In the last few months I have been witnessing a more visible presence of the German community online and really great stuff has emerged from my sporadic explorations through .de and .at ground. Mind you, they probably were already there for long, and I have definitely missed a lot, but I am now trying to catch up with it, or at least trying to keep up to speed with the latests.

[ amazing how we can easily restrict our searches and connections to an English speaking world… at least this is my perspective. I google in English, I tag in English, 95% of my network and community activities have English as the main communication channel. that’s not bad at all, but there’s other landsacpes emerging in paralel, and it is great to know that this is happening]

There are two initiatives I would sepcially like to mention today:

Mixxt.org

“Mixxt is an online kit for creating your own social network. Individuals, organisations or enterprises can start their own community with mixxt and don’t even need a technical background knowledge for that. Your new social network is just a few mouse clicks away. Think of various applications being possible with mixxt (the sky is the limit): Share your know-how and your interests with others, organise your meetings and events, bring your friends, colleagues or business partners together on the Internet and keep in touch with other users.”

By default, mixxt offers the following features for free:

• public or private networks
• member administration
• single sign on for all networks
• discussion forum
• wiki (text administration)
• event module and calender
• photo sharing
• newsletter and group mail, being send directly to the members’ email addresses
• private message center
• adjustable privacy settings
• news import via RSS-feed
• data export via CSV
• video and blog module on request

This definitelly looks good. 🙂

This week I also joined a group called everything web  2.0 in another network I was introduced a couple of months ago: Xing.

And there while in my random explorations I found this reference to a new micro-blogging service: Bleeper.de

What really impressed me in yet this one-more-service was not it’s interface (quite similar to twitter I must say) but the fact that it is a free service running on open source software and automatically licensing all the users posted data under a CC license. What can I say, I found it  at least interesting!

And if my bad “Deutsch” is something to trust, looks like that in the future bleeper will be working on more feautures:

• More AJAXand user interface;
• Roadmap;
• Pulling and sending data from others services such as Twitter, Jaiku, etc.;
• Facebook Integration;
• Picture, Video and Audio updates.

It definitelly doesn’t look bad.

It now makes me curious to know what is being doen in other countries and other languages. If you know of some cool, yet less popular initiatives out there, please let us know.

…. I am off to finally subcribe for French classes. Who know…one of these days I will “invading” the web with some lousy French too…and hopefully bumping with other pleasant surprises! 🙂

We are at ALT-C.

We arrived yesterday evening and the fun immediately started!

It is great to be among friends, to get together with those who we work with all year around online. It feels great. It makes the event more interesting. It might become the main reason this event will be reminded for. Bit isn’t it always like this? The People ..the people, they are the ones that really matter and impel us to to learn, explore new domains and revisited old areas of interested through a new lense – according to the resources they link us to, the ideas  they share, the persceptions and feeling the provoque in us.

Today Graham Attwell, Steven Warburton and I presented our sort paper about Evolve. Graham and Steven were brilliant as usual. From the 15 minutes of “fame”, there was particularly one thought that summed up exactly what I think to be one of the keys for sustainability of communitis, groups…or whatever you choose to call like-minded people who somehow come together online. Graham, trying to answer what is key to sustainabily referred to the emotional factor how that drives individual participation and effective communication. And this is so true!

How many of us remain in the same groups and communities we joined for the same reason that motivated us to join in the first place. I would risk to say that only very few, if any at all. We evolve with the communities we belong to, as they mature to. And what specially keeps us attached to the community is not necessarily the learning it enables or the information we gathered from there, but above all the learning relationships that get formed while doing so. The bonds. The feeling of comfortability of interacting with each other and the levels of trust that deepen with time, and which evolve as a natural reaction of the individuals involvements with each others’ learning process.

As we say in the webheads sharing is caring, and definitely everytime we are sharing something is not only because we came across something that interests us, but also because it is something that will interests others…most time more than us.

Blogging from the conference while lunch time …typing too fast …hope this makes any sense!  😉

What does connecting online mean to you? why do you connect online? Why is online environments become so popular and for some so priceless and important as part of their further development and (informal) learning?

These are questions that come to mind sometimes and today they make even more sense since I have joined Connecting Online 09 (More about CO09 here). Co09 aims at inviting people to tell their stories, share their experiences and create opportunities for people to talk and be listened to. And maybe it is here that the magic especially resides : in the fact that online everyone can develop their own voice and be valued for what they have to give.

Online, in order to make one’s self visible, one has to participate actively. It doesn’t mean to say that you cannot take part in online initiatives in a shier, quieter way. BUt if you are really looking for action and meaningful interaction you will have to make sure to be part of that world in an active way, so it ca bring you visibility. How are we otherwise supposed to know you have something to share. We cannot guess you are part of it if you don’t give us tangible evidence of your presence.
The hardest part is to get started! How many of us have dread to go to that very first dance class in a room full of people who we don’t know and who we assume are already friends with eachother, and been dancing for years. There is always this resentment we will not be good enough or what we have to share is too trivial to be accepted by the others, who supposedly already share group coherence. I think acceptance is an important issue. People new to these kind of online interactive environment don’t want to take this kind of risks. Most times we are afraid of not belonging there; or better of not being able to fit it. But the truth is totally the opposite. Usually the people who engage in these conversations are friendly and keen on new faces – it means new learning possibilities based of fresh perspectives. In my opinion, online interactions are (or are supposed to be) nothing but these interesting, relaxed conversations among people who get together to discuss their interests based on their own experiences or lack of them. Stress and tense dialogs are usually not part of the deal. Everyone is there on a volunteer basis and we all want to make the best of it and create an environment in which we feel comfortable and welcomed.  Everyone is there with a similar purpose – to hear what others have to say and offer their perspectives whenever they think pertinent. That’s a healthy exchange of personal data (experiences, practices, reading, interpretations, etc) which can be converted into joint constructed knowledge and know-how. That’s the magic of Connecting online – to listen and be listened to; to be part of this ongoing dialectic of giving and taking, which is becoming rare on face to face learning opportunities, as such interaction often get limited to that classroom/session pre-arranged time.
Connecting online is not about connecting to a machine; nor is it only about connecting through a machine. There is more to it:  it is about truly connecting (reaching out) to people and establishing interesting human interactions which enable learning opportunities to happen in a coherent and continuum process There is no limitation so time or space for these exchanges to happen and the fact that are the individuals who choose their connections and guide their learning path often makes connecting online a more relevant journey (when compare with some classroom sessions) to the parties involved.

In short, connecting online involves a volunteer move from the individual to learn with others; later on it requires a deeper engagement with his/her peers in which warm interactions take place and help evolve the relationship the learner has with other learners and with the entire group. Connecting online is about making bonds which will grant one good company in a nver-ending journey into learning.

This is indeed an assumption many tend  to make when they are introduced to it. Is it because at the first sight it doesn’t seem to comply with the traditional ways of teaching? Is it because learning technologists sometimes may sound like geeks – when getting involved with social media in a rather overwhelming way? Is it because one doesn’t feel comfortable using these new media which are meant for our “kids”? Is it because one doesn’t care about new approaches that will make them “lose the expert” seat once again? Or maybe it is all/none the above… who knows…

The fact is that lately every conference I have taken part in, I always meet these brilliant minds who are thinking of doing something fantastic with educational technologies. They are usually people who either are developing a new piece of software or came up with this great idea to approach their practice differently. It also turns out that 9 out of 10 of those people I meet in these conferences call themselves Learning Technologists, Learning Technologies researchers, Lecturers in learning technologies, and so on!  Although there is nothing wrong with it, the fact is that we end up preaching to the choir; talking to those who have already perceived the potential and educational side of learning technologies. And all of a sudden everything seems so easy because our audience nods with conviction while we enthusiastically present about our topic. However, outside the conference building, our audience is not always like this.

We often come away from those venues reassured we have made important contributions to the educational world and that this will probably trigger more practitioners to follow our steps. In a way – YES – but we also tend to forget one thing: most times it’s researchers presenting research finding to other researchers. And although this is not bad, this is also not all we can do. Where are the teachers and all those lecturers who are preparing our youth to a future which more and more relies on technology? Well, they are probably attending and presenting at conferences of their own area of expertise, talking to other professionals who share the same interests and most probably the same kind of experiences. And this is not bad, but we can do better than this, especially at a time like this when we all seem to believe collaboration and cross-discipline cooperation is important.  Apart from the foreign language learning and teaching contexts of which I am part of, I don’t come across a great diversity of examples where learning technologies have been applied to the curriculum in a rather impressive way. Usually, I only come across new approaches by the same small group of  people. However, However, I am well aware that a wider variety of excellent practices exist both in number and diversity, and that there are lots of educators doing great stuff. The problem is that they tend to present the ideas and the results of their projects at conferences of their own subject, which is only fair. But more collaboration across sectors and disciplines is also desirable.

The example I am about to report is one of these cases.

The MSc in Advanced Occupational Therapy is a programme “totally delivered online” – so was it yesterday announced during the launch event of this new Masters programme hosted by the Faculty of Health and Social Care- University of Salford.

This programme has been a dream that after two years of hard workfinally come true.   – Angela Hook and Sarah Bodell – occupational therapy lecturers – have done a magnificent job by putting it all together. In their own words – two years ago they ”knew nothing about learning technologies and powerpoint hadn’t been part of their practice for that long either”. Today this seems hard to believe, if we bear in mind these two ladies have just projected and launched a magnificent programme which incorporates the latest approaches such as podcasting for content deliver and discussion trigger, blogs for reflection, wikis for peer collaboration, SL and Facebook for socializing and skype for personal tutoring, because in the end it is the individual who really matters! The student’s assessment will even be negotiated by students themselves!! How cool is that?

As Sarah stated yesterday in the launching ceremony, this programme aims at putting occupation in occupation therapy. She also emphasized their passion for learning and the awareness that in this new century new ways of pursuing further development have to be taken into consideration, in order to provide professional people with the opportunity to engage with the latest development in their field of practice and also get updated qualifications.
Angela also excelled with the way she presented the structure of the programme. Before emphasizing the learning approach mentioned above, she said the programme was aimed at anyone who wants to engage with it and they only need very little ICT skills to do so. As she put it, “if you know how to use word, if you can manage email and you use the Internet to search for information, then you will be able to do this, because you already master the hardest part of technology.” And I could only agree. The hardest part is to get started. Once you do, everything will become easier, all the time. And to reassure learners of that and also make sure they will be looked after, this programme will provide their students with a four week induction period where they will have a chance to try all the tools and overcome all the fears they might have while doing so. ANd all of this with the personaizedl support of a team. Is this something or what?

This is indeed a great initiative. It becomes even more relevant, when you think that this team has been working on this for quite a while now, engaging themselves with all the applications and technologies they decided to include in the programme. It is like the old saying: Don’t expect others to do, what you yourself are not ready to. And in this case I think they can expect a lot, because they are guiding – and inspiring I’d say –  by example.

They themselves have meaningfully engaged with the approach they are trying to pass on to others and they are doing a great job at it. Example of that is their blog which has already enabled them to collaborate with other practitioners in their area who just happen to be on the other side of the globe. They even have already had the chance to write a paper together and present with them at a conference dedicated to Occupational Therapy issues, of course!

I am sure there are many other great examples like this one out there. Like I said before, I know quite a few in the Language learning / Teaching field, but apart from that my knowledge is quite limited to the people I usually engage with. I would be interested in knowing about other instances of outstanding practice in many different areas.

Yesterday this link arrived at my twitter channel via @ewanmcintosh. (isn’t twitter fab? 😉 ) Another great talk by Sir Ken Robinson. I didn’t expect it to be less than true inspiration after the last talk I had watched from him as part of the TED conference.

Yesterday evening, I finally was able to play the talk on my laptop. It was not only inspiring, it was extremely encouraging and thought provoking. The main message was, in my opinion, not to change the educational system, but rather to come up with a new one that will actually meet this age’s essence: individuality and diversity; customization and creativity.

Sir Robinson speaks about us aiming at the wrong challenge. It is not how we can make something better, as it is not about constantly reforming a system that was designed for a different age; It is about forming a new, or rather, new ways of helping us discover our natural talents. Our “geniuses” are being oppressed by education – isn’t it a pure antithesis of what we think education should be granting us?

And this brilliant speaker goes on with a brilliant thought I truly believe in: people do their best when they do what they love… when they are in their element. Isn’t it so true? Does it happen to you too? It does to me and it has always been so in school, at work, in everything I do. For instance, I hated when I had to memorize things I didn’t understand. My head would spin just to think about the electrons, atoms and molecules that, according to the teacher, were there up the air but whose point I always missed to see …so abstract it was, and so little skill the teachers had to explain it in a way it would make sense to ME. And as apparently it made sense to the others, I felt I should just shut up and set my mind to spend boring weekends at my desk trying to memorize words and sentences I couldn’t make out, but which would grant me a passing mark. On the other hand, I liked languages. I tried to understand the grammatical structured, examine the exceptions, observe how people expressed themselves, analyze  how language is cultural and experience related, how it also influences the way we think, etc. I was always fascinated by it. Learning languages is an ongoing challenge. And I always enjoyedit. As I did enjoy computer classes too. I therefore relate truly to the thought that when people discover what they can do, they become someone else, they transform, they bloom, they exceed what they thought to be their limits.

Trying to meet the future with ideas of the past is not the answer. We have to look at nature and learn from it. We need for once and for all to move from the industrial to an organic paradigm that will help provide the appropriate conditions to seed the right learning environments. Environments in which each learner will be valued and able to develop his/her genius in a creative way. And then I loved the way Sir Ken Robinson describes creativity: Original ideas with added value.

And he finishes with this amazing quote from Benjamin Franklin “All mankind is divided into three classes: those that are immovable, those that are movable, and those that move.”

So, Let’s MOVE people! It’s about time.

Probably not… 🙂
However, twittering (links to) blog posts is only one of the many ways in which twitter has served me in the last months.

Twitter, a micro-blogging free online tool, has become incredibly popular among web users in the last few months. It has also entered the educational world and it is surprisingly bringing people together over 140 character messages. Is it a case to say less is more? Or is it just the way we have become?
The most amazing fact yet is not really the size of the messages, but how it enables information to flow and the narrative to grow. And oh boy, does it do so.

I must say I was a really bit sceptic about it at the beginning. I always am. I am never an early adopter. It takes time for me to get into things. It’s just a reflection of who I am, I guess. Rather than my finding the tool, I need the tool to find me [if this makes any sense at all…]. I will explain….
I can’t even remember when I first created my twitter account, but I do remember thinking about why I should have one. It was too limitative for someone like me who has very little synthesis capacity. It would just take me ages to write a 140 character message, and I wasn’t sure I was going to get much out of it. Furthermore, not many of my online friends were in twitter…yet! I immediately put twitter in my have-an-account-but-not-using-it-tool shelf. And it remained there for a while until Carla Arena and the Blogging 4 Educators team spiced up my curiosity about it once again.They were twittering and I started following them.I was fascinated by the amount of relevant information, bits of personal insights and also some trivial tweets that were arriving at my desktop in a twinkling of an eye. It was fun and most times relevant. I started seeing the point of it. Twitter had finally been able to reach out to me – or better said – the people who were using it. And so I decided to give it another try. I shyly started twittering, hoping no one would notice me (what could I actually offer in a 140 character message?). To my surprise, I started getting more used to it (you need to create online twitter habits!!). I got better at short messages. I have to use “short-cuts” most times – not very scholastic, but it does the trick!! 😉 I also started communicating with others via twitter. I noticed that there were also people who actually read my messages, as I was getting some @me tweets too. It is interesting how people communicate directly and indirectly with others by sharing links, responding to questions, providing additional insights and sometimes even guiding in alternative directions, which they also find useful. All of a sudden micro-communication was increasingly entering my world. Because I started following more people, more twitters also decided to follow me – I still haven’t figured out how selective people are about who they follow, but I have ended up even following some of those who my twitter-fellows follow because of the tweet-conversations they are following (confusing, ha?).  In this sense twitter has enabled me to enlarge my connections and networks [even if in a rather lurking way, as I tend to communicate, not exclusively, but more often with those who I already knew from other venues]. Micro-blogging has largely contributed to my learning.

There is of course many questions that arise from this new practice and means of communication, sharing, networking…learning. Yes, Learning. That no one can deny! Many of the hot issues around twitter relate to the literacy theme. Are we becoming lazy at writing? Will this type of discourse ill-influence our essays? Will it give little-johnny bad writing habits? Are we destroying the language?, etc.

Well, I don’t think so. I believe that in learning everything counts. We don’t learn only from the most sophisticated prose [I am even tempted to say that it is where it has less chances to happen, although it can help refine it]. We don’t speak the way we write, and we obviously won’t be using a twitter register when applying for a job, for instance, although you might get to know about your future job through twitter!!
Different contexts call for different registers. It has always been like this, I don’t think it’s going to change now.  So, I have a hard time understanding why we should be so concerned or see it as an evil practice which will ruin the kids’ writing capacity.

Okay, I am being quite ironic now, but the fact is that in our daily lives we all express ourselves differently from the way we develop an academic speech, for example. By the same token we adopt different speech tones according to our target audience.
It doesn’t mean however that we don’t gain something from all the different situations we get involved in. We just have to be flexible and understand the differences of the several contexts in which we have a presence. Twitter is just one more application to add to the panoply of others means of micro and instant communication which make us reinvent the way we get our ideas across and interact. Through sms, instant message and now twitter a new language register (or a sub-set of it) has emerged – it’s a pure reflection of the immediacy of such channels. Preventing learners from using such environments is a lost battle. They are using it already. They have started doing so way before we did. It’s a dialect they master and which they enjoy.It belongs to their generations.Hence, there’s a certain magic in it.
I truly believe it can be accommodated as part of the teaching and learning experience. It has great potential, and some educators are already doing so, as it has recently been reported here.

More about group twitter note taking soon!

It’s been a while since I last posted here. I kinda miss it.

Today seems a good day to post, especially because I have decided to take part of one more challenge: this time is twitter and I was wondering if you were interested in twittering or at least checking what it is going on there. The challenge page can be seen here and basically it all comes down to one thing: Twitter fun!

Let me tell you how I got so into twitter. I always start off being very suspicious and quite reluctant about the new fashionable tools to which you get invited almost on a daily basis. Twitter didn’t appeal that much to me at the beginning – I am never an early adopter… it seem to be quite vague and ineffective… to be honest …and so after signing up to one more account I didn’t give it much thought. However, during the preparation of the earth day event it became extremely useful as a way to get to know the other members of the project a little bit better. Along the way I started getting more and more involved in it as people were sharing resources, expressing opinions, talking a little bit more about what they were doing at that exact moment (how it is raining again, and Hurray … the football team scored again! – those little things that make daily life more bearable and also make you wear a smile on your face as you think to yourself…it’s not only me who has all this paper work to take care of!) Nothing like experiencing in context!

Then with diigo offering the possibility to twitter your bookmarks away and igoogle allowing me to add my twitter friends’ feeds to my home page, twitter has become part of my daily wanders in cyberspace. I got convinced about its potential. Finally!

I have linked to so many useful resources my twitter friends have twittered about, I have followed other interesting people who otherwise I would probably not have come across, and I have benefited loads from what other people bother to share. The twitter-land is indeed a GREAT micro-world.

The learning with computers community has recognized that and is now promoting the Microblogging challenge. I hope you can join us! 😉

More info about twitter can be found here.

Text originally posted here.

This is a challenge my friend’s friend posed on to her and which she decided to pose on to me. Actually, the question was asked on my friend’s friend’s friend’s blog. In the blogsphere news travel fast, one single question can suit many and so the challenge was up. I learned through my google reader I had been tagged to respond to this challenge the day Carla Arena posted her answer (RSS feeds travel even faster!), but somehow I was having trouble finding the right words for my answer-post. I don’t think I have come up with the right ones, but I can’t delay it any longer.

So, “How does my blog relate to my business?”

Well, my blog is me… or part of me. It is my thinking-aloud corner, where I jot down some random ideas, try to answer some queries, and most times end up raising even more questions than actually answers, which was the purpose of the blog post in the first place. Blogging is like this joint and at the same time personal never ending journey, which “forces” you to relentlessly examine your practice, (re)evaluate your believes and be prepared to new challenges [to change, adopt, adapt and re-adapt to a world in a ceaseless (r)evolution] .
None of this would ever be possible without the networks I have cultivated around me, or better, the people (those are the key) with whom, in one way or another, I have bonded in this cyber-world, and who have offered me diverse and relevant perspectives of a landscape always in motion.

My blog – or my blogs, if you want – completely relates to all my businesses. I have grown professionally through my blog. Blogging on a regular basis is my own reminder of how much I still have to learn (B. Brecht once wrote (something like this) : “let’s try and reduce our ignorance even if only 1mm” – as long as I keep blogging, I know I am still working at achieving it!)
I have also developed better inter-personal skills through the multi-blogging interactions. They are fun, they are interesting, they bring out the best of me…the best I can…I mean!

On personal and professional levels (and yes, the two dimensions intertwine Big Time, and I am not complaining, because that’s who I am), I think I have been able to develop a “voice” – an identity. Not that I have any presumptions of being an authority in the field or anything of the kind, but by blogging I have been able to grow more confident about what I do and try to pass on, and somehow I have been able to speak my mind out: for the better and for the worse too… 🙂 .

In short, my blog is a continuous update of who I am, what I do, what and how I think, and what and how other people make me perceive the world around me. And this last part is the most important bit: because without the “other people” – my friends (and I have made really good friends online) – none of this would ever have been possible.

I blog, because they blog… because they comment, because I comment…because there is a conversation going on. I can hear the sound of voices. I enjoy it.
I don’t like the disturbing silence of thinking.

And if I wanted a mono(b)log I would have started a paper based journal…or maybe not (just remembered I attempted it several times and never got past the second or third page of those perfumed note books from my teen years).

And now it’s time to pass on the challenge. To answer “How does your blog relate to your business?” I am tagging: Anne Fox, Dennis Oliver, Hala Fawzi, Graham Attwell, Joao Alves, Nina Lyulkun and Ramona Dietrich, and anyone else that reads this blog (just let me know through the comment feature and I will tag you too! 😉 )

Looking forward to reading your answers. And don’t forget to pass the challenge on to other bloggers . Thinking about the answer to this question is actually a very good exercise. 😉

Today is Labor day and it does seem that people have been working on ideas to keep us busy, busy, busy!

Or maybe it was the Spring which brought a new wave of imagination and creativity.

Be as it may, the fact is that the challenges are here and there is no way passionate people about education, the blogsphere or simply cyber-fans will ignore these two challenges that arrived to me through twitter

The Comment Challenge: From today on and for a period of one month (1st – 31st May) Sue Waters, Silvia Tolisano, Michele Martin and Kim Cofino are challenging you to be a better blog citizen. For more information link to the wiki.

Meanwhile, you can invite your students and/or gather inspiration while wandering around the blogsphere to apply to this mega cool contest: The Sparky Awards

What a shame I don’t have students right now, otherwise we would already be cooking up something for this challenge too. (the process is more fun than the prize itself. It is also a cool way to get the learners involved)

So, the question is: Are you up for the challenges? I really hope so.

If you still have some reservations, do listen to this video and read some of the comments that were stimulated by this master piece by blog experts! Isn’t this exciting! I am just thrilled!!!;-)