes my workshop methodology, so do go and browse if you are interested in exploring this kind of format yourself.

Finally, I'm still really happy about winning the Learning Technologist of the Year award. I brought a hard copy of the announcement back for my mum, and she's very pleased too :) If you'd like a flavor of the gala dinner and a peek at the presentation check out James Clay's excellent (& very) short film of the evening. I eat chocolate in it.

Looking forward to next year already. You can see my pictures here and Sam (who always takes the best ones!)'s pictures here.

Learning Technologist of the Year 2008

I'm delighted & honoured to have won the Individual Award for 2008 Learning Technologist of the Year (pfd) at last nights ALT-C 2008 Gala dinner. The Award aims to celebrate and reward "excellent practice & outstanding achievement in the learning technology field", and was presented at the ALT conference in Leeds last night by David Cavallo, Chief Learning Architect for OLPC (One Laptop per Child).

Other teams and individuals honored last night:

The Learning Technology Group - Aditya Vadali, Dan Jackson, Georgia Georgiou, Mark Bryson, Mike Cowie, Rich Ranker, Steve Powell, and Tim Ellis from Lancaster University won the team award for "successful provision of an integrated service that has benefited staff and learners across the whole university".

Stuart Hepplestone from Sheffield Hallam University carried off the commendation in the individual category. The Learning Technology Team from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, along with the Technology Directorate from Ufi learndirect both snagged team commendations.   

The judges were kind enough to say that I am "responsible for ground-
breaking work in the learning technology domain", including my work with Will Gardner for Childnet International producing cyberbullying guidance on behalf of the DCSF as part of the UK's Safe to Learn suite of guidance; leading Childnet's work on Young People and Social Networking Services funded by Becta; for my work running the Edublog Awards for the last three years; and for my role in the JISC funded Emerge project, supporting and developing a sustainable community of practice around the educational use of new emergent technologies.

As fantastic as it is to be recognised for the award, there are a bunch of people that I need to thank who have worked with me and really deserve some credit for the success of these projects. At the risk of upsetting all the other people I'm also really grateful to, I'd just like to extra-thank some really important people who have made carrying out some tough projects possible, and being a learning technologist a real pleasure:

Stephen Carrick-Davis and Will Gardner of Childnet International; James Farmer, Dave Cormier, Jeff Lebow and Jo Kay - the current Edublog Awards team; and George Roberts, Marion Samler, Graham Attwell, Joe Rosa and Stephen Warburton from the Emerge Team. You are all stars, and if I don't owe you several beers each its only because some of you already own me them.

There are many many other people I'm thankful to and have been lucky enough to work with over the last several years, so a big cheers to you all too - I hope you won't mind me not making this post into a massive list of names. Be aware most people won't bother reading this far anyway :)

4th ALT-C Edubloggers meetup

UPDATE - venue changed to the OLD BAR - still in the same SU building :)

Really looking forward to our fourth ALT-C Edublogger meetup next week, taking place at Leeds Student Union Old Bar, Tuesday 9th September, 19.30 onwards. The Alt-C evening meal (for those who are attending the conference & have signed up for it) is served in the adjacent Refectory building, and as usual will provide a handy initial meeting point for some of you. Otherwise, head over to the Mine Bar. We may be moving on somewhere else but we'll stay at the Mine Bar until at least 20.30.

We've been lucky enough to have had some great special guests at previous meetups - including James Farmer, Stephen Downes, Barbara Dieu, Christopher D. Sessums and Barbara Ganley. This year's meeting promises to be as jam packed with world-class edubloggers as ever, including Scott Wilson and Graham Attwell. George Siemens will also be in town - he's speaking at ALT-C early Wednesday - and I'm looking forward to meeting up with him for the first time in 3D.

As ever - this is an informal, fun get together. You don't have to dress up and you don't have to be an old school edublogger to come along. Everyone who has an interest in edublogging is welcome. To co-inside with F-ALT, the first ever grass roots fringe event at ALT, which will be tackling a range of cutting edge topics in a fast, dynamic debate framework, we'll be holding the microblogging session on the night. Su White will be facilitating speakers Helen Whitehead, James Clay, Jay Cousins, Andy Powell & maybe me in a kung-fu style roundtable. Good quality heckling and any imaginative audience participation will be entirely welcome.

falt08

EdTech - mobiles, sunnies, sarnies

Picture credit: Mom & Mrs Pat Butcher by virgo200745

Grab your floppy hat and sun screen and head out to the bright new day that is the Edubloggers Summer Picnic: Hyde Park 15 June 08. This one's in honor of Instructional Media Analyst Stella Lee who's on loan to us from Athabasca University, Canada, for a week:

It's been a while since we had a proper meetup. So why not come to London's Hyde Park for an afternoon of great company and the finest food and wines known to mankind?*
Sign up now!
And don't forget to help spread the word!

Who?
Anyone working in educational technology, or in formal or informal learning & interested in geeky stuff. This is an ideal day out for for learning technologists, IT people, teachers, librarians, cultural workers, researchers, or people interested in talking about how tech supports learning & learning communities. Relations, friends, loved ones and offspring are all welcome.

Where?
Hyde Park: Meet by the Serpentine Gallery (check back for updates/rainy day alternatives)

When?
2pm - later. There will probably be an early evening pub move. I'd be pretty amazed if there wasn't.

What?
Bring food, drink, footballs, frisbees, blankets... activity ideas welcome - we may have footie & rounders matches depending on the relative fitness of attendees.

*You need to provide these yourself unfortunately

Digital Communities & Digital Identities

Most of my week was taken up presenting, hosting, and having a huge deal of fun at the Emerge project three day online conference, Digital Communities and Digital Identities. I lead on the programming for the event,& recruited many of the speakers, so it wasn't altogether surprising that I really enjoyed myself. The quality of the session content, speakers, and participant contributions exceeded even my high expectation though. I'm going to blitz through some of the sessions here, linking to resources on an ongoing basis (not everything is up yet) and inviting additional linkfo where people want to contribute them. Also, a quick reminder that following the ol Emerge tag convention, we went with jiscemerge0408. We used three primary environments: Elluminate (java based online conferencing software) for synchronous activities, Moodle (open source virtual learning environment) for asynchronous activity and conference co-ordination, and Second Life (multi-user virtual environment), for the conference social. We also used a host of other tools for specific tasks - twitter, wikis, media players, and the Emerge main site (a social networking platform), primarily for blogging.

You can see a visual record of the conference here. I tried to record as I went along, using screen shots of the presenters on cam. A very simple solution to creating a visual record of the online conference, but I can't say I've really seen it used at other online events.

What were my conference highlights? One of the big things that hit home for me at this conference was the definite sense of community belonging. Certainly, community members have a very diverse experience of and understanding of Emerge, and it's primarily (as Graham Attwell noted) a community of interest. Although the Emerge 'border policy' has been a semi-permeable and pragmatic one, our majority of our members are primarily associated with two funding rounds, designed to support innovation and user engagement in the UK post-compulsory education sector.   

However, the more important understanding that really hit home for many of us at this particular conference is the appreciation of Emerge as a community of cultural and social practice. Graham Attwell and Stephen Warburton will doubtless add to this far more graciously shortly. For me, the conference really highlighted the business of serious fun and how conductive and essential providing an relaxed, comfortable environment where people were able to express themselves, take risks and reach out. Knowing that you are part of a community which is interested in your work, sympathetic and alert too the problems and contexts you operate in, and basically on your side, can operate as a critical safety net, fostering creative risk taking and collaboration.  I'm not talking about blandly sycophantic  agreement here either. Meaningful friendship involves critical engagement - people who care enough and are interested enough to say things that might be challenging. It's difficult to have and engage openly in critical conversation - but ignoring it and hoping it will go away is a childish, disrespectful strategy which will eventually bite you in the ass.

A fun illustration of this was the revival of Frances Bell's community beard meme, originally coming from a funny critical post on the the prevalence of beards in the community  commenting on the gender imbalance of the visible community. Frances is an consummate expert in being a critical friend, and partly what I'd like to see actively cultivated in the community is  an environment that allows constructive criticism to be given and received non-threateningly.

George Siemens delivered a great keynote on Technology and Community as Identity, and raised a lot of themes which continued to resonate throughout the three days. So hats off George - you're a great keynote speaker!

Brian Kelly's session on Developing a sustainable approach to the use of web 2.0 was a masterclass in service design and management, summing up where we currently are in terms of institutional, legal and ethical terms regarding using third party services to support learners in formal education.

The Emerge Bizarre launch (mp3 file)- that went out as a live radio show - was a triumph of content and production values, and includes some interviews with a couple of our projects. Great use of CC licensed music and a big kick to us to used multimedia more effectively in future.

The ARGOSI and HABITAT projects community slot - presented by D.H. Lawrence and two ladyz also wearing rather fetching beards - The User experience of Virtual Worlds was very interesting and exciting. I'm particularly in love with the ARGOSI project which seems to be inspired by 80's TV programme The Adventure Show (which I loved! Please send me a link someone!). I'll add more detail and links to this shout out shorty.

What Not to Rez - our fashion show social on Second Life was something that I really enjoyed too - you can check out the Flickr show link at the top of the post for pictures of me in my monster-truck proportioned frock.

Endings 2007

Well, that was 2007.

I've been very busy, mainly working on resources for schools and colleges around using Social Networking Services (to be released soon) and traveling around the UK talking about cyberbullying and the guidence I helped produce for the UK government with school teachers, parents, leaders, local authorities, the police and social services - what it is, how we can prevent it and how to deal with it effectively when cases occur. I just wanted to post a catch up note commenting on a few end of year events.

We held the 4th International Edublog Awards slightly early this year - the most ambitious event to date. I'm really happy to say that the amazing international team - social website and community expert James Farmer (Australia – & the legend who who set up and ran the first awards, and rejoined us this year) webcasting pioneer and audio supremo Jeff LeBow (US), EdTech luminary Dave Cormier (Canada) and Second Life guru Jo Kay (Australia) - carried it off with aplomb. Huge huge thanks to them and to everyone else who pitched in.

& if you haven't already - check out Cormier's annual top ten EdTech stories of 2007.

What else? The last time I posted was just after the Eduspaces disconnection notice. I'm happy to report that after a flurry of dismayed activity, some kind of agreement was reached with TakingITGlobal.org who have now stepped in to begin the process of (hopefully) fixing the technical issues brought about by the shutdown activities and continuing the community with greater involvement of the members. The threatened closure raised a lot of issues for educators around community development, risk management, data protection and the use of third party web 2.0 services in education.

I also got asked to talk about Social Networking Services at the Bazaar European Conference on the 14 December 2007 in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and I was delighted to be able to hang out and talk shop into the wee hours with such smart and passionate company - including Helen Keegan, Steve Wheeler, and Bazaar supremo Graham Attwell.   

Speakers were asked to encompass the conference themes in their topics: data security, privacy and sustainability; social software, tools and content creation; Open Educational Resources (OERs) and the culture of sharing; Interoperability, metadata and OERs; Personal Learning Environments, ePortfolios and informal learning. For me, one of the huge things to come out was the lack of up-to-speed digital media literacy resources across the UK and Europe, for adults, children, young people and educators (particularly around data protection and management). I'm a huge fan of Henry Jenkins US based New Media Literacies project, and I'd like to see more action from both the UK's Media Literacy Taskforce, Becta, and Ofcom this year.

Eduspaces says goodbye

Just got the email from Curverider announcing the Eduspaces closure:

Hi All,

We would like to inform all users 
of EduSpaces that we will be shutting 
down the service on Jan 10th, 2008.

We have provided a mechanism 
for you to export all your blog 
posts in either an RSS format or 
HTML. To do this, go to your blog 
and select the submenu option 
you require. For those of you 
with files, you might want to 
download those as well.

Thank you to everyone 
who has supported EduSpaces 
over the last three years.
 
Best regards,
 
The EduSpaces team

It's no huge surprise (amongst other indicators Dave and Ben both moved out of Eduspaces a while ago), although I had hoped they would find someone to take the site over, and I can't say that I'm not sad to see the site go. Eduspaces and the Curverider team have provided a really important service, and an even more important model for the international education sector - demonstrating how web 2.0 and social technologies can be used to support learning and teaching, and showing the world what a learner-centric system might look like.

Edublog Awards - come celebrate!

Come and celebrate all the hard work that everyone has done this year:

• exploring and demonstrating how social media can make a real difference to the effectiveness of our learning and teaching
• battling restrictions and insecurities about new technologies and pedagogic practices
• putting the learner at the center of formal and informal learning
• making sure education is a creative, playful, enjoyable and worthwhile experience for all

The International Edublog Awards is now in it's fourth year, celebrating and highlighting excellence in the educational use of weblogs and social media, drawing attention to the vast amount of cutting edge educational practice out there and making friends on the way.

The awards party is upon us: Saturday December 8 2007 @ 21.30GMT. For your local times please click through. We're currently sorting out the hosting issues - the event will be taking place on the Island of jokaydia in Second Life.

Not able/wanting to join us on jokaydia? Why not keep track of all the action at one of our delightful  alternative locations? ;)

• EdTech Talk supremo & long time awards partner Jeff Lebow will be hosting Ustream Simulcast and text chat at EdTech Talk   - You'll be able to watch and hear whats going on at the SL location without risking anything, and join in with the party from there. You can find the audio only listen link are there as well.

There'll be a two alternative SL spaces setup for people to meet and listen to the webcast of the event if we get too full on the Island of jokaydia:

• Worldbridges Webcastatorium on Info Island. Special thanks to the World Bridges Team for sharing their space.
• The Island of Terra Incognita. Special thanks to Decka Mah for sharing her space with us for the event.

• Use Twitter to read/post about the awards - follow 'Eddies' to join in the conversation

• There's a Flickr pool for you to add your pics to - we'd love to see what you look like while you're at the awards, on or off line.

• There's a Facebook event listing up for those of you who have Facebook accounts

• For those of you busy doing your own thing, the tag is 07Eddies - please stick it on your awards related goodness!

Award recipients who would like to give an audio acceptance speech can either skype 'worldbridges' (or be skyped by worldbridges) or speak up in SL.

See you there!

Voting open

Heres your JF heads up that the finalists are now posted & the voting is now open for this years International Edublog Awards (aka the Eddies). HUGE thanks to everyone who took the time to publicise we were taking nominations and/or to nominate.

A couple of headlines: Unsurprisingly, Second Life was the platform that swept the virtual worlds category - there has been a lot of investment and interest in exploring the educational potential of SL this year. Slightly less predictably, Ning has swept the Social Networking Sevice category. Well done to all the finalists in that category for their excellent work - I'll be posting about Ning more shortly. However: is nothing interesting going on on other platforms? Did people defining SNS as just the profile based services, a la boyd, when it came to nominating? I find it hard to believe that there are no noteworthy eduprojects going on over at Flickr, YouTube, del.icio.us, etc etc.

 

Childnet's Digizen Cyberbullying Competition for 14-19 year olds

We talked a lot last year about how we'd like to run a competition showcasing how young people were using social software to engage with local and global communities, and develop their own voices online. The Edublog Awards are run as a voluntary effort and we just weren't confident that we could expand the awards in terms of the category requests we were getting (you'll notice that we run to 20 categories this year - double the number we've previously had), and in terms of providing young people with a really high quality awards programme.

I've been fortunate to work with charity Childnet International this year - one of the worlds leading e-safety organisations, whose mission is to work in partnership with others around the world to help make the internet a great and safe place for children. Childnet provide a wide range of high quality resources covering topics including blogging, mobile phones, data protection, file sharing, aimed at young people, parents, carers, and schools. Most recently I've been working with them on their Digizen site - an amazing media literacy project which covers cyberbullying issues, and advice on using social networking services in education.

Childnet have a long history of running internationally based young peoples competitions which focus on the responsible use of technologies, and in supporting young people to models great practice. The Edublog Awards are delighted to be promoting Childnet's brand new Digizen competition (we've included the competition under category 19) and we hope that you will support it as well, by spreading the word and by encouraging young people to enter - or even supporting the production of entries in your school councils, or in your subject areas - citizenship, drama, English or IT for example.

The competition is open to young people between the ages of 14 and 19 who are in formal education, or who are being home schooled. There are main two criteria for entries:

1. Entries should address some aspect of cyberbullying.

This could be around a specific type of cyberbullying, or a particular debate or issue to do with cyberbullying. Any format or approach is allowed - it could be a videoed discussion, a comic about a students experience or views, a podcast of a radio show, reviews of resources. The entries should be targeted at their peers or at younger children. They don't need to be huge, overly complex or ultra slick - they do need to be thoughtful, interesting and engaging. One example of a potential entry could be a short discussion of why mobile phones might be banned in response to cyberbullying incidence in school, and whether or not this might be effective. A student could record this on their mobile and upload it to a video hosting site, inviting other students to leave their comments.

You can get more ideas about the range of issues cyberbullying touches on over at the Digizen site.

2. They must be online

Entries can be in the form of websites, blogs, social network site profiles or groups, and can be audio, visual or text based. Once entries have been posted online you can submit your students work here. Find out more information about the competition terms and conditions over at the Digizen site.

We'll be updating on the competition at the awards in December (the Digizen competition doesn't close for entries until January 31 2008) - and we hope to be able to highlight some of the examples of the entries to date.