EdTechUK

NLab Seminar on Social Software

On Tuesday I was invited to speak at one of DMU's Institute of Creative Technologies 2006 NLAB seminars. It was great to finally meet up with Sue Charman and Professor Sue Thomas, and I really enjoyed meeting the seminar participants and talking about all the interesting research, thinking and practice going on in and around my hometown (Leicester, rhymes with Nesta).  I gave a brief overview of the current state of play in education, focusing on the use of edublogs and the edublog communities in the UK. The panel was live blogged (rather disconcertingly to be on the receiving end) by Suw.

NLab has it's own blog, as do many of the participants - including Jess Laccetti who posted this summary of the day, and Mark who posted these comments.

My slides were mainly a collection of handy links, so here they are for anyone who wants them:

Download NLab.ppt

Suw and I look extreemly serious in the pictures. In real life we actually do make some jokes.

The New Worldwide Web

A while ago I was delighted to make a very modest contribution (about the 2005 edublog awards) in response to a call from Terry Freedman for a book about the current state of play in education. Things have changed rapidly with the wild-fire spread of the current generation of social software, and the equally speedy ways in which web 2.0 has been seized upon within education to support engaging, exciting and inspiring learning.

After much hard work, Terry has now released the final, freely available version:

Download Coming_of_age_v1-2.pdf

(2MB PDF)

Please do feel free to pass it on to anyone who might be interested in an overview in recent web developments. There's some great stuff in there - 20 (!!!) chapters on all kinds of web 2.0 goodness, with contributions from Miles Berry, John Bidder, Mechelle De Craene, John Evans, Peter Ford, Terry Freedman (Ed), Steve Lee, Ewan McIntosh, Alan November, Chris Smith, Dai Thomas, David Warlick, and Shawn Wheeler, And if that list of international edu-luminaries still isn't enough to tempt you into a 2 meg download, why not take a peek at Peter Ford's index & biog post.

Doodle 4 Google Competition

Image: 2005 winning entry by Lisa Wainaina, age 11

Google are running their first nationwide Doodle 4 Google competition, following last year's London pilot. If you attend a school or college in the UK and are between the ages of 4 and 18 you are in with a chance of becoming one of the 300 Regional finalists and going on to win the top prize - you and your family get to head out to Googleplex, California, and your doodle goes live for 24 hours:

'Doodle 4 Google - My Britain' is a nationwide design competition open to the UK's 10 million school children. Young people are being invited to design a Google doodle explaining what it means to be British today. The winning doodle, which will be displayed on the Google UK homepage for 24 hours, will be seen by around 18 million people.

The Doodle 4 Google microsite contains everything schools need to know about the competition including a downloadable version of the School Pack with sample Google logos and lesson plans for teachers.

blog.ac.uk

The embryonic conference site is up (many thanks James!) for the UK's first educational blogging conference, scheduled to take place in London on June 2nd. We have two amazing international speakers lined up, and a host of the UK's leading edublogging lights running sessions. This is going to be a working conference: places are free but limited. Head over to the website for details (and more to come over the next week) and send an email here headed blogs.ac.uk and including your details, affiliations, and weblog name/url to register your interest.