Archive for 2008

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »

Lets party

April 8th, 2008 by Graham Attwell

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.

Posted in Culture, e-learning 2.0, Wales Wide Web | 1 Comment »

The directors (rough) cut

April 7th, 2008 by Graham Attwell

pesaropodcast.jpg

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Posted in Audio, Podcast, podcasting, Wales Wide Web | 5 Comments »

Is my knowledge maturing?

April 2nd, 2008 by Graham Attwell

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.

Posted in Knowledge development, Mature, Wales Wide Web | Comments Off on Is my knowledge maturing?

Vokis are fun

April 1st, 2008 by Graham Attwell

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.

Posted in Social Software, Wales Wide Web | Comments Off on Vokis are fun

Digital memories

April 1st, 2008 by Graham Attwell

From the Jisc web site: “Oxford University is launching a web site to allow members of the public to submit digital photographs or transcripts of items they personally hold which are related to the First World War. This ‘Great War Archive’ site will run for three months and aims to collect together artefacts, letters, diaries, poems, stories that have been passed down from generation to generation reflecting the true experience of the First World War but which are now in danger of being lost.This resource, which will subsequently be made available free of charge on the web from Armistice Day this year (November 11th), is being collected as part of Oxford University’s First World War Poetry Digital Archive project. The JISC-funded project is based on the 10-year old award winning web site which digitised the poetical manuscripts, letters, and war records of Wilfred Owen.”

Great idea. But even better would be if it was not just memories from the UK but from every country afflicted by that terrible war. I know there are many German readers of this blog. Has anyone any ideas they can contribute?

Posted in Culture, Open Educational Resources, Pontydysgu | 2 Comments »

Do we need Learning Management Systems?

March 31st, 2008 by Graham Attwell

I’m back on the road this week.

Tomorrow I head off to Karlsruhe for the launch of a new research project called Mature. “MATURE conceives individual learning processes to be interlinked (the output of a learning process is input to others) in a knowledge-maturing process in which knowledge changes in nature. This knowledge can take the form of classical content in varying degrees of maturity, but also involves tasks & processes or semantic structures. The goal of MATURE is to understand this maturing process better, based on empirical studies, and to build tools and services to reduce maturing barriers.”

I will be working on how Perosnal Learning Environments can be used as part of the knowledge maturing process. Could be a lot of fun.

And on Friday I head off to Pesero in Italy. On Saturday I will be running a workshop on social software, PLEs and e-Portfolios. The workshop is the last day of a five day course on Open and Distance Learning. There are five tutors on the course. We had a skype meeting to discuss what platforms we would use and as might be expected we all had different ideas. The first two days of the course are to be run using Dokeos. I had a try at setting up materials in this system. There is nothing wrong with Dokeos. I is a perfectly respectable Open Source Learning management System. But I just can’t get along with such systems. I guess I just find it too difficult to think in LMS structures. So, along with Cristina Costa, who is also teaching on the course, I set up a PBwiki, I was much happer with this. It is quick and flexible. And Cristina has extended it to include several Pageflakes mash-up pages.

I like this and will use the wiki for support material for presentations and workshops in the future. I will also use the wiki as part of the workshop for recording processes and outcomes. Everything is licensed under Creative Commons. So, if you want to reuse materials please feel free.

I guess I won’t have so much time for blogging this week. But I will try to post a couple of progress reports from the road.

Posted in e-learning 2.0, e-portfolios, Knowledge development, Mature, PLEs, Wales Wide Web | 2 Comments »

How do you get to be an e-learning expert?

March 28th, 2008 by Graham Attwell

I had an interesting email from a student today: “Dear Professor”, it opened – I was flattered, “….I’m now applying to a PhD through the Fulbright Comission to study in U.S. Can you please advise me about the best PhDs that could help me become an eLearning expert? I’m interested in Educational research, but also in developing informatic skills.”

I know little of the US Doctoral system. But the more general question also flummoxed me. Is a Doctorate a good way to become an e-learning expert. Or do you just have to go out there and do it. Or,  should we be developing higher education degrees to train pople in e-learning? Is there an occupational profile for an e-learning expert? Or is it a hybrid made up of several different occupational profiles?

I will pass on any good comments to the student who emailed me.

Posted in Wales Wide Web | 1 Comment »

IBM Centre occupied by protesting avatars

March 28th, 2008 by Graham Attwell

ibmsl

Photo: RSU: Some rights reserved

Caption: ‘IBM workers and friends protest at the IBM Business Center in virtual world Second Life, amidst concerns that IBM are outsourcing thousands of staff without proper consultation or securities.’

Protesters occupied the IBM Centre for two hours. It greatly heartens me to see such creative and socially constructive use of new technologies. For more about yesterdays demonstration see the IBM Virtual Protest Official Blog.

Posted in MUVEs, politics, Wales Wide Web | Comments Off on IBM Centre occupied by protesting avatars

Who reads this blog?

March 28th, 2008 by Graham Attwell

We do have an account with Google analytics to provide us with details about who is accessing the Pontydysgu web site but I have ot admit I nearly never look. It is just too detaied for me and as far as I cans ee it does not pick up feedreader access. Wea lso have a plug in called statz (it is German) which provides some quick and dirty figures. It provides daily statistics on hosts – on where people are coming to the site from. That used ot be dominated by Google. But not any more. Since the start of the year there has been a steady increase in referrals from Yodao. Yodao – which translates as “there is a path” – allows users to search for Web pages, images and blogs and to translate Chinese into English.

sadly we have never had a comment form anyone in China although there have been a few trackbacks. I would love to hear from anyone accessing the site form China – what are you looking for, is the site helpful and how is e-learning being developed in China?

Posted in Wales Wide Web | 3 Comments »

New sidebar link

March 26th, 2008 by Graham Attwell

Hawk eyed visitors may have noticed the addition of new links in the right sidebar. Blip TV hosts our videos. The PBwiki Open Learning is a new space we are developing together with Cristina Costa to provide learning materials and support for workshops and presentations. All materials are available under a Creative Commons license so please feel free to copy and remix.

Posted in News | Comments Off on New sidebar link

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »

  • Search Pontydysgu.org

    Social Media

    RSS
    Facebook
    Twitter



    News Bites

    Cyborg patented?

    Forbes reports that Microsoft has obtained a patent for a “conversational chatbot of a specific person” created from images, recordings, participation in social networks, emails, letters, etc., coupled with the possible generation of a 2D or 3D model of the person.

    Racial bias in algorithms

    From the UK Open Data Institute’s Week in Data newsletter

    This week, Twitter apologised for racial bias within its image-cropping algorithm. The feature is designed to automatically crop images to highlight focal points – including faces. But, Twitter users discovered that, in practice, white faces were focused on, and black faces were cropped out. And, Twitter isn’t the only platform struggling with its algorithm – YouTube has also announced plans to bring back higher levels of human moderation for removing content, after its AI-centred approach resulted in over-censorship, with videos being removed at far higher rates than with human moderators.

    Gap between rich and poor university students widest for 12 years

    Via The Canary.

    The gap between poor students and their more affluent peers attending university has widened to its largest point for 12 years, according to data published by the Department for Education (DfE).

    Better-off pupils are significantly more likely to go to university than their more disadvantaged peers. And the gap between the two groups – 18.8 percentage points – is the widest it’s been since 2006/07.

    The latest statistics show that 26.3% of pupils eligible for FSMs went on to university in 2018/19, compared with 45.1% of those who did not receive free meals. Only 12.7% of white British males who were eligible for FSMs went to university by the age of 19. The progression rate has fallen slightly for the first time since 2011/12, according to the DfE analysis.

    Quality Training

    From Raconteur. A recent report by global learning consultancy Kineo examined the learning intentions of 8,000 employees across 13 different industries. It found a huge gap between the quality of training offered and the needs of employees. Of those surveyed, 85 per cent said they , with only 16 per cent of employees finding the learning programmes offered by their employers effective.

    Other Pontydysgu Spaces

    • Pontydysgu on the Web

      pbwiki
      Our Wikispace for teaching and learning
      Sounds of the Bazaar Radio LIVE
      Join our Sounds of the Bazaar Facebook goup. Just click on the logo above.

      We will be at Online Educa Berlin 2015. See the info above. The stream URL to play in your application is Stream URL or go to our new stream webpage here SoB Stream Page.

  • Twitter

  • Recent Posts

  • Archives

  • Meta

    • Categories