Don’t forget tomorrows (Monday) LIVE internet radio edition of Sounds of the Bazaar. The programme will go out at 2000 Central European summer time (1900 UK summer time). To listen to the programme just click on this link. This should open in your default MP3 player (e.g. i Tunes).

The programme is the first in a series called Emerging Mondays. The theme for the programme will is “Social software – finding value? The right tools but the wrong approach?

The 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.

I greatly enjoyed the Edumedia conference in Salzburg. Regardless of the formal sessions, what makes the conference is the people and the settings.
ON tuesday we organised an unconference session on the terrace of the conference centre. Or rather we did not organise it. In the best tradition of unconferencing it emerged or just happened. Anyway, the outcome was that Steve ‘Wiki’ wheeler, mobile Mark Kramer. Andreas the podcast Auswarter and a bunch of friends spent two and a half hours discussing the future of technology enhanced learning. The discussion embraced the meaning of mobility and mobile learning, motivation, informal learning, the future of education institutions, deschooling society, web 3.0, MUVEs, emotional learning and more. And thanks to a veritable plethora of recording devices edited highlights of our conversations will be released soon, I am sure.
Much of the discussion centred on mobile learning and, in particular, mico blogging. We were all intrigued by the success of our tweme at the Edumedia conference. The tweme (the word tweme is a mashup of twitter meme) was not an official conference initiative and all that had been done to publicise or explain it was a quick announcement prior to my keynote presentation on the first afternoon of the conference. Yet, despite the very limited bandwidth, a lively community and discourse emerged – see www.twemes.com/edublog08
I am increasingly intrigued by microblogging formats as a way of capturing the incidental learning which happens all the time. Incidental learning is heavily context specific and os based on social interactions.
Incidental learning is episodic but rapid and frequent. Our learning and knowledge base is constantly redrawn, challenged ro adjusted to take account of an on-going stream of incidental learning episodes. This might best be called Lifestream Learning. And twitter and other such microblogging formats offer a compelling way of both capturing and representing such a learning Lifestream. Even more, twitter allows us to express the emotions which as so intrinsically involved in incidental learning in social contexts.
Of course there is a danger of being overwhelmed by a river of data. We need further tools and approaches to filter, search and aggregate our learning life streams. Still more we need tools to assist us in representing such learning, of visualising our knowledge and of combining our own knowledge representations with those of others.
We do not have such tools at the moment (I sort of feel it should be something like the matrix). But being able to capture and represent a community shared lifestream such as Edumedia – even if it was just for two days and we will never experience the precise context again.

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.

Lots of fun at the Edumedia conference in Salzburg. Somehow managed to speak at the same session as Jay Cross. With the two of us on the attack I think some participants thought they had strayed into a meeting of dangerous revolutionaries.

And I just about managed to get something going with twemes. Twemes is an aggregator of twitter, delicious and flickr working on a unique tag. The tag for the conference is #edumedia08. OK there was not enough bandwidth for accessing the web and both my phone and camera ran out of power.

But I could connect to skype and the ever knowledgeable Cristina Costa told me of a skype-twitter interface and it worked. Some eight of us at the conference have been using the tag. You can follow the tweme at http://twemes.com/edumedia08. I must say I like the mix of languages.

On the train this morning I read ta new paper by Dave Cormier entitled “Rhizomatic Education: Community as Curriculum (note – free access but you will have to create an account). thsi is a great article and I will return to some of the ideas Dave raises later this week. But I like very much the idea of community as curriculum. Dave says

“In the rhizomatic model of learning, curriculum is not driven by predefined inputs from experts; it is constructed and negotiated in real time by the contributions of those engaged in the learning process. This community acts as the curriculum, spontaneously shaping, constructing, and reconstructing itself and the subject of its learning..”

And that is what I am trying to do in Salzburg.

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.

Or PLEs, Mupples and PLSs. Its a bit of a mouthful. A couple of weeks ago the iCamp project came up with the idea of Mupples – Mashup Personal Learning Environments. “Mash-ups, the ‘frankensteining’ of software artefacts and data”, they say “have enabled a new generation of learning tools. Web-applications, services, and data can now be endlessly recombined, no matter where they reside.” I think this is a helpful idea. And they are organising a conference on it in September.

Now this morning comes the idea of Personalised Learning Systems. The term is used in a blog post by Ken Carroll from Praxis Language based in Shanghai. I met Hank Horkoff, the CEO, last week and was mightily impressed with the work they are doing (watch this spot for a Sounds of the Bazaar interview with Hank).

Anyway, Ken says:

“The PLS has one obsessive objective: to allow the user in every way possible to fit the learning around her own needs (rather than forcing her to conform to some outside requirements). In this sense, the PLS is consistent with Personal Learning Environments, and of course, with our own philosophy of learning on your terms. The lifelong learner simply has to have ownership/control of the learning. Perhaps the PLS would fit as a language learning toolkit within a PLE to enable that control.”

I am not so sure I like the term Personalised Learning System. But the idea makes a lot of sense in terms of using standards compliant and web 2 savvy learning provision which learners can access though the (mashup) Personal Learning Environment.

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.

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

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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.