I have become a big fan of Twitter. I can’t really say why but I do like the feeling of presence – even if half the time its hard to know what people are twittering on about.
And so in our latest mash-up we have installed a twitter widget on the right hand bar of this page.
If you have any ideas of new widgets or feeds we might add do get in touch.
Things are busy here at the Pontydysgu HQ. I am off to ST Gallen in Switzerland for the SCIL Congress on ‘The Changing face of Learning – Creating the Right Balance’. I am doing a Keynote presentation on PLEs, introducing a paper on Open Educational Resources and running a workshop on PLEs – all in one day! Its going to be a lot of fun – I hope. Meanwhile we are busy fighting bugs in Freefolio and developing a social network version of the WordPress based software. This is for a new network on research into the training of trainers. We hope to launch the site next week – keep watching here for announcements.
Talking of bugs, we cannot get the new WordPress 2.5.1 version – which this site now uses – to display photographs – anyone any good ideas?
I’m out and about this week. Today I am off to Sweden for a presentation on Personal Learning Environments. And Wednesday afternoon I travel on to Brussels for a meeting on a new project about the training of teachers and trainers in Europe. As ever if you would like to catch up for a beer and a chat please drop me an email.
Monday 21 is the third of our LIVE Sounds of the Bazaar broadcasts. Todays show goes out at 1900 CEST, 1800 UK summer Time. We hope we have eradicated the bug which badly reduced the quality of yesterdays broadcast.
Don’t forget todays LIVE edition of the Sounds of the Bazaar show. We will be broadcasting at 2000 Central European Summer Time, 1900 UK summer time. For other time zones just check the tiny urls in the news item below. Todays show features interviews with John Pallister form Wolsingham School on e-Portfolios and with Annika Matilda Bergstroem from Sweden. Our special guest is Matt Montgane who is going to be telling us about the forthcoming 24 hour Earthcast.
And for todays show we will also have a chatroom running in parallel. Just click on this link to enter the chat.
Don’t forget – you can listen to the programme by clicking here. This should open as a stream in your default MP3 player.
And if you missed yesterdays broadcast, an archive version is now on line..
We have been threatening this for a long time. But now, thanks to generous sponsorship from the JISC Emerge Bazaar project, Sounds of the Bazaar is going LIVE.
We are going to host a broadcasting fest this weekend with three live half hour programmes on all the best in educational technology, learning and (hopefully) culture. I will give you a little more detail on the line up for the programmes later this week.
But make sure you put these dates in your diary now:
Saturday 19 – 1400 hours Central European Time (1300 UK)
Sunday 20- 2000 hours Central European Time (19.00 UK)
Monday 21 – 1900 hours Central European Time (1800 UK)
How do you access the programme – just go to this address in your browser – the stream should open in your MP3 player of choice. And don’t worry if you forget the address – we will put a big button on this site for you to press!
Update – thanks to Cristina here are links for times in other time zones:
First show – http://tinyurl.com/5gme7w
2nd show – http://tinyurl.com/5qx5k8
3rd show – http://tinyurl.com/635no3
Hawk eyed visitors may have noticed the addition of new links in the right sidebar. Blip TV hosts our videos. The PBwiki Open Learning is a new space we are developing together with Cristina Costa to provide learning materials and support for workshops and presentations. All materials are available under a Creative Commons license so please feel free to copy and remix.
Well, Pontydysgu has never been renowned as a particularly religious organisation. More like beer and football. But we aren’t chavs – we are nerds and we are proud of it. So we have been spending the last couple of days trying to set up Sounds of the Bazaar Live! We plan to launch our own internet radio station at the end of April. And before, the launch, we will be making a couple of pilot (test) programmes. Those will be exclusively available to Wales Wide Web readers. So watch this spot.
In the meantime, if an of you have any experience in livecasting from a wireless LAN, please do get in touch. You could save us hours of technical puzzles. We’d also be grateful for any recommendations on streaming servers. Surely, someone out there must be offering a free (or cheap solution for educational broadcasting.
We have been struggling over the last three weeks to get the publications area of this site live. And now it is. OK – we haven’t got all our publications up there yet. That is going to take a few more weeks. But every day we will try to add two or three papers. I am also very relieved that the ‘Project Managers Guide to Evaluation’ and ‘Searching and Lurking and the Zone of Proximal Development’ are finally accessible through the web – it means I no longer have to email them out to people 🙂
Many thanks to Dirk for his hard work in developing this section of the site.
Some of you have asked what has happened to our podcast series, Sounds of the Bazaar. Although the project funding from the Bazaar project ended in December, we are going to continue to produce Sounds of the Bazaar. The first of a new series is in the can and should be out by next Monday at the latest. So keep watching on this site.
Cyborg patented?
Forbes reports that Microsoft has obtained a patent for a “conversational chatbot of a specific person” created from images, recordings, participation in social networks, emails, letters, etc., coupled with the possible generation of a 2D or 3D model of the person.
Racial bias in algorithms
From the UK Open Data Institute’s Week in Data newsletter
This week, Twitter apologised for racial bias within its image-cropping algorithm. The feature is designed to automatically crop images to highlight focal points – including faces. But, Twitter users discovered that, in practice, white faces were focused on, and black faces were cropped out. And, Twitter isn’t the only platform struggling with its algorithm – YouTube has also announced plans to bring back higher levels of human moderation for removing content, after its AI-centred approach resulted in over-censorship, with videos being removed at far higher rates than with human moderators.
Gap between rich and poor university students widest for 12 years
Via The Canary.
The gap between poor students and their more affluent peers attending university has widened to its largest point for 12 years, according to data published by the Department for Education (DfE).
Better-off pupils are significantly more likely to go to university than their more disadvantaged peers. And the gap between the two groups – 18.8 percentage points – is the widest it’s been since 2006/07.
The latest statistics show that 26.3% of pupils eligible for FSMs went on to university in 2018/19, compared with 45.1% of those who did not receive free meals. Only 12.7% of white British males who were eligible for FSMs went to university by the age of 19. The progression rate has fallen slightly for the first time since 2011/12, according to the DfE analysis.
Quality Training
From Raconteur. A recent report by global learning consultancy Kineo examined the learning intentions of 8,000 employees across 13 different industries. It found a huge gap between the quality of training offered and the needs of employees. Of those surveyed, 85 per cent said they , with only 16 per cent of employees finding the learning programmes offered by their employers effective.
Our Wikispace for teaching and learning
Join our Sounds of the Bazaar Facebook goup. Just click on the logo above.
We will be at Online Educa Berlin 2015. See the info above. The stream URL to play in your application is Stream URL or go to our new stream webpage here SoB Stream Page.