We are delighted so many people at Online Educa Berlin are interested in our work. Sadly, we are running out of hard copies of the publications. We will be trying, over the weekend, to move the publications section of this web site on line – and we will be making downloads of all our publications – and those of our partners, available here
A quick news update. Graham, Jenny and Dirk are at Online Educa Berlin. Pontydysgu is supporting the Bazaar project, developing and promoting Open Content and Open Source in education.
Later today (Thursday) Graham will be talking at the conference about web 2.0, social software and Personal Learning Environments. His slides will be available on the Online Educa site and on this web site.
Tomorrow (Friday) we are hosting a lunchtime round table on open content. Meanwhile if you are in berlin – an would like to talk to us, you can find the Bazaar on stand 16 (opposite the bar.
Quick news update on where we are this week.
Graham Attwell is at a b-learning project meeting in Sofia on Monday and Tuesday. Late Tuesday evening he travels to Vienna. On Thursday and Friday there is a meeting of the Leonardo da Vinci TT-plus project which Graham, along with Eileen Luebcke, will attend on behalf of Pontydysgu.
Meanwhile Jenny Hughes is in Poland evaluating the EMCET project.
Next week Jenny, Graham and Dirk Stieglitz will be in Berlin for the Online-Educa Berlin conference.
If you would like to meet up just drop us a line.
You can now subscribe to the Sounds of the Bazaar podcast at the iTunes store. Just click on this link to find the podcast page.
We had a feed problem, which we are not sure what caused it but we solved it and should work again.
Thanks to Jan Lai, who told us that “bug”. So if you faced any problem please tell us.
Don’t miss the Bazaar confererence on 14 December in Utrecht. The major aim of the conference is to promote dialogue and exchange between ‘experts’, researchers, developers, practitioners and learners. The organisers say they are particularly keen that learners
and junior researchers are given an opportunity to discuss and exchange their ideas. They aim that the content of the sessions is driven and created by the participants rather than the traditional ‘presentation and five minutes questions’ format with content determined in advance by a single organiser, or a small group of organisers.
Graham Attwell form Pontydysgu will be speaking at the event. For more details see this post on ‘Networks, Communities & Learning: Show that you Share! on the World Wide Web blog.’
Just a quick note about our changes “on the fly”: if the site or a page is temporary (minutes) not avalailable I failed in changing something crucial.
Other things just give the page an odd layout and will also be repaired fast. The archive and category sections are puzzleing me most in the moment so please be patient and get not too annoyed.
I have in front of me the Pontydysgu official Certificate of Incorporation. It is dated 22 February 1999. That is more than 8 years we have been going. In that time we must have participated in literally hundreds of projects. I have written numerous papers. We have published three books. And lately we have been producing podcasts and videos. Where are the results of all our work? They are scattered over the web. I frequently have to use Google to find my own writings. So a web site seems a good idea.
You might ask why we have not produced a web site before. Yesterday I came across the saying “A cobblers children always go barefoot”. So it is for us. We have evangelised on the use of new technologies for knowledge sharing but we have never done it.
Now at last we have our site. I hope it will be an attractive and lively place. It is intended to be ever developing – not one of those corporate sites with last update a year ago.
Of course it is not finished. But we hope the content will come on line rapidly over the next couple of weeks.
Many, many thanks are due to Dirk who has designed the site – and of course to the good folks from the WordPress community who have developed the software.
Our new Website is now online.
Still a lot to learn and still a lot to do. So I would call it Version 0.3.
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.