As promised more on this weekends Sounds of the Bazaar LIVE internet radio fest. Don’t miss it!

The programme times are as follows:

Saturday 19 April – 1300 UK summer time, 1400 Central European Summer Time (CEST)

Sunady 20 April – 1900 UK summer time, 2000 CEST

MondaY 21 April – 1800 UK summer time, 1900 CEST

Each of the programmes, which will last about 45 minutes, has a theme.

Saturday’s programme will focus on e-Portfolios and Personal Learning Environments. And I will be talking live with Cristina Costa about how we can use social software and web 2.0 tools to support learning.

Sunday will look at creativity and reflection in learning. Programme guests include John Pallister form Wolsingham School in County Durham and Annika Matilda Bergstroem from Sweden.

And on Monday we will be looking at Web 2.0, innovation and learning development. Guests include Raymond Elferink from the Netherlands and Andreas Auwarter from the University of Koblenz in Germany. Ray will be talking about a new lightweight learning repository and Andreas about podcasting in education.

And on course we want you to take part too. You can email your questions or comments on the show to me, Graham Attwell, on graham10 [at] mac [dot] com. Or you can text me on 00491797650986. All comments that are fit to be heard will be read out LIVE. But better still come on the show. How can you do that? Just skype me – my skype name is GrahamAttwell. Make sure you have a headset ready. Or email me in advance and tell me you would like to come on the show giving me your skype address.

And on Thursday we will be launching a new project – the Emerge Bazaar (an Emerge benefits Realisation Project) as part of a JISC Emerge three day on-line event.

The launch will take the form of a one hour LIVe internet radio programme. We’ve got lots of great content lined up for you: interviews, phone ins (or, more properly, ‘skype ins’), jingles, competitions and more. Anyway, more details on that next week. Of course we will also be explaining to you what the Emerge Bazaar is about. You are all invited. This programme will be at 1600 UK Summer Time, 1700 Central European Summer Time.

Last – but not least – how do you access the show. Sound of the Bazaar will be streamed from the following address:

http://icecast.commedia.org.uk:8000/emerge.mp3.m3u

Just put this address in your browser and the stream should open in your favourite MP3 player on your computer – e.g. iTunes or Windows Media Player.

If you have any technical queries or any other questions please get in touch. Meanwhile sit back and enjoy the show.

Just a quick early morning moan.

Can anyone tell me what is the point of these aggregator blogs which have appeared in the last three months. Most of them seem to be set up in WordPress and are using some kind of search software – probably Google or Technorati – to automatically aggregate based on key words / categories. In a few cases there does seem to be some human intervention but most of them are just preprogrammed to write soemthing like “xxx wrote an interesting post yesterday”. And of course being reasonably legitimate – apart from the ‘Flash Gordon’ factor – they get past my sp[am filter and appear as trackbacks on the blog. A lot are targeting ‘tech posts’ and a not inconsiderable number are after things like e-Portfolios.

I fail to see the point – what added value do these sites provide. Or do their owners think they will get rich from Google ads? In their dreams.  This is just another layer of spam.

We have been threatening this for a long time. But now, thanks to generous sponsorship from the JISC Emerge Bazaar project, Sounds of the Bazaar is going LIVE.

We are going to host a broadcasting fest this weekend with three live half hour programmes on all the best in educational technology, learning and (hopefully) culture. I will give you a little more detail on the line up for the programmes later this week.

But make sure you put these dates in your diary now:

Saturday 19 – 1400 hours Central European Time (1300 UK)
Sunday 20- 2000 hours Central European Time (19.00 UK)
Monday 21 – 1900 hours Central European Time (1800 UK)

How do you access the programme – just go to this address in your browser – the stream should open in your MP3 player of choice. And don’t worry if you forget the address – we will put a big button on this site for you to press!

Update – thanks to Cristina here are links for times in other time zones:

First show – http://tinyurl.com/5gme7w

2nd show – http://tinyurl.com/5qx5k8

3rd show – http://tinyurl.com/635no3

This is a question which has bothered me for some time as I am involved in developmental projects for both e-Portfolios and Personal Learning Environments. And it could well be that there is little difference, depending on how both applications (or better put, learnng processes) are defined. Of course, if e-Portfolios are seen primarily as a vehicle for assessment then the differences are clear. Simililarly if the e-Portfolio is owned by an institution or course. But if the e-Portfolio is seen as being owned by the learner, is intended to record all learning and is seen as a tool for formative self evaluation and for reflection then the differnces become more fuzzy.

I have had a number of interesting discussions about this issue recently – with Jenny Hughes, Cristina Costa and Mark van Harmelen. Jenny (who loves working with words) talked about the difference between presenting knowledge and representing knowledge. I think this is a valuable distinction. An e-Portfolo is a` place for reflection, for  recognising learning and presneting that learning. A PLE may be seen as a tool (or set of tools) for not only presenting learning  but for also (individually or collectively) developing a representation of wider knowledge sets (ontologies?).

Of course it could be possible to develop a tool set which supports both tasks. But there are different sets of tools involved in those different prcesses and in the interests of si8mplicity and usability it may be better to develop environments which allow flexible access to such different tools or tool sets for different purposes.

Why am i wrestling with such obscure ideas? Pontydysgu is a partner in the EU funded Mature project. Part of our tasks is to research the ‘state of the art’ on these issues and to develop and test PLEs as a process for developing and sharing knowledge. Its going to be interesting.

OK – age is telling. I had not heard about LAN partes until last week when Jenny Hughes filled me in on the latest craze. And I love it. For the uninitiated a LAN party is a sort of wireless enabled weekend sleepover / house party.

The party hosted by her son, Owen, who occasionally features on the podcasts went something like this.

Friday evening the guests assemble. Each brings games / computers / gadgets plus a box of electronic bits and pieces. They have a central aim for the party – to build a computer for a friend who does not have one. They meet and plan the build – which bits to use etc. But first they have to boost the wireless signal to reach the attic. Then they form into teams for playing various on-line / offline games and work out a points scoring systems for the different teams. And then it is go – games playing / building the computer / coding and so on. And of course, an endless supply of pizzas and stubbies (for our non native English readers – a stubby is a small bottle of weak beer). Sunday evening – the computer is working and loaded up with software and parents arrive to take the kids home.

Sound fantastic to me. I am planning a Pontydysgu LAN party in June. Want to come? Just email me.

Its been a tiring last six days. First to Karlsruhe for the launch of the Mature research project and then on to Pesaro to teach on the last day of the five day course on materials production for open and distance learning. There were some 15 students from all over Europe. It was hard work but great fun. I did an initial session on Personal Learning Environments (more on that on this blog later) and then a session on podcasting. I got four groups to each storyboard a session and then each group recorded their session live on stage in front of the whole class.

The technology was a bit dubious – it was what I could set up from my bag in five minutes – but the participants were enthusiastic – despite it being a sunny Saturday afternoon, creative and very funny.

I have promised to publish their work. This is a very rough cut – I did it last night when I got home. The sound levels are all over the place and the editing is minimal but I think it shows the potential of using podcasting for creating and creativity. You are all invited to listen – however some of the humour is very much in-group. Sadly there was no time to run a session on editing but we are adding that to the wiki that Critsina and I have created for supporting our teaching and learning sessions.

Thanks to Elmo for organising the Pesaro course and to all the students for their willingness to play.

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I am not particularly good at ‘live’ blogging. But I thought I would practice with a couple of posts from my travels this week. At the moment I am in Karlsruhe in the South of Germany at the kickoff meeting of the EC mature project.

Most of today has been taken up with partner presentations but the last horu has been more interesting. There are a lot of talents between the partners and a reasonable repositopry of tools and applications that the different techncial developesr have brought to the table.

On the one hand it would appear useful to develop mock ups of the different tools – or at leasts some mash up some of the outputs an services. But on the other hand we need to take the learners into account – and our aim of user based knowledge aggregation – not just aggregate technology and tools. Bringing those processes together is not so easy. Can we really work out use cases before users have accessed and tested the tools? More tomorrow.

Get a Voki now!
Having fun making things. For the wiki pages Cristina and me have created for the course in Pesaro (see yesterdays post) we decided to create a couple of avatar based messages. We were going to use Springdoo but there server was not overly responsive (it took 24 hours to confirm my account) so instead we used Voki. Great fun and very easy to make. Here is my voki.