its that time of year again. And next week me, Dirk and Crsitina will be heading off to the InterContinental hotel in Berlin for three days of fun.

And, as you would expect we are organising our own programme around the conference. We are working with Josie, Steve, George, Paul and Joe from Emerge to put together a some unconferencing enents and demos of Emerge projects. Here are some of the events (I will post the times for the project demos as soon as I get confirmation).

Wednesday 3 December – 2030 CET Edubloggers meetup – Ambassador lounge bar  Sorat Hotel Ambassador Berlin, Bayreuther Straße 42 · D-10787 Berlin (Five minutes walk from InterContinental)

Thursday 4 December – 11.00 CET – Sounds of the Bazaar LIVE from the conference.  ICWE stand B54.

If you cannot make it to the conference listen to the programme live – go to http://tinyurl.com/6df6ar in your web browser. The programme will open in your MP3 player of choice.

Thursday 4 December – 19.30 CET – Microblogging debate, Marlene Bar, Intercontinental Hotel

Friday 5 December – 11.00 CET – Sounds of the Bazaar LIVE from the conference.  ICWE stand B54.

Friday 5 December – 13.00 CET – Special Interest Group Lunch on microblogging (SIG lunches), Bellevue Room, InterContinental Hotel

Further Special Interest Group Lunches to be announced.

With the exception of the Special Interest Group lunches all these events are free and open to anyone regardless of whether you have registered at the conference. If you are in Berlin just drop in and find us. Between events you will have a good chance of finding one of us on the Jisc Stand.

To keep in touch with what we are doing follow Graham Attwell, Josie Fraser and Cristina Costa on Twitter. Or join our Sounds of the Baazaar Facebook group.

Its been a bit of an event week. Cetis and Emerge held conferences. MirandaNet and the Amplified people held events. I took part in them all to a greater or lesser extent. Online.

Emerge was by invitation. But I turned up at the rest by following urls on shout outs on twitter. Twitter is becoming a professional and social calender.

So far so good. But opportunities for participation and interaction varied greatly. This is partly due to the technologies. From one extreme to the other – Emerge used the Elluminate platform which allows a high degree of particaption whilst MirandaNet had a hand held vdeo camera linked to u-stream. Cetis had no video feed but the event was intensively covered in Twitter and live blogged as well. The Amplified people ambitiously tried to provide four different video streams. With both the MirandaNet and the Amplified event the audio quality was poor. These things happen and I am sure the technology will get better. My only observation would be that whilst people invest a lot of energy into video feeds they seem to ignore the need for high quality micrrophones. Indeed, a preamp to pick up the audio directly would seem a worthwhile investment if people really want to get their event out on the net.

But it is the event organisation or pedagogy which concerns me more. Organising a Blended Event is like organising a belended learningc ourse. You cannot just replace the nromal face to face elements of the course with the smae pedagogci approache son the ineterent. It requires thought and design. And if you really want such a blended prohgramme – rather then just pushing out a video feed of the face to face event – then the design of the event will have to be changed. For Emerge, it was diifcult to see what added value there was for the Face to Face participants. For MirandaNet and Amplified the opportunities for active partication by on-line participants was limited. In some ways the Cetis people who did not stream their conference may have got more interaction through the use of Live Blogging and Twitter than those who did provide a video stream.

We do not really seem to know how to do these things at the moment.

If I get a little time to think about this, I am going to try to start writing some guidelines on how to organise Blended Eevents. But better still, has anyone out there got any ideas?

I am going to be coming back to the subject of innovation in next few days. I have much to say (well that’s not a change) and think the subject is going to become fairly central to the next wave of development of Technology Enhanced Learning. Anyway, returning to a more colloquial use of the word, here are a couple of innovations from today.

The first is technical. Elluminate has brought out a new edition of their conferencing programme with suppport for up to six simultaneous video streams. And they have done it well. Whilst the default is to coarse grey scales to account for slower computers it can be changed to fine colour as in the pciture above. And you can select which stream you wish to see largest. The refresh rate is pretty high wuit little pixalisation. It certainly adds a new dimension to online meetings. Indded, today we had no problems with the video streaming although as usual the audio provided a few hiccups.

And teh second innovation you ask. Well it is certainly not techncial. Cristina has launched a Facebook group for our LIVE Sounds of the Bazaar broadcasts from Online Educa Berlin next Thursday and Friday. Oh – had I forgotten to tell you? Yes, we will broadcasting live from the conference at 11.00 CET on Thursday and Friday. Please join us face to face at live at the ICWE stand B54 near the front of the Intercontinental hotel. Or if you cannot make it to Berlin then listen in at http://radio.jiscemerge.org.uk/Emerge.m3u . You can also join Cristina in the chat room – details soon. And please join the Facebook group.

I will post tomorrow on more of the unconferencing fun we will be getting up to in Berlin.

In this multitasking twitter and hash tags and live blogging world we live in I was following the Jisc CETIS conference on Technology for Learning, Teaching and the Instiution yeserday (as aside not Andy Powell provides wonderful live blogging from the conference circuit).

There was a keynote speech by Professor Andrew Feenberg. His conclusion appeared to be that we needed new metaphor for education – to move away form the model of a factory to the idea of city. Now I see the appeal in terms of modernism. And that is interesting since the connectivism strand of think appears to go far closer to post modernism in its approach. The city, I suppose, could be said to be multi cultural and socially enriching in terms of interaction. I still remain unconvinced but anything which moves education beyond the present factory modals has to be a good thing.

And then my eye fell upon an article by Mike Baker in the Guardian newpaper extolling the virtues of US universities, where his daughter had recently studied, as opposed to the practice of universities in the UK. Mike Baker points to the greater flexibility of US universities in terms saying “the libraries were open 24 hours a day, seven days a week…. my daughter’s fellow students could pack in extra credits if they wished to get through their degree more quickly or, if they needed a part-time job, they could take fewer credits and stretch out their studies. Equally, they could stay on for an extra summer semester if they wished. ….Many of her fellow American undergraduates arrived at the university from community college, transferring in their course credits……Our universities also seem reluctant to change admissions.”

All good points I suppose. But is this not really just ramping up the Taylorist education factory production system to make it more effcient and flexible to churn out yet more students. I am at one with Andrew Feenberg in wanting to examine the purpose and worth of our university system. It is the enterprise approach to teaching and learning which has done so much harm to attempts to develop new pedagogic approaches to the use of technology for learning. More enterprising enterprises is not going to help.

Here it is – the podcast of the live radio show.

On Monday we broke new ground with our Sounds of the Bazaar radio show. We produced a special issue of Emerging Sound of the Bazaar entitled ‘Into the Dragons Den’.  The programme was a fly on the wall special following the progress of a Dragons Den session organised by the Jisc Emerge project. What’s it all about? Emerge supports a range of projects funded by the Jisc Users and Innovation programme. The projects are mainly focused on developing social software for use in education. Part of the support process has been through a four stage development model. As part of that model, at different times during the project development, project developers get invited to a session where they are quizzed by ‘Dragons’ on the progress of their project.

The Dragons Den session featured on Sounds of the Bazaar podcast is the Preview project which is developing and piloting models for Problem Based Learning in Second Life. Maggie Savin-Baden represented the project. Paul Bailey and Chris Fowler were the dragons.

I’m not sure the Dragons roared. In fact, I think Maggie slayed the Dragons. But judge for yourself.

As always many thanks to all those who took part in the programme including our phone in guests. Production and music by Dirk Stieglitz. (NB – don’t be offput by the volume on the first minute – I got overexcited).

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Tonight we broadcast a Sounds of the Bazaar Soecial radio show ‘Into the Dragons Den’.  The programme is a fly on the wall special following the progress of a Dragons Den session organised by Emerge. The show goes out at 19.00 UK time, 20.00 Central European Time as the kick off for the Emerge online conference on Altered States: practitioners, innovation and institutions. Read on for details of how to listen to the show.

The Dragons Den session featured on Sounds of the Bazaar is the Preview project which is developing and piloting models for Problem Based Learning in Second Life. Maggie Savin-Baden will represent the project. Paul Bailey and Chris Fowler wil be the dragons. It is going to be great fun.

This programme will be a little different in format to previous Sounds of the Bazaar broadcasts. It is a documentary. And we want you to skype us with your reactions to the programme. Our skype line – just search for GrahamAttwell in skype – wil open at the start of the programme and will remain open until half an hour after the programme. It will also be open from 10.00 – 1300 UK time, 9.00 – 12.00 tomorrow, Tuesday, 25 November. We will record all your reactions and broadcast these as a follow up podcast. Please participate – it is a new experiment for us in broadcasting your views.

The programme will last about 45 minutes. To listen to the programme just go to http://radio.jiscemerge.org.uk/Emerge.m3u in your browser. The stream should open in your MP3 player of choice. And if you’d like to chat during the programme Cristina Costa will be in the chat room at http://tinyurl.com/soundschat. Just add your name in the text field (leaving the password field blank) and chat away.

I am intrigued by the findings of the Digital Media and Learning initiative on Living and Learning with New
Media. In the course of the project, funded by the McArther Foundation, researchers interviewed over
800 youth and young adults and conducted over 5000 ours of online observations in the USA. The major finding for me is teh distinction the report makes between the ways in which young people use the internet for extending friendships and interests and for peer-based self directed learning.

The report says: “Most youth use online networks to extend the friendships that they navigate in the familiar contexts of school, religious organizations, sports, and other local activities. They can be “always on,” in constant contact with their friends through private communications like instant messaging or mobile phones, as well as in public ways through social network sites such as MySpace and Facebook. With these “friendship-driven” practices, youth are almost always associating with people they already know in their offline lives. The majority of youth use new media to “hang out” and extend existing friendships in these ways.”

“A smaller number of youth also use the online world to explore interests and find information that goes beyond what they have access to at school or in their local community. Online groups enable youth to connect to peers who share specialized and niche interests of various kinds, whether that is online gaming, creative writing, video editing, or other artistic endeavors. In these interest- driven networks, youth may find new peers outside the boundaries of their local community. They can also find opportunities to publicize and distribute their work to online audiences, and to gain new forms of visibility and reputation.”
“Some youth “geek out” and dive into a topic or talent. Contrary to popular images, geeking out is highly
social and engaged, although usually not driven primarily by local friendships. Youth turn instead to specialized knowledge groups of both teens and adults from around the country or world, with the goal of improving their craft and gaining reputation among expert peers.

While adults participate, they are not automatically the resident experts by virtue of their age. Geeking out inmany respects erases the traditional markers of status and authority.”

The major issue for education is the different social relations inherent in these activities.
“Friendship-driven and interest-driven online participation have very different kinds of social connotations. For example, whereas friendship-driven activities center upon peer culture, adult participation is more welcomed in the latter more “geeky” forms of learning. In addition, the content, behavior, and skills that youth value are highly variable depending on with which social groups they associate.”

“…in interest-driven participation, adults have an important role to play.
Youth using new media often learn from their peers, not teachers or adults. Yet adults can still have tremendous influence in setting learning goals, particularly on the interest-driven side where adult hobbyists function as role models and more experienced peers.”

Next Monday we break new ground with our Sounds of the Bazaar radio show. We are producing a special issue of Emerging Sound of the Bazaar entitled ‘Into the Dragons Den’.  The programme is a fly on the wall special following the progress of a Dragons Den session organised by the Jisc Emerge project. What’s it all about? Emerge supports a range of projects funded by the Jisc Users and Innovation programme. The projects are mainly focused on developing social software for use in education. Part of the support process has been through a four stage development model. As part of that model, at different times during the project development, project developers get invited to a session where they are quizzed by ‘Dragons’ on the progress of their project.

The Dragons Den session featured on Sounds of the Bazaar is the Preview project which is developing and piloting models for Problem Based Learning in Second Life. Maggie Savin-Baden will represent the project. Paul Bailey and Chris Fowler wil be the dragons. It is going to be great fun.

The programme, whih will last about 45 minutes, goes out at 19.00 UK time, 20.00 Central European Time. To listen to the programme just go to http://radio.jiscemerge.org.uk/Emerge.m3u in your browser. The stream should open in your MP3 player of choice. And if you’d like to chat during the programme Crsitina Costa will be in the chat room at http://tinyurl.com/soundschat. Just add your name in the text field (leaving the password field blank) and chat away.

I reallly like this work by Ambjörn Naeve called A greed upon reality – the real (e)state of the economic system. The screenshot is taken from his Conzilla (www.conzilla.org) systems model, although sadly I can’t get it to open on my Mac.

The work, Ambjörn says, is mainly based on the New(tonian) economics provided by Lisa H. Newton: Permission to Steal – Revealing the Roots of Corporate Scandal.
http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/publicphilosophy/newton/default.asp

Firstly, many thanks to Martin Weller and A J Cann for your kind nominations for Pontydysgu for best group blog for this years Edublog 2008 awards. Much appreciated here at Pontydysgu Towers.

We also greatly appreciated Martins comment: “they’re Welsh, they like edupunk, they do a crazy internet radio show and have challenging posts. What more do you want?.”

And now on to our nominations (although we may come back with more in different categories later this week). For best individual blog we nominate ictology by Ismael Peña-López. Just watch that man’s live blogging. Awesome.

Our best resource sharing site nomination goes to Zaidlearn – just look at this list of 90 posts about learning tools.

And here is our nomination for best educational use of audio. This goes to Andreas Auwarter and all the students who work on the wonderful Bildung im Dialog website. With limited resources, Andreas uses podcasts to teach students from all disciplines storytelling, media, production and much more. OK – it is in German. But it would be great if the Edublog awards could acknowledge the work being done in other languages than English.