This post provides a summary of how you can particpate in the Alt-C conference wherever you are.

It’s the Adanveced Learning Technologies (ALT) conference this week in Leeds in the UK. Together with Cristina Costa I will be reporting from the conference on the Pontydysgu blogs.

In the past if you couldn’t spare the time, forgot to submit your abstract and thus had no institutional support for the conference fees or just couldn’t face another four days of papers and workshops, that would be it. No conference, no networking. The times they are a changing. First we have all manner of distance communications. And secondly we are beggining to loosen up in our ides of how knowledge is shared with the grwing popularity of technology enhanced unconferencing. AltC is not open to all this year. But there are events you can participate in wherever you are and differents spaces to interact with conference delegates.

First a plug for Sounds of the Bazaar. We are broadcasting LIVE from the Jisc Emerge social at Alt-C on Tuesady at 1725 UK summer time, 18.25 Central European time. Sit back and relax (perhaps with a glass of wine yourself) and listen to what the party goers are saying.  Just point your browser to http://radio.jiscemerge.org.uk/Emerge.m3u This should open in your MP3 player of choice and after a few seconds delay start streaming. Better still, if you’d like to join in the fun, you can join our conference special chat room and share your opinions with others. You can also ask questions to the people being interviewed. Cristina Costa will be moderating the chat LIVE at Leeds at the following url – http://tinyurl.com/soundschat – no account needed.

What else is going on? Alt-C themselves have go in on the act and are providing access to the keynote speeches through Elluminate. Just head  over here to get the full details. Alt has provided a Crowdvine social network site for the conferrnce. Sadly that is only open to registered delegates. But there is an open aggregator here (or download an OPML file with the aggregator RSS feeds).

F-Alt is the first ever fringe being held at Alt-C. It sounds like it is going to be a lot of fun. You can get full details on the F-Alt wiki. There’s a chance that sessions may be broadcast live on ustream. Keep watching on twitter for more details. You can find a FriendFeed aggregator here.

Last but not least, the Alt-C Digital Divide slam is open to all. Full details on the wiki. Go on – its much more fun than that report you should be writing. Create your own entry.

I am sure there will be more. Just hang out in the right spaces to find out what is going on. Or, of course, you can watch this blog for regular conference updates.

This video has been produced by Pontydysgu and friends as our entry for the Alt-C2008 Digital Slam competition. We discussed the idea over skype and then each recorded our own part of the soundtrack. The text is from Wikipedia entries about the Digital Divide. We wanted to bring music and pictures togather to explore the multi faceted and often contradictory phenonomon of the digital divide. And we wanted to bring voices and pictures together from different countries and cultures. We had orginally intended to include Greek language in the mash but found that there is no Digital Divide entry in the Greek version of Wikipedia. We will write one.

Anyway hope you enjoy it.

Words – Graham Attwell, Cristina Costa, Dirk Stieglitz and Maria Perifanou.
Music – Break Rise Blowing by Countdown.
Text – Wikipedia
Pictures – Abrilon, Lisachaos, Maebmij, ninnet, AnantaB (all Creative Commons, Flickr)
Production – Dirk Stieglitz

This was recorded live at the EduMedia conference in Salzburg. Many thanks to Andreas Auwarter who recorded the audio and did the post processing.

Yes its the AltC conference next week. Lots going on. On Tuesday we will be broadcasting LIVE with a Sounds of the Bazaar special from the Jisc Emerge social. Point your browser to http://radio.jiscemerge.org.uk/Emerge.m3u and it will open the LIVE stream in your MP2 player of choice. And you can join in with live chat at http://tinyurl.com/soundschat – hosted by Cristina Costa.

And we are supporting the first ever conference fringe F-AltO8. There is a fabulous free badge for everyone who signs up in advance on the fringe wiki – http://f-alt.wetpaint.com.

I accepted an invitation to do a keynote presentation at a conference on Web 2.0 at the University of Minho in Braga, Portugal on October 10th. What I dinn’t realise is that they wanted me to write a paper. I am not so keen on formal papers these days – I far prefer multimedia but I finally got down to it. I greatly enjoyed readng up for he paper and quite enjoyed writing it – though am frustrated at all the things I did not say. And I still find the academic text format a bit stifling. Oh – and I hated doing the referencing (though that is my fault – I should have done it as I wrote). Anyway here is the paper. I am trying to out in scribd to see if this makes sense as a way of blogging a paper.

If you prefer you can download the paper here – portplesfin

From Open Education News:

“There has been a lot of buzz about the free and open Connectivism and Connective Knowledge course to be facilitated by George Siemens and Stephen Downes in September. To date, over 1,200 people have signed up for the course prompting a new label, Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), to describe this super-sized open education course”. On a new blog about the course George says:

“As a group, we all share in the success (and failure) of MOOCs …We have to walk a line between innovating teaching and learning while still keeping things at a level that permits the ideas we’re presenting to translate into the realities of educators and administrators … While Stephen and I are facilitating this course, I think it’s critical that the larger community identifies with it and takes ownership of it. Our course isn’t happening in a vacuum – we’re building on our own previous work and the work of others. And once our course is done here, others will hopefully learn from our experience and build on it. Spiralling innovation. But I’m hoping we won’t only see people building on our work. I hope we’ll see others building with us … Research opportunities are enormous. MOOCs are uncharted, largely undocumented, territory. This course will produce a significant amount of data – both quantitative and qualitative.”

It is great that teh course is free and open. But is this real innovation. Are we not just reinventing mass rows of students sitting passively in tiered lecture tehares albeit on-line. Is thsi just another Tayloritic model of education. Cheap – yes! Efficent – yes! Effective – perhaps not. Particpation…learner support? Is the innovation technical or pedagogic?

These issues and more will be the subject of the F-Alt (the fringe conference at Alt C) warm up session in the bar at 9pm in the bar at Leeds Univeristy on Monday. It probably won’t be massive. Bit it is open and you are all invited.

Its September. Its conference season. Its ALT C. Can’t afford the fees? Paper rejected? Tied up in pre-term preparations? Never mind – Sounds of the Bazaar is going out on the road to bring you the highlights of what is happening in ed tech, teaching and learning. And we start off with our first LIVE broadcast next Tuesday 9 Septemeber LIVE from the AltC conference in Leeds, UK.

Not quite sure of the format yet but it will be fun. Jisc Emerge is having a social and rumours say they are laying on free beer and wine. We will be broadcasting live from the social, talking to leading researchers and practitioners from the educational technology world. Plus some of our regular slots and a few surprises.

How can you join in? Well if you just want to sit back and relax (perhaps with a glass of wine yourself) that is absoltuetly fine. Just point your browser to http://radio.jiscemerge.org.uk/Emerge.m3u

This should open in your MP3 player of choice and after a few seconds delay start streamin. We will be going live at 17.25 UK Summer time, 18.25 Central European time.

But if you’d like to join in the fun you can come on our conference special chat room and share oyur opinions with others,. You can also ask questions to the people being interviewed. We’ve asked Jisc for iPhones to keep us in touch with your questions but in case this doesn’t happen 🙂 then Cristina Costa who will be moderating the chat LIVE at Leeds will pass the questions on. I will post up the chat room address in the next 24 hours.

OK – look forward to hearing from you next Tuesday.

OK – the summer break from the airwaves is over. Next week we will broadcast the first of the autumn series of Sound of the Bazaar LIVE – details tomorrow but put Tuesday 1820, CEST, 1720 BST in your diaries now. And here as a warm up is a new podcast produced by the wonderful Andreas Auwarter from the Bildung in Dialog site (English monoglots – don’t be put off by the the German language introduction – the discussion is in English. As Andeas says in this programme notes: “Steve Wheeler in an interview with Patrick Vetter and Christian Czarnowske. Finally Graham Attwell joins the dialog and this interview brings up to an interesting and short discussion about Web 2.0, Adult Education, Web 3.0 and their meanings of those terms.

Soundpainted with podsafe music from http://www.Jamendo.com.”

This was recorded on a beautiful summers day on the terrace of St Virgil’s conference centre in Salzburg at the EdMedia2008 Conference. To be honest, its chats like this outside the official programme which make conferences worth their while.

Once more my thanks to Andreas – and do join us on the terrace and try to imagine the sun.

Sadly I can’t seem to get the stream to play in my blog. But just head on over to Bildung in Dialog to hear this recording.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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I’m not sure about the ‘do no evil’ empre. And not sure about Google’s motivation for launching another browser on the market. But I love their cartoon book explaining the Chrome browser. Also good to see that they have licensed the cartoon book under Creative Commons. Here is one page explaining standards and Open Source.

In June I wrote enthusiastically about Twemes. Twemes is the service which uses hash tags to aggregate posts from Twitter, Delicious and Flickr. We  had a great time using it for communciation in confernces and workshops. One of its greatest virtues is simplicity and sponteneity. We intended to use it as a main channel for communciation at Alt-C. And when we went to set up our hash tag it was gone. Here is the last posting dated Augst 13 on the Twemes blog.

Down But Not Out

“As many of your have already noticed, Twemes.com has not been able find all tagged tweets over the last few days.  This is due to Twitter’s decisions to shutdown and/or limit access to a number of their APIs.  Whether by design or by accident, Twemes.com now only has limited access to Twitter.  We have made appeals to Twitter staff to help us continue to keep Twemes.com in operation but those requests have had no impact on our access to the Twitter API.”

So services can disappear. Very good services. And here is not sign that Twitter are doing anything to substitute for it. We are looking at a couple of things – but have not found anything as simple and good. Any suggestiosn welcome.

The message I draw from this is that there is a big difference between Open APIs and Open Source. It is one thing being able to access and use an API. But you never know when a provider will choose to change it or as in this case to limit access. At least wih Open Source the control lies in the community and hopefully tehre would be an open discussion before making changes which would break third party services. I hope the open source microblogging platform Identi.ca continues to develop.