As always it is the extra curricula activities which are the highpoint of conferences. And i don’t just mean in the bar. I had an interesting lunchtime conversation with Martin Owen where we were talking about the problems with the classificatory systems being put forward for analysing a database of practice examples developed for the IPTS study on the impact of Web 2.) innovations on education and training in Europe.

One issue we discussed is the continued use of systems approaches for defining research design and analysis. All too often findings which do not fit into a pre-defined system are just viewed as ‘noise’ and therefore ignored. But it may be in that noise that cannot be analysed in a systems driven approach that the real issues lie. It is how learners are using social software that is critical to me and not how the system adapts or more often rejects the use of such software.

I am at a workshop on Learning 2.0: The impact of Web 2.0 Innovations on Education and Training organised by the Institute of Prospective Technology Studies in Seville.

They have done a lot of work. however, I feel that in focusing on the use of technology for learning within the existing educational organisations they miss the main issues. How do we bring together informal learning and learning from formal sources? How do people not enrolled on courses use technologies for learning? How do we transform institutions? How can we empower learners to structure their own learning? How can we open up educational resources – materials but not just resources – to the wider community.

How also can we develop research designs and methodologies to address these issues?

Pontydysgu is pleased to be involved with a series of Open Learning Events this autumn. Here is a quick run down of some of them. And you are all invited to particpate.

Sound of the Bazaar Emerging Mondays – Live Internet radio
27th October 2008
‘What is digital identity?’

So what does digital identity mean to you? Do you care? As more of our lives, from personal to professional activities, find their way online how do we cope with managing our fractured and distributed digital presence. Can we ever keep ‘personal’ separate from ‘professional’ when tools and services mash-up our online identities in ways that are beyond our control? What does this mean for the development of new literacies and new services that seek to put our identities back within our grasp.With live interviews, music, strong opinion, poetry, our very own edupunk granny Leila and more. We will be broadcasting *LIVE* from 1800 – 1900 UK time, (check your local time here: http://tinyurl.com/4jk76t ).

To access the programme just click on this link or go to
http://icecast.commedia.org.uk:8000/emerge.mp3.m3u

This should open in your favourite MP3 player. There will also be a written chatroom running simultaneously in the background, which you can join through this link http://tinyurl.com/soundschat – no password needed – just type your name in the box)

How do I participate?
Have an opinion or want to comment? Then drop us a line by email to graham10 [at] mac [dot] com or come and join us live in the chatroom where we will be discussing the contents of the show.

EVOLVE Open Seminar Series

3 November 2008 at 1800 pm UK time, 1900 CET (Check your time zone here: http://tinyurl.com/4p4sk4 )

Guest Speaker: Dave Cormier
Topic and Presentation Blurb coming soon here http://www.evolvecommunity.org

Training the Trainers Online Conference

5 and 6 November 2008

Pontydysgu is happy to be supporting the first (as far as we know) on-line international conference on the training of trainers taking place on the 5 and 6 November 2008. The conference is for all those interested in the training and professional development of teachers and trainers. This includes teachers, trainers, tutors, researchers, managers and policy makers and other interested individuals.
The conference will take place through the internet using the Elluminate conference tool. We hope this will not only reduce the carbon footprint of our activities, but will allow wide participation by those who might not be able to travel.
The conference will be organised around four themes:

• Theme 1 – The changing role of trainers in learning
• Theme 2: E-learning for trainers
• Theme 3: Work-based learning
• Theme 4: Support for the professional development of trainers

You can find full details including a prelimary programme and details of speakers on the conference web page http://www.trainersineurope.org/conference . Attendance is free but we would ask you to register in advance http://tinyurl.com/3l7tts . You are also welcome to contribute to the conference on-line exhibition http://www.trainersineurope.org/conference/exhibition

Thought Fest 2008

12 and 13 December 2008

A totally unConference event !!!! in Manchester / University of Salford.

ThoughtFest 08 (Twemes: #TFest08) is a two-day event being organized by Pontydysgu with the support of the JISC Evolve network and the European Mature-IP project. The event will bring together researchers in Technology Enhanced Learning in an open forum to debate the current issues surrounding educational technologies and discuss how and where research impacts on practice and where practice drives research.

Full details on the Thought Fest  and how you can get involved can be accessed here: http://tinyurl.com/4q7hcf

Deadline for  submissions is 26th October 2008

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.

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

Subscribe: RSS

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.

I’m having a happy afternoon playing with differents ervices for visualising data. I am looking at ways of showing data for use in careers counselling. I have created a very simple data set of employment by SOC rates in Kent in the UK. My first tries are using the IBM alphaworks tool which has the merit of being very simple to use.

Here is a matrix chart:

and this is a bubble chart:

I am greatly intrigued by Martin Weller’s presentation on SocialLearn yesterday. One of the advantages of Elluminate is it allows you to watch a recording of the presentation afterwards, although it is very frustrating not being able ot take part in the rolling chat channel. SocialLearn is a UK Open University project. According to the SocialLearn blog: “Some learners will be happy running 20 web apps [for their Personal Laerning Environment], while others will want to access this ecosystem via a coherent web interface. Currently one would do this via iGoogle, Netvibes, Facebook etc, if the apps have widgets in these different walled gardens.

In SocialLearn, we aim to move beyond web-feed based interoperability and visual clustering of apps on the webtop, with SL-aware apps communicating via the API, so that the learner’s profile can track and intelligently manage the flow of information and events to support their activity.”

This seems a great approach and I particularly liked Martin’s demo of their alpha software. two things stood out for me – the focus on people as a recommender for resources, thus allowing Open Educational Resouces to be accessed in context. Secondly the idea of supporting micro and episodic learning.

I do have concerns. The OU appears to be positioning the project as an experiment in exploring new business models in a world of competition by multiple learning providers. I am not sure that this is the ideal starting point but I suppose innovation is driven by many concerns and motivations!

When I watched the presentation last night I was also not happy with another of the core assumations behind the project – namely that “there is a major shift in society and education driven by the possibilities new technology create for creating and sharing content and social networking.” This seemed to me too technology centerd. But looking at it again in the cold light of a Friday morning the emphasis on the possibilities of new technology seems right. What then becomes interesting is that if such possibilities exist and if we assume that technology can be socially shaped, how do we use such possibilities in facilitating learning.

And in that respect, the SocialLearn project looks to be a very important initiative.

I have been reading a lot more blogs lately. For one reason, I have been in one place for a week so have had a little more time to explore ideas. But the main reason is twitter. True, it gets a bit of time to get right who you are following. On the one hand you need to follow enough people to gain a range of ideas on what the community is saying – to follow the Zietgeist. On the other hand you want to get rid of those annoying people who twitter endlessly about nothing (one well known educationalist posted that the swimming pool in his hotel was closed for a second time in a week for a private reception and he was going to demand a discount on his bill – do I really want to know that?). This takes a little time in weeding and tweeking the list of people you are following.

But then twittier becomes a wonderful resource – not just of access to live feeds and events – but of recommendations of blogs and paper to read. And so far I have found it that – most of the things people recommend are worth reading. Much better than any of the repositories or collections. twitter seems to me another step towards a Personal Learning Environment. I make the choice who I am following – nobody else. And with Open Sourrce Identi.ca mini blogging service, it should be possible to develop organsiational networks or networks to support communities of practice for communciation and learning.

What would be cool though, is a way of harvesting the resources being recommended and somehow of classifying them. I have been messing around with using rss feeds from twitter search and that is proving quite useful but there must be better ways of doing it. Be nice if some of this stuff could somehow be displayed in a wiki.

The other feature which would be cool would be a Shoutout service. What is a Shoutout? It is when someobne says – “Does anyone know” or What do “People think about”. The results of the Shoutouts could be another very neat resource if they could be sensibly harvested.