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.

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.

This is the last LIVE edu-radio show before we take a summer break. The theme: Edupunks. And if you missed it here is your chance to download or listen online to the podcast version. If you heard the live version you can listen again!

First up in the show is Edupunk ‘poster boy’ Jim Groom – the man who first coined the name edupunk.

He is followed by Mike Caulfield from the University of Mary Washington. He talks about edupunks as a metaphor and about change cultures.

Helen Keegan explains how she developed a new ‘do it yourself’ course at the Univeristy of Salford. Helen explains the need for us to loosen up control.

Kathryn Greenhill from Australia explains that punklib is librarians doing it for themselves. She appeals for libraries to free up data.

Martin Weller, believes edupunk is a metaphor for the zeitgeist of our times. He talks about the tension between the culture of social networking and our instututional course provision.

Sounds of the Bazaar resident edu-granny, Leila Gray, reflects on the differences technology has made in her lifetime.

Margarita Perez Garcia wraps up the July edition of Emerging Mondays with three short experimental poems.

The music for this show is from the polish Rock-Punk-Alternative Band Adapters. We feature their album Adapters. You can find this album and a lot more music on the great Creative Commons music site Jamendo.com.

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What is Edupunk?

Stephen Downes offers a definition: "edupunk is student-centered, resourceful, teacher- or community-created rather than corporate-sourced, and underwritten by a progressive political stance." And an anonymous commentator on his post says: "I can’t think of anything more punk than education. For the student, learning gives power to the individual. A society full of mindless drones trained to each do a single task doesn’t really have the mental ability to rebel in meaningful ways. For the teacher, every day is an exercise in punk. You’re almost completely under the control of your coordinator, your principals, your superintendents, your school board, the media. Often, "the man" passes down restrictive rules and decisions that don’t seem to align with what’s best for you or your students. Often, you’re only equipped with sparse resources you’re able to scrap together here and there."

Are you into edupuank. Or is this just a ludicrous social construction by white males the wrong side of 40. The next Emerging Monday Sounds of the Bazaar LIVE radio programme on Monday 7 July will explore the edupunk phenomonon. With interviews,music opinion, poetry and more. LIVE. Guests include Kathryn Greenhill, Michael Caulfield and Martin Weller.

And hopefully we will be welcoming resident edupunk granny Leila back to the programme. Make sure the show is in your diary. We will be broadcasting LIVE from 1900 – 2000 UK Summer Time, 2000 – 2100 Central European Summer Time. To access the programme just click on this link or go to http://icecast.commedia.org.uk:8000/emerge.mp3.m3u and it shoudl open in your favourite MP3 player. And please tell your friends.

The podcast version of Emerging Sounds of the Bazaar LIVE summer special. This edition was produced for the Jisc Emerge conference on Exploring User 2.0: the shape of future users. The conference day theme was digital storytelling so we thought we would talk to users – old and young and from across Europe.

First up in the show is an all too short talk with kids from the computer club at Cwmglas primary school, Swansea. Sadly we ran out of bandwidth and had to curtail the talk but I have arranged to go back to make a podcast shwo at the school in a couple of weeks. And make sure you visit their brilliant website. (NB we are trebling our bandwidth next week).

Next up is John Pallister, who teaches IT in a secondary school talking about his discovery of Web 2.0 tools and his increasing fascination with the on-line world.

John is followed by Guenter Behan from Graz in Austria exoplaining the ideas behind the European funded Aposdle project.

Asley Healey from Glasgow in Scotland tells us about her research into communities of practice.

And Leila Gray – an 83 year old computer fan from Blackwood in Wales explains how she uses Web 2.0 applications. Leila was so good we have invited her to become our resident Sounds of the Bazaar Techno-granny (more about that soon).

And to wrap up taodays programme Margarita Perez Garcia reads us a poem in Spanish.

What a show. And between each item we have great music form an album called Cien Anos Despues by Magnolia Chile available free under a Creative Commons license from the Jamendo web site.

Enjoy. You are listening to Emerging Sounds of the Bazaar – the Sounds of the Summer.

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Been away from the blog for a few days – too much travel. But we are back with another LIVE Sounds of the Bazaar internet radio broadcast. The programme will go out LIVE tomorrow (Wednesday) at 1415 Central European Summer Time (13.15 BST). Interviews, features, music, poetry and more. Guests include John Pallister from Wolsingham School, Gunter Beham from the EU APOSLE project, the kids from Cwmglas primary school in Swansea and Nicola Witton and Scott Wilson from the Emerge ARGOSI project.

Please try and join us for some summer fun. You can listen to the programme by going to http://icecast.commedia.org.uk:8000/emerge.mp3.m3u in your browser. The programme should stream form your MP3 player of choice.

We will have a chat room operating alongside the programme – go to http://client11.addonchat.com/sc.php?id=302479. The chat will be hosted by Cristina Costa.

And if you would like to come on the programme just drop me an email – graham10 [at] mac [dot] com or skype me. Look forward to talking to you all tomorrow.

Great fun on Emerging Mondays radio show last night. Ignoring risk assessments we broadcast live from across Europe, with Mark Kramer talking live over a public wifi link to skype on a mobile phone from the football fanzone in Salzburg. Many thanks too to Steve Wheeler and George Roberts for their contributions. And of course to our listeners – without you there would not be much of a show.

Icecast server statistics are a little difficult to read. At a minimum we had 69 listeners – although there may have been more. Countries included UK, Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium, Romania and the USA.

For those of you who missed the show – or if you enjoyed it so much you want to listen again 🙂 – here is the podcast version. We will also announce the next show very soon.

SleaveNotes

In this issue I talk about Dave Cormier’s paper on Rhizomatic learning and the community as curriculum.

Steve Wheeler reflects on the contradictions facing education institutions using social software.

Hank HorKoff from ChinesePod talks about using new technology for language learning.

Mark Kramer talks live from the football fanzone in Salzburg about how we ware using mobile devices.

Neil Oughton from Beaumont College in the UK explains how he is planning to use WordPress in his college.

And poet George Roberts reads another of his poems.

The music is by Ally Valentine from the DD10 8TW album. It is available for free download from the Creative Commons supported Jamendo web site.

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What do you do on Mondays?
Eastenders? Corrie? The Archers? Meet a mate down the pub? Or perhaps a quiet night in?
We have the answer to those Monday evening blues. Its called Emerging Mondays. Emerging Mondays features a once a month topical and lively media meet up for all Emerge members and friends. The format is simple. Starting at seven clock, once a month, Emerging Mondays will feature an hours live internet radio followed by a social event in second Life.
The first of our series is this coming Monday, June 9 at 1900 hours UK Summer Time, 2000 Central European Summer Time.
The theme for our first programme will be “Social software – finding value? The right tools but the wrong approach?
The educational technology community has embraced social software with a wave of experimental projects and activities. But is it working? The tools are great for encouraging new participatory approaches to learning and for building peer activity and networking. However, is there a dissonance between such approaches to learning and the structures and curricula of our education systems? Does the adoption of social software challenge hierarchies and power? What is the role of teachers and trainers in a era where knowledge is distributed through networks.
The radio broadcast can be accessed by going to the following web address: http://icecast.commedia.org.uk:8000/emerge.mp3
This weeks show features Steve Wheeler from Plymouth College talking about social software, Jay Cross from Internet Times on informal learning, Hank Horkoff from China Pod in Shanghai on personal Learning Environments and language teaching and learning and of course our culture spot with the Last Poet in Oxford.. We will be holding a regular ‘phone in’ slot over skype and would love to welcome you live on the show. Make sure I have your skype address – mine is GrahamAttwell and we will be happy to chat to you on Monday evening.
And, of course, I am looking forward to meeting up with you on the Emerge SL Island after the event.
Its enough to make Mondays worth looking forward to.

It is another week of hectic fun here at Pontydysgu Towers. Tomorrow morning (Monday) I am off at the crack of dawn to the EduMedia conference in Salzburg. I’m doing two presntations – one on the MOSEP e-Portfolio project and another on podacsting and blogging in self directed adult education. Best of all – lots of my favourite peopel are going and I’m looking forward to a pint or tow with you tomorrow evening.

I will post the presentations on SldeShare when I get five minutes. And I am messing with memes – or rather twemes. What are twemes? Twemes are a mash-up of twitterm delicious and flickr. You can see the edumedia tweme here. And if you are using any of these services to add things about the conference please tag them with #edumedia08.

Click advance notice. Sounds of th Bazaar LIVE is launching a new monthly series sponsored by the JISC Emerge programme. And each of the monthly broadcasts will be followed by a social event in Second Life. Cool or what? The first of the series of Emerging Mondays takes place on Monday June 9 at 1900 UK summer time, 2000 Central European Summer Time. I will post the url for the programme laler this week – together with our guest list. But put it in your diary now – don’t forget – Emerging Monday’s Sounds of the Bazaar LIVE Monday 9 June.

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.

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