Its that time of the year again and its the ONLINE EDUCA BERLIN conference on 2-4 December. Over 2000 educational technologists in one conference. Presentations, demonstrations, exhibitions, parties and more. Can’t afford the conference fee? Can’t get away from the classroom? Don’t worry – we will be there to bring you three special live interent radio programmes from Sounds of the Bazaar. We will be doing our very best to bring you the views of leadings peakers, refelctions on the latest trends and of course we will be speaking to particpants.

The programmes will go out at the following times:

• Wednesday  2 December 1600 – 1640 Central European time, 1500 – 1540 UK
• Thursday 3 December 1100 – 11.40 Central European time, 1000 – 1040 UK
• Friday 4 December 1100 – 11.40 Central European time, 1000 – 1040 UK

To listen to the programmes go to http://radio.jiscemerge.org.uk:80/Emerge.m3u This will open the LIVE radio stream in your MP3 player of choice. And Cristina Costa will be waiting in our chatroom – address  to be abbounced for your ideas and comments.

If you do have the good luck to be at Educa Online Berlin, then come and join in. We will be broadcasting from next to the main bar (where else!). And we would like to invite all our friends – new and old – to meet up with us on Wednesday 2nd in the bar of the SORAT Hotel Ambassador Berlin (Bayreuther Straße 42) – just ten minutes from the conference centre – map here.

Are you interested in the potential of LIVE internet radio? Would you like to find out how we produce the programme? Want to know more about our equipment? Would you like to start your own channel sharing our bandwidth? Or would you be interested in working with us on a project? Then come and join us in the main bar of the Hotel Intercontinental (the conference venue) at 1900 on Thursday 3 December. We’d love to meet you.

Last Wednesday I was honoured to speak (via skype) at the launch of the New Media School in Bucharest. The launch took place in the Modern Art Museum who are a partner in the project. The New Media School is a fascinating initiative by the students union to promote social and collaborative learning. For me the most encouraging thing is how they plan to use social media for teaching and learning. Anyway, whilst we were waiting for the start of the meeting, I made a short interview with Gabi Solomon and Vlas Atansui who have been two of the prime movers behind the project. Congratulations to them and everyone else associated with this project. Below is a text Gabi sent me about the project.

New Media School

What?

The New Media School project is an initiative to support a community of practice of young students, responsible with communication in their organizations. The members of the community will be chosen for their interest and passion for web 2.0 and communication, and for the willingness to develop their skills in this regard. Their learning experiences, as far as the project is concerned, start with the real-life challenges they encounter while trying to develop communication and dialogue within and outside the organization, and ends with the changes they manage to implement while interacting with the New Media School community. Along the way, the project will facilitate a learning environment both on-line and offline, making use of a variety of tools like: wikis, a google group, googledocs, a social platform, twitter.

The project aims to empower 30 students who study in Bucharest to create multimedia content about their projects and their organizations and to promote it using new media tools in experimental/inovative ways. Our assumption is that today’s literacy goes beyond being able to read and write. Nowadays it’s all about being able to effectively communicate your ideas by crafting powerful messages using text, sound, music, image and graphics and then promoting your message using web2.0 platforms. We are also interested in better engaging students in the conversation about education by helping them to deliver high impact messages about the way they are learning and the learning opportunities that they value.

How?

For the next month we planned three meetings:

• the launching meeting (where we will have a discussion about the project and a “get-to-know” session for the members)

• a Web 2.0 workshop (where we will explain the tools we want to use and what you can achieve by using them)

• a video workshop (where we will have an expert on social campaigns talking about the concept of a video, how you film, how you cut a short movie)

Working in small teams over the course of the project, the participants will develop the skills needed for shooting, editing and publishing video clips related to their projects, their organization, education, non-formal and informal learning. In addition to the hands-on approach the participants will explore, together with trainers and guests (bloggers, communication experts, video editors and directors) new practical ways of delivering their mesages to other young people and to the world. They will be encouraged to link up with other educational initiatives – which include anything, from campaigns, conferences, trainings, other youth projects etc. – and use their new media skills to promote these types of non-formal education. The content produced will be also published on the project website and promoted on-line through the use of social media and established on-line publications.

The project is both a learning experiment in the innovative use of digital technologies as a form of self-expression, as well as a contribution to the creation of a free online resource of content generated by the learners themselves.

Which methods we plan to use?

Sharing Meetings

We believe that the motivation for learning comes firstly from our real needs and desires. During these meetings, the members will share their experiences and the challenges they’ve met in the organizations, looking up new ways of solving them and integrating their individual experiences in a broader context.

Training

The community will also grow with the help of experts who have a lot of knowledge about this domain and are willing to share it with us. We will invite trainers to facilitate the process of learning and by doing this we will add value to the process of sharing and collaborative learning.

Collaborative workshops

Sometimes we can learn something only by doing. The workshops we plan are learning events, where we learn by experimenting together communication techniques, where we develop challenges and we obtain unexpected results.

Social experiences

We learn best from and with our friends. We will include in the New Media School experience Time for knowing each other, for relaxing and having fun together. We like watching movies, seeing a theater play, cooking together or playing sports.

Access to mentoring and coaching experiences

Each and everyone of us enjoys meeting special persons, who are able to inspire and guide us, who help us find our own path and answer our questions. We invite those people to join our community and help us in the process of learning.

Learning log

Learning is something that we experience all the time, not only in the classroom or in training workshops. Sometimes we have no time to process the lessons learned from our experiences and that leaves room for forgetting. We will encourage the use of a learning log or of an individual portfolio for all our members. For example, they can use a blog where they would write about their experiences, they would reflect upon them, so they would enhance the learning process and they will have the record of their achievements

Blended learning

Usually, the answers that we find during our meetings spark new other questions. Because of that we will keep these ideas and questions alive after the meetings, on an online platform made of many social and collaborative tools.

This is a short video – the first in a new series of Sounds of the Bazaar videos – made as a contribution to a workshop on ‘Technology-enhanced learning in the context of technological, societal and cultural transformation’ being held on November 30 to December 1 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Bavaria.

This workshop is organised by Norbert Pachler, the convenor of the London Mobile Learning Group (LMLG) and is being hosted by the EU funded Stellar network. The workshop is looking at the following questions:

• What relationship is there between user-generated content, user-generated contexts and learning? How can educational institutions cope with the more informal communicative approaches to digital interactions that new generations of learners possess?

• Learning as a process of meaning-making for us occurs through acts of communication, which take place within rapidly changing socio-cultural, mass communication and technological structures. Does the notion of learner-generated cultural resources represent a sustainable paradigm shift for formal education in which learning is viewed in categories of context and not content? What are the issues in terms of ‘text’ production in terms of modes of representation, (re)contextualisation and conceptions of literacy? Who decides/redefines what it means to have coherence in contemporary interaction?

• What synergies are there between the socio-cultural ecological approach to mobile learning, which the group has developed through its work to date, with paradigms developed by different TEL communities in Europe?
• What pedagogical parameters are there in response to the significant transformation of society, culture and education currently taking place alongside technological innovation?

The LMLG sees learning using mobile devices governed by a triangular relationship between socio-cultural structures, cultural practices and the agency of media users / learners, represented in the three domains. The interrelationship of these three components: agency, the user’s capacity to act on the world, cultural practices, the routines users engage in their everyday lives, and the socio-cultural and technological structures that govern their being in the world, we see as an ecology, which in turn manifests itself in the form of an emerging cultural transformation.

I have created a Cloudworks site to support the workshop and you are all invited to participate in the discussions. The site features key questions from a series of background papers, all available on the site and you are invited not only to comment but to add your own links, academic references and additional materials. The discussion is being organised around the following themes:

• Sustainability
• Literacy
• Content
• Design challenges
• Work Based Learning
• MyMobile project/pedagogy

Look forward to your comments on this site or in the clouds.

This weeks meme has been change. Monday and Tuesday, we helped organise the Network of Trainers in Europe International On-line conference on Innovation in Training Practice. And today we have been working with the Create support programme in hosting a one day on-line conference, entitled Institutional Pragmatics, for the Jisc Institutional Innovation programme.

What does Institutional Pragmatics mean? The theme of the day was how can projects produce sustainable change at an institutional level and wider. What are the drivers of change and what are the barriers? How can these barriers be overcome. Who are the people who are important in a change process. Doe change occur from the top down or the bottom up or does it involve both.

The morning break out session heard presentations by different projects of their work. I was particularly impressed with the Erewhon and STEEPLE projects, both, if my memory serves be right, based in Oxford. Erewhon is an investigation into the deployment of existing university computing resources to mobile platforms, coupled with the implementation of relevant location based services and access to the Oxford VLE. The vision for the Steeple project is to streamline enterprise level podcasting and support a viable community around scalable, enterprise-level solutions, in the areas of automated video/audio capture, processing and delivery. But these are only two of more than 50 projects being funded by the UK Jisc. Details of all the projects, including the project blogs and access to outputs, can be found on the Support, Synthesis and Benefits Realisation (don’t be put off by the name!) web site.

The afternoon was largely given over to exploring issues around change. I was particularly interested in the question of whether we should be seeking to change thinking or practice. Whilst there obviously is a link between them, and thinking is important, for me it is changing practice which determines the way we teach and learn. It was also encouraging to note the importance given to engagement with students as both drivers but also as agents of change.

Our main role in the conference was to broadcast an internet radio programme, Sounds of the Bazaar, linking the different sessions, held on the Elluminate platform. Although the programmes were mainly music and chat, we made a number of interviews, which we are publishing here as podcasts.

They are well worth listening too. Two of the interviews, with Leo Care  from the  WeCAMP project and Mike Neary from the Learning Landscapes project, are both concerned with linking the physical design of university buildings to infrastructures for technology enhanced learning and about how design can promote learning networks. Wecamp has developed a Web-based interactive campus visualisation modelling platform to effect participation and collaboration. A major benefit, they say, is the ability to visualize scenarios being considered, aiding the communication with senior management and informing the decision making process. The e-modelling platform is designed to enable the University of Sheffield (UoS) to acquire and preserve over time its own organizational memory and knowledge in effective planning and uses of future learning spaces.Learning Landscapes is a research project looking at the ways in which academics work with colleagues in Estates to develop and manage innovation in the design of teaching and learning spaces in Higher Education.

The third interview was with James Wisdom about a consultancy report he has produced for SEDA in the UK on the Higher Education Framework proposals, unveiled by UK Business Minister, Peter Mandelson last week. These proposals may have far reaching consequences for the future of higher education in the UK, and in the thinking, for universities elsewhere. Thanks to all of them for agreeing to come on the Sounds of the Bazaar programme.

Music Playlist of the show:

1. “Put The World On Stop” (Piano Version) by Sean Fournier
2. “WalkOnFlames” by Markus Schmitt
3. “Fusion” by Cool Cavemen
4. “Anything But You” by Fresh Body Shop
5. “Still Und Schön” by Tom Oswald
6. “L’Odore della Morte” by Talco
7. “When Will It End” by Erica Shine
8. “The Great Deceiver” by Dennis Logan
9. “These Days” by Robin Grey
10. “50’s Life” by The Wookies
11. “Miss is a sea fish” by Ehma
12. “My Misfit Ways” by Christophe Marc
13. “reggae and unity” by Jahmac
14. “Broken Stereo” (Acoustic Version) by Sean Fournier
15. “Pain” by LA OLLA EXPRESS
16. “The Symphony” by Chris Skinner
17. “Incoherent” by Josh Woodward
18. “Roots” by Galdson

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Podcast (podcast1): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

In September, we organised a symposium on Personal Learning Environments at the the 2nd World Summit on the Knowledge Society (WSKS 2009), “an international attempt to promote the dialogue for the main aspects of the Knowledge Society towards a better world for all.”

I rather rashly promised to publish the products from the symposium. It has taken a little longer than I had hoped, but here they are. The slides and links to the full papers are included in the text, the audio recordings of the presentations can be accessed at the bottom of this page.

The first speaker was Ricardo Torres. His paper was entitled “Using Web 2.0 applications as supporting tools for Personal Learning Environments.”

The abstract is as follows:

” This paper shows the results of a pilot study based on a proposed framework for building Personal Learning Environments using Web 2.0 tools. A group of 33 students from a Business Administration program were introduced to Web 2.0 tools in the context of an Information Systems class, during the academic year 2008-2009, and reflected about this experience through essays and interviews. The responses show evidence of learning and acquiring skills, strengthening social interactions and improvement in the organization and management of content and learning resources.”

You can download his full post here.

The second presentation was was by Cristina Costa from the University of Salford. Her paper was entitled “Teachers professional development through Web 2.0 environments. 

Her abstract reads as follows:

“Teacher professional development is no longer synonymous with acquiring new teaching techniques, it is rather about starting new processes as to engage with new forms of learning, reflected in the practice of teaching. With easy access to the panoply of online communications tools, new opportunities for further development have been enabled. Learning within a wider community has not only become a possibility, but rather a reality accessible to a larger number of individuals interested in pursuing their learning path both in a personalised and networked way. The web provides the space for learning, but the learning environment is decidedly dependent on the interrelationships that are established amongst individuals. The effectiveness of the web is reflected in the unconventional opportunities it offers for people to emerge as knowledge producers rather than information collectors. Hence, it is not the tools that most matter to develop a learning environment where more personalized learning opportunities and collective intelligence prospers as the result of personal and collaborative effort. Although web tools provide the space for interaction, it is the enhancement of a meaningful learning atmosphere, resulting in a joint enterprise to learn and excel in their practice, which will transform a space for learning into an effective, interactive learning environment. The paper will examine learning and training experiences in informal web environments as the basis for an open discussion about professional development in web 2.0 environments.”

You can download her full paper here.

The third presentation was by Tobias Nelkner from the University of Paderborn. He talked about the development of a widget infrastructure to support Personal Learning Environments. Here is his abstract:

“Widget based mashups seem to be a proper approach to realise self-organisable Personal Learning Environments. In comparison to integrated and monolithic pieces of software developed for supporting certain workflows, widgets provide small sets of functionality. The results of one widget can hardly be used in other widgets for further processing. In order to overcome this gap and to provide an environment allowing easily developing PLEs with complex functionality, the based on the TenCompetence Widget Server [1], we developed a server that allows widgets to exchange data. This key functionality allows developers to create synergetic effects with other widgets without increasing the effort of developing widgets nor having to deal with web services or similar techniques. Looking for available data and events of other widgets, developing the own widget and uploading it to the server is an easy way publishing new widgets. With this approach, the knowledge worker is enabled to create a PLE with more sophisticated functionality by choosing the combination of widgets needed for the current task. This paper describes the Widget Server developed within the EU funded IP project Mature, which possibilities it provides and which consequences follow for widget developer.

You can download his full paper here.

The fourth was Maria Perifanou from the University of Athens. She talked of her experiences of using microblogging for language learning. the abstract reads:

‘Learning is an active process of constructing rather than acquiring knowledge and instruction is a process of supporting that construction rather than communicating knowledge’. Can this process of learning be fun for the learner? Successful learning involves a mixture of work and fun. One of the recent web 2.0 services that can offer great possibilities for learning is Microblogging. This kind of motivation can raise students’ natural curiosity and interest which promotes learning. Play can also promote excitement, enjoyment, and a relaxing atmosphere. As Vygotsky (1933) advocates, play creates a zone of proximal development (ZDP) in children. According to Vygotsky, the ZDP is the distance between one’s actual developmental level and one’s potential developmental level when interacting with someone and/or something in the social environment. Play can be highly influential in learning. What happens when play becomes informal learning supported by web 2.0 technologies? Practical ideas applied in an Italian foreign language classroom using microblogging to promote fun and informal learning showed that microblogging can enhance motivation.”

Maria’s full paper can be downloaded here.

The final speaker was Graham Attwell from Pontydysgu. He talked about the European Commission Mature-IP project which is developing a Personal Learning and Maturing Environment. His paper was jointly authored with John Cook and andrew Ravenscroft from the Metropolitan University of London. Here is the abstract:

“The development of Technology Enhanced Learning has been dominated by the education paradigm. However social software and new forms of knowledge development and collaborative meaning making are challenging such domination. Technology is increasingly being used to mediate the development of work process knowledge and these processes are leading to the evolution of rhizomatic forms of community based knowledge development. Technologies can support different forms of contextual knowledge development through Personal Learning Environments. The appropriation or shaping of technologies to develop Personal Learning Environments may be seen as an outcome of learning in itself. Mobile devices have the potential to support situated and context based learning, as exemplified in projects undertaken at London Metropolitan University. This work provides the basis for the development of a Work Orientated MoBile Learning Environment (WOMBLE).”

You can download the paper here.

Podcast music is ‘Miss is a sea fish’ by Ehma from the Jamendo web site.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Podcast (podcast1): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Podcast (podcast2): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Podcast (podcast3): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Last week we hosted a series of radio shows to accompany the Jisc SSBR Institutional Innovation project conference on Institutional Impact.

And here are the podcasts.

The lunchtime programme features interviews with Jisc programme managers, Lawrie Phipps and Ruth Drysdale.

The afternoon show has an interview with Howard Noble from the Green ICT project.

Guests on the evening show include:

• George Roberts providing reflections on the conference and much more
• Miles Berry on Open Source Schools
• Ana Garcia from the University of Madrid talking about coaching and innovation
• David Morris from the University of Coventry on Location Independent Working
• Pekka Kamarainen from the University of Bremen on innovation in the training of vocational teachers and trainers
• Paul Bailey from the Jisc Institutional Innovation programme on innovation and sustainability

Dirk Stieglitz selected the music, produced the programme and undertook the post programme processing.

My thanks to Dirk and all my guests for making a great series of programmes.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Podcast (podcast1): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Podcast (podcast2): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Lately I have got excited about the potential of mobile devices for learning. Partly this is due to the accessibility of such devices and their growing functionality but more it is because of the potential of mobile devices to enable situated or contextual learning. Elearning until now, perhaps because of the domination of universities and to a lesser extent academic schools in implementing educational technology, elearning has focused on academic or disciplinary knowledge. Yet much of the knowledge we use is vocational or occupational in nature. Mobile applications can take advantage of different aspects of context. Of course this is a challenge to institutions, as well as for developers. I have been discussing these issues over the last four or five weeks with John Cook and Andrew Ravenscroft from London Metropolitan Univeristy.

And yesterday at the Jisc Instiutional Innovation conference, John Cook presented both ideas and examples of his work in this area. The abstract for his presentation read:

“How can learning activities that take place outside formal institutions, on platform of the learners choice, be brought into institutional learning? New digital media can be regarded as cultural resources that can enable the bringing together of the informal learning contexts in the world outside the institution with those processes and contexts that are valued inside the intuitions.The big problem is that reports show that Social Software and Google are not enabling the critical, creative and reflective learning that we value in formal education.”

Here are the slides from his presentation. And below you can find a podcast of his keynote.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

This Thursday features a day of LIVE internet radio to support the Jisc Institutional Innovation programme online conference on Institutional Impact.

We will be broadcasting four programmes during the day.

The Morning Programme

The morning programme starts at 10.00 CET (9.00 UK Summer Time) and will run until 1215 CET. The will feature music and chat. At around 11.00 CET we will brodacst Professor John Cook’s keynote speech on “Scaffolding the Mobile Wave”

• How can learning activities that take place outside formal  institutions, on platform of the learners choice, be brought  into institutional learning? New digital media can be regarded as cultural resources that can  enable the bringing together of the informal learning contexts in  the world outside the institution with those processes and contexts  that are valued inside the intuitions. The big problem is that reports show that Social Software and Google  are not enabling the critical, creative and reflective learning that  we value in formal education.
  

The Lunch Time Show
The lunch time broadcast will be from 1400 – 1430 CET (1300 – 1330 UK Summer Time. The show will feature interviews with Ruth Drysdale from Jisc and David Morris plus more music.

The Afternoon Show
The mid afternoon show from 1600 – 1630 CET (1500 – 1530 UK Summer Time)  will feature guest slots from Howard Noble from the Low Carbon ICT project and from Luis Francisco Pedro form Portugal on introducing PLEs throughout the institution.

The Evening Show
The evening show kicks off at 1930 CET 18.30 UK summer Time. Besides providing a chance for quick reflections on the conference, it will also be featuring interviews with leading researchers and practitioners on institutional innovation from all over Europe (we have some great gusts lined up – I will try to provide you with a trailer for them tomorrow). From 2000 CET (1900 UK Summer Time) onwards it will also be streamed into Second Life for participants in the Institutional Innovation conference social event. The show ends at 2030 CET (19.30 UK Summer Time).

How to listen to the programme.
You can access the internet radio feed by going to http://radio.jiscemerge.org.uk:80/Emerge.m3u in your browser. This will open the stream in your MP3 programme of choice (e.g, iTunes).

Please feel free to just sit back and enjor the show. But if you would like to come on the show live to provide your reflections and ideas about the issues being discussed then please skype or email Graham Attwell – graham10 [at] mac [dot] com or GrahamAttwell on skype.

Here are the remaining podcasts recorded when making the Jisc e-Learning Show.

Rob Ward is Director of the Centre for Recording Learning Achievement. He talks about progressions routes and e-Portfolios in this interview.

Sandra Winfield is project manager at the Centre for International e-Portfolio Development at Nottingham University. She talks about the use of e-Portfolios to support work based learners.

Tony Toole, from the University of Glamorgan, talks about the use of mobile technologies and social networking applications to support work based learners in Wales.

Alan Paull is a consulatant who has been working on the development and implementation of the XCRI standard for exchanging course information. Here he explains what the standard is and how it can be used

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Podcast (podcast1): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Podcast (podcast2): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Podcast (podcast3): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

I did a series of interviews to gather materials for last weeks Jisc e-Learning Show radio broadcast. If course we could only use very small parts of the interviews in the programme.

Now we are releasing the full version of the interviews as podcasts. There is some rich material here for anyone interested in the use of technology to support e-Portfolios, work based learning, mobile learning, the exchange of course information etc. This is the first of two posts – the second will contain the remaining interviews.

Bob Bell is Fe in HE coordinator for the Jisc Northern Regional Support Centre. In this interview he talks about work based learning.

Clive Church works for EdExcel. He is particularly interested in the development and use of e-Portfolios.

Derek Longhurst is Chief Executive of Foundation Degree Forward. In this interview he looks at the challenges changing forms of learning and knowledge development pose for universitie sand discusses future policy options.

Lucy Stone is project manager at Leicester College, where she is introducing mobile technologies to support work based learners.

Lucy Warman is developing a Jisc project designed to involve students in sharing experience at the University of Central Lancashire.

Thanks to all the interviewees for their time and ideas and to Dirk Stieglitz for post production work.The music is called Musiques en Principauté de Boisbelle and is composed and played by DaCapo. It can be found on the Creative Commons music web site Jamendo.

The music is by

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Podcast (podcast1): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Podcast (podcast2): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Podcast (podcast3): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Podcast (podcast4): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS