It is hecti8c here at the Pontydysgu office. We are lining up a great summer of activities, radio broadcast and events. And here is the first. Announcing the the launch of the Evolve Community.

The Evolve project is organising a series of international on-line events and seminars.

The objectives are:
• To provide a space for participant driven discussion and debate
• To promote critical inquiry and discourse
• To allow for the presentation of ideas in progress
• To share expertise, ideas and future thinking around common research agendas

The first event will take place this Fraiday May 30 at 1700 GMT (For other time zones please check here: http://tinyurl.com/5gzysk.

The Venue for the presentation is in Elluminate – http://tinyurl.com/6emm9f (no Password required)

Barbara Dieu has agreed to be the Keynote speaker for our first event, which is organized around the following theme: Social software in Schools and Institutions. Barbara’s presentation is entitled Social Media in Engiahs Langauge Teaching.

We will also be hosting a topical activity around the monthly themes. See how to get involved here: .

And don’t forget to get your own freefolio spot. You just need to create an account! Go to http://www.evolvecommunity.org

We hope you join us. This is will be a great chance to network, to get to know what other people are doing, and also to share your work and ideas.

I have become a big fan of Twitter. I can’t really say why but I do like the feeling of presence – even if half the time its hard to know what people are twittering on about.
And so in our latest mash-up we have installed a twitter widget on the right hand bar of this page.
If you have any ideas of new widgets or feeds we might add do get in touch.

Lat week I was at the Scil Congress in St Gallen in Switzerland. The theme of the congress was ‘The changing face of learning – Creating the right balance’. I presented a keynote (slides to come soon on Slideshare) and ran a workshop on Personal Learning Environments. Not sure I got the timings quite right n the workshop – I got a bit carried away with the discussion. But the group certainly had got the idea. And as a last activity I asked them to make a quick podcast. I gave three groups 10 minutes to storyboard a four minute podcast on ‘The changing face of learning: the next steps’ and then we recorded it.
Only one had made a podcast before. But they did a pretty good job. I have done a very quick post production job. Here is the podcast – it is about twelve minutes in total.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

At a session at the Scil conference on serious games. Hope it is not too serious.

First up is Frederic Aunis on hairdressing. He works for L’Oriel. Kids end up doing hairdressing because they do not know what else to do or have failed at school. Hairdressers, he says, all over the world learn by doing. they need techncial and artistic skills, life and communication skills and a business understanding. But in schools business skills are not taught. Managers train apprentices in technical skills but not business skills.

Frederick has been developing a business game. His organisation is developing programmes for 20 million students (seems unlikely?). The game is called Hair Be12. It is translated into 13 languages and implemented in 10 countries. Now we get a demo. Choose a character and customise it. Then twelve episodes to the game. The first is on customer relations. A series of multiple choice questions. Then according to answers skills levels indicator moves up and down and turnover for business changes. No correct answers in game says Frederick. It’s like in real life. No-one complains but your turnover is hit. And there are bonus games. design your salon etc. At end get classification on the web based game – compared to others.

interesting that it did not really work as an individual self-learning game but took off when it was used in groups – it created, he says, “a wow effect.” And it has gone on to be used for facilitating meetings and organisational development within hair salons.

The topics have been ‘flattened’ to ensure game is applicable in different cultures.

Hm – not bad – looks quite fun, teaches something hard to learn any other way. At least it feels like a game. Maybe a bit limited in scope though. Big plus – he says it was relatively cheap to develop. My rating – cool. And a great presentation.

Contact url seems to be www.hair-be12.com – definitely worth a look.

I am blogging ‘live’ from the Scil conference at St Gallen. Quite interesting in that the conference is very much geared at the HRD and business world – ‘communities’ I do not venture too far into often. The conference is entitled “The Changing Face of Learning – getting the right balance.” So is learning changing in the business world?

The first speaker up is Erlan Joergensen from Shell. I can’t say much sounds new. His slogan is Ask-Learn-Share. He is very much at pains to say that all learning has to be related to the needs of the business. This seems a step back to me. What he is saying that is new is to integrate – on a business basis – the informal and workplace learning together with formal learning within “global networks”. All courses will have a workplace component.

Certainly Shell do seem to using networking tools – wikis and bookmarks – and have embraced the idea that global networks can link tacit and explicit knowledge through peer assisted problem solving. The wiki, he says, provides the ‘business operational knowledge’ for the whole company. Interesting too, that he calls it “a wikipedia”! Shell are also looking at the use of Second Life.

The wikis are being used to develop communities on different topics with 27000 active users and 2500 new entries in the last month.

OK – time to make my mind up – what do I think? Certainly bringing access to knowledge sharing tools looks impressive. It is not quite clear how such tools and activities are being integrated into the blended courses. That there is a new focus on work based learning – and that supervisors are seen as important in this is not new but does represent a shift of emphasis. However, the relation between individual learning and organisational learning seems unclear. And there are still too many business buzz words for my liking.

Jen writes “Graham – I think your blog should have a space for a ‘sponsored vid of the week’. This is mine for next week.” For me, this song by the great Pete Seeger is the ultimate comment on our education systems – and wonderful slides to go with it.

Things are busy here at the Pontydysgu HQ. I am off to ST Gallen in Switzerland for the SCIL Congress on ‘The Changing face of Learning – Creating the Right Balance’. I am doing a Keynote presentation on PLEs, introducing a paper on Open Educational Resources and running a workshop on PLEs – all in one day! Its going to be a lot of fun – I hope. Meanwhile we are busy fighting bugs in Freefolio and developing a social network version of the WordPress based software. This is for a new network on research into the training of trainers. We hope to launch the site next week – keep watching here for announcements.

Talking of bugs, we cannot get the new WordPress 2.5.1 version – which this site now uses – to display photographs – anyone any good ideas?

Like many readers of this blog, I guess, I will try out anything new. I have loads of accounts with different services – so many I forget them. Just occasionally, something sticks. I use Twitter, Diigo and Skype everyday. Slideshare and Flickr are pretty indispensable. The problem is that we get sucked into thinking everyone else does the same. And it isn’t so. Only yesterday one of my friends skyped me very happily. It was his first skype call. he was amazed at the video.

And it gets more difficult in projects with non techy researchers. Many are not just not used to using technology. Most do not feel confident. The big breakthough for me has been using the UK universities Flash meeting application. This is an excellent service, provided for free by the Open Content Learning Space project. I have used Flash meeting with three projects now. The learning curve is always similar. the first meetiong is always hard with people uncertain of how to use headphones, how to enter a meeting and all that. The second is easier with some ability to talk about issues and nowhere near so many dropping out with techncial problems. The third meeting they all get a webcam together and start performing. And the joy is not just the use of the application to allow for ‘virtual’ on-line meetings. It is that people begin to see the value of new technologies to help them in their work. And they become so much more confident in using the technologies. They lose their fear. And, at that point, they are prepared to go a little bit further into the unknown, trying out new applications and ideas.

It’s been a while since I last posted here. I kinda miss it.

Today seems a good day to post, especially because I have decided to take part of one more challenge: this time is twitter and I was wondering if you were interested in twittering or at least checking what it is going on there. The challenge page can be seen here and basically it all comes down to one thing: Twitter fun!

Let me tell you how I got so into twitter. I always start off being very suspicious and quite reluctant about the new fashionable tools to which you get invited almost on a daily basis. Twitter didn’t appeal that much to me at the beginning – I am never an early adopter… it seem to be quite vague and ineffective… to be honest …and so after signing up to one more account I didn’t give it much thought. However, during the preparation of the earth day event it became extremely useful as a way to get to know the other members of the project a little bit better. Along the way I started getting more and more involved in it as people were sharing resources, expressing opinions, talking a little bit more about what they were doing at that exact moment (how it is raining again, and Hurray … the football team scored again! – those little things that make daily life more bearable and also make you wear a smile on your face as you think to yourself…it’s not only me who has all this paper work to take care of!) Nothing like experiencing in context!

Then with diigo offering the possibility to twitter your bookmarks away and igoogle allowing me to add my twitter friends’ feeds to my home page, twitter has become part of my daily wanders in cyberspace. I got convinced about its potential. Finally!

I have linked to so many useful resources my twitter friends have twittered about, I have followed other interesting people who otherwise I would probably not have come across, and I have benefited loads from what other people bother to share. The twitter-land is indeed a GREAT micro-world.

The learning with computers community has recognized that and is now promoting the Microblogging challenge. I hope you can join us! 😉

More info about twitter can be found here.

Text originally posted here.