SocialTech

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.

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.

 

OMG It's the all new Edublog Awards!

It's back! & it's embiggened!

This years Eddies are up and running. We have a new home, new feed, new logo - and a ton of new categories! I'm also delighted to welcome back James Farmer to the conviner bench. For those of you who don't know - James pulled the whole thing together back in 2004 & then went off to concentrate on his mighty edublogging empire - I guess having  a community of 100,000 at your back leaves you with a ton of time :)

He'll be joining the rest of the core team - Dave Cormier, Jeff Lebow and me, in pulling together this years edublog extravaganza - the most glamorous event of the edublogging calender. This year you'll actually get to see our frocks - thanks to the support of the lovely Jo Kay we'll be hosting the ceremony in Second Life. If you haven't yet had a look around, why not take advantage of the CSI:NY peoples generosity and check out their easy entry package. If you're allergic to MUVEs or just don't have the time, hard drive or inclination to join us there, we'll be providing off world audio & back channel facilities.

The ceremony is currently scheduled for Saturday 8 December your time, so please put it in your diaries now.

What hasn't changed is the  awards ethos and aim. We are still an independently run, community-based awards programme which recognizes and promotes excellence in the educational use of social software. We're committed to  celebrating the achievements of  the international community, and to rounding off another hard working year with  a great excuse for us to all get together and build a fantastic resource to inspire and support educators everywhere.

So what are you waiting for? Start reviewing your blogroll, sending in your nominations  and spreading the word so that we can make this years awards our most successful ever.

Those categories are:

1. Best individual blog

2. Best group blog

3. Best new blog

4. Best resource sharing blog

5. Best designed blog

6. Most influential blog post

7. Best blogged research paper or project

8. Best teacher blog

9. Best higher-education student blog

10. Best librarian / library blog

11 Best educational tech focused blog

12. Best elearning / corporate education blog

13. Best educational use of audio

14. Best educational use of video / visual

15. Best educational wiki

16. Best educational use of a social networking service

17. Best educational use of a virtual world

18. Best educational use of open source

19. Digizen’s 14-19 competition - note, this award is not run by the Edublog Awards, we are  delighted however to be promoting it and supporting young peoples participation.

20. Conveners award

Please get in touch if you or your organisation would be interested in sponsoring any of our categories!

Show that you Share! In Utrecht!

I'm delighted to have been asked to lead a workshop on social networking services and social search at the forthcoming Bazaar European Conference, 14 December 2007 in Utrecht, the Netherlands. For those of you who don't know, Bazaar is a European funded project seeking to support the development of a community around Open Source Software in education and open content development or Open Educational Resources (OERs).  The line up so far looks excellent - including Helen Keegan, Steve Wheeler, and Bazaar supremo Graham Attwell.

Main themes are data security, privacy and sustainability; social software, tools and content creation; Open Educational Resources (OERs) and the culture of sharing; Interoperability, matadata and OERs; Personal Learning Environments, ePortfolios and informal learning.

The conference has been designed to foster dialog and support the participation of everyone attending - opening with a scoping session so that attendees can decide how best to structure the event (Graham's taken a semi-structured unconference approach - the best one I think for these kind of events - otherwise every session turns into a debate about structure vs structurlessness. Check out the flyer for further details.)

On top of all this it's a free event! Blimey. Hope to see some of you there.

Download conference_flyer_bazaar.pdf

The BIMA Facebook debate, & Chris Kelly's announcement today

I had a blast as one of the debate panelists at this week's BIMA organised Facebook Debate (Yes, I was there, despite not being included on any of the speaker lists) at the BT Center in London. I'm not a huge fan of the debate format - for and against arguments always kick against the pragmatist in me,which is why I love the slam concept, but it was fun to go all out for a specific side. My team (me & the endearingly grumpy Robert Lock) were pitched against Damien Mulley and Sam Sethi on two audience selected topics - Facebook's decision to open up its interface to all developers was a mistake (we were asked to argue for) and friend requests from your boss are best ignored (against).

I'm not going to run through all of the arguments, although some of them I suspect are well on the way to near legendary status (Sam's statement that Boss stands for bag of shit, for example) and I'd also like to publicly thank Damien since his arguments were all of huge help to our team  :)

I'll call out a couple of points that I made that may be of interest to readers over here. Firstly (and this turned out to be the most contentious thing I said all night) I suggested that one of the problems with opening up the Facebook platform to external apps was that to the extent that third party apps were interesting/useful (& I'd like to think that some are useful, as opposed to just entertaining), many just expanded the Facebook sink into a black hole - eg - more information that I can't get out. Although the management of distributed presence was clearly a theme that ran across the evening, data portability seemed to be  largely regarded as a matter of choice - in the sense that if you want it - go to another  platform. 

Secondly, I talked about having your boss included in your contact list as a good excuse to finally get to grips with Dante's 10th circle of hell - aka the peculiar granularity of FB permissions. I asked for an audience hands up on who in the room felt really confident about setting up and using permissions, and about five people did. It'll be interesting to see whether the introduction of friend categories makes permissions easier, harder, or no different to navigate (& just in case anyone involved in the coding of it for FB is reading this - please make sure you can assign individual friends to multiple groups).

UPDATE: Adam Tinworth has posted a really great report of the event over at One Man & His Blog. I'm sorry he couldn't stay to the end and talk!

In other related news - so this doesn't become the FB blog - Chris Kelly, Chief Privacy Officer at Facebook, posted today on a range of e-safety activities, including a commitment to address complaints concerning certain categories (nudity, porn, harassment, unwanted contact) within 24 hours - as far as I know the first social network service to specify a customer service level agreement response time (please do let me know if I'm wrong!).

Burning Life

I don't post that much about Second Life (SL), despite the fact I've been spending an awful lot of time there on the Emerge Island and also gearing up for throwing an SL Edublog Award party with James Farmer in there this year (OMG - we're into our 4th year already!).

For those of you who haven't looked around yet, it's not all shopping and, um, educational technologists. If you've got a speedy computer (or at least, patience honed from the days when popular chat rooms would regularly boot you out whenever things got lively), you might want to check out counter cultural festival Burning Life 2007. Promising "another side to the Second Life sims: cultures that counter corporate constraints, and embrace unrestrained creativity", the festival runs today through to October 1st.

Happy Software Freedom Day!

Today is Software Freedom Day. Take a moment to celebrate your favorite free/open source software, or to thank one of those hard-working, freedom-fighting developers. For more ideas and inspiration check out the official site.

For the really lazy amongst you, head over to Packt Publishing's 2007 Open Source Content Management System Awards (Jeeze guys, could you have come up with a more glamorous name?) to eyeball some apps. A bit of an eclectic choice for the Social Networking category (is Elgg a CMS? Is Moodle a Social Networking app? etc) but today is Software Freedom Day, so go vote for something Open Source!

4 bloggers blogging

Blogged already by James, Steve & Hayden, but I can't resist posting this photo from David Bryson's bloggers blogging slideshow - it's of Simon, me, Frances and Helen blogging after the Web Slam. Ah, happy days.

Web Slam: 2.0

I'm still at ALT-C 2007, enjoying catching up & meeting a bunch of new people. This morning,  Helen, Frances and I ran a Web 2.0 slam workshop. We were aiming to get the audience to take over the session and approach Web 2.0 apps, issues and practices creatively. Everyone was asked to contribute a 90 second competitive slam - basically, a quick and dirty performance piece around the stuff we covered in the first half of the session. We worked as we went and you can check out the WetPaint wiki, which links to the pictures and vids our lovely best boy Simon Hardaker took during the session. Big thanks to to Steve Wheeler who put time in as our chair, Unfortunately no one took up my suggestion to explore web 2 through the medium of interpretative dance, although the winning slam was a web 2.0 parody mime. 

We may or may not have film of the presenters' slams - apparently there was additional secret filming going on in the audience and we're currently trying to uncover the footage. Helen presented a visual montage around web 2.0 issues and themes; Frances contributed a bed time story/morality tale for our times on Facebook disclosure; I explored social network search engines with a live dating session for the single people in the audience.  This could potentially be a good career move for me so if you have a tech event coming up and would like some live matchmaking 2.0 give me a call ;)

Off to ALT-C 2007

I'm off to ALT-C in the morning. I'll be working the early morning shift (9am!) with Frances Bell & Helen Keegan on the 5th - we're running a Web 2.0 Slam workshop, my contribution will be about personalisation, social search and social networking services. It would be more fun if we had an evening slot but hey - you could always stay up all night! DISCLAIMER - the internet has moved faster than the submission procedure, so we may not be sticking exactly to the advertised adgenda.

Catherine Howell is also speaking in the same slot as us, and I'm a bit upset to miss her session to be honest. At least if we don't get many takers I can happily imagain they're all headed off to her workshop.

There's also a good looking web 2.0 apps as student portfolio session at the same time, so those of you who are morning people are spoiled for choice.

Euro-Machinima

Photo: PK Berlin 25 Friedrich Kirschner by Watz

Leicester is a pretty cool town. Not only does it boast the best indian food available in the UK, it also recently hosted the first European conference about women and social media, and is now gearing up for the first European Machinima Fest.

Machinima is a rapidly maturing field - film making using gaming and MUVE software. Press release after the jump, sign up for further details here.

Women, Blogging & Business

I spent a great day on Friday at the Women, Blogging & Business conference - the first European event to focus on women and social media. The final programme offered a great line up, and this is the first conference I've been to since the early 90s that had an all women speaking cast, and certainly the first tech conference I've ever been to where the women clearly out numbered the male delegates.

It was a fantastic day. The first keynote was Meg Pickard (Head of Communities and User Experience for Guardian Unlimited) who delivered a great analysis of the web 2.0 transformation of the consumption, interaction, curation and creation of content.

Next up was Eileen Brown, Microsoft Technology Evangelist, who gave us the low down on the strategic use of employee blogging within Microsoft and outlined the impact it has had on humanising the public perception of the company, as well as on influencing policy and practice at Microsoft itself.

Jory des Jardins,  Media Consultant & Co-founder of BlogHer wrapped up the keynotes with an overview of women bloggers as producers and consumers.

Technorati here, Flickr here.

Spring Meetup! London, 17th April

Picture: Centre Point Fountain

I’m loving the sunshine at the moment, and relishing the opportunity to be able to have breakfast in the garden. What could be better? Mojito’s after work with some likeminded, geek-friendly company? If this sounds good to you then why not come along to the next edublogger meetup kicking off at Jrinks in Soho, London, on Tuesday 17th April, around 6.15pm. You don’t need to be an educational blogger – an interest in technology and learning will do.

Guest of honour is Barbara Dieu, a São Paulo-based teacher, researcher, EFL/ESL and edtech luminary. Barbara is runs Dekita, blogs over at Wide Open Spaces and has been involved in international collaborative and exchange projects for the last decade.

Let me know if you can make it via the comments here or by email.

Google map here, nearest tube Tottenham Court Road