The Pontydysgu website is always full of news about the big projects we are involved in, like FP7 Learning Layers or Taccle2.  This is pretty inevitable as they take up the majority of our time and budget.  However, there are lots of other, smaller Pontydysgu projects running in the background that we rarely post anything about.  This is a bit of an oversight because although we often use these projects as test beds for trying out new ideas or as vehicles for piloting specific bits of technology that we then roll together in a much bigger package, they are also successful in their own right.

All of them are running in Pontypridd, (known locally as “Ponty”) which is where the Wales half of Pontydysgu is based. Some are part funded through the LLL Partnerships programme; some are funded in-house. We thought we might write a series of posts on what these projects are all about….

First up is Dysgu Ponty, which translates to Learning Ponty.  We chose this name because apart from the play on Pontydysgu (meaning approximately Bridge to Learning), we wanted to convey the idea that the whole community of Ponty was learning and that the town called Ponty was a learning resource.

The project is based on a very simple concept – let’s cover the town with QR codes linked to a learning resource.   The codes are being printed on decals (for shop windows), enamel (for the exteriors of building) and on varnished wooden plaques for hanging around trees in the park.  Codes come in three colours – red for Welsh, green for the English translation and black for careers.

So far we have 200 and our target is at least another hundred.  The town has a population of 30,000 but this covers all of the outlying villages as well.  It also has a great sense of community, which means that the level of support has been brilliant. The whole community is involved – schools, the Town Council, shops, businesses, the local newspaper

The link from each QR code goes to a website page on which there is a question that relates to the location.  The level is approximately 8 -12 yrs olds. Following the title question is some simple information using a range of multi media.   The location of the codes will be on Google Maps and we are currently sorting them out into a ‘Maths trail’, ‘Language trail’, ‘History trail’ etc so that children can choose whether to follow a subject trail or focus on the codes in one part of the town.

The purpose of the project is really to provide a bridge between formal and informal learning and to improve home school links.

We are currently working of a way of  ‘rewarding’ children for completing a number of questions – not sure Mozilla badges quite fits.  Also thinking about how we can get kids to be able to upload pictures as well as comments. May rethink the platform.

Meanwhile here are some examples of the sorts of things we are talking about

Location:  on the bandstand in the park

• Links to… Question:  Have you ever heard brass band music?
• Additional ‘information’ – mp3 of Colliery Brass Band with one line of text explaining that most all the pits had their own band

Location: Outside Costa Coffee

• Links to… Question: Do you know where coffee comes from?
• Additional information: You Tube video of coffee being harvested and processed

Location: Outside travel agent underneath exchange rates

• Links to… Question:  How much is it worth?
• Additional info:  Text and image – If you had £37.50 to take on holiday, how many Euros would you get?  Which travel agent in town has the best exchange rate today?

Location:  On the river bank adjacent to the confluence

• Links to…mQuestion:  What rivers are these and where is their source?
• Additional info:  The place where two rivers merge is called a ‘confluence’.  Use Google Earth to trace the two rivers back as far as you can, find out their names and where the river enters the sea.

 Location:  On the war memorial

• Links to… Question:  How many died?
• Additional info: Look at the names on the Great War memorial and then the names on the Worls War 2 memorial.  In which war were the greatest number of people from Pontypridd killed? How many times more people?  Why do you think this was?

 Location: Market Street

• Links to…Question:  What has changed?
• Additional Info: Picture of the street taken 100 years ago from same spot. Text – List all the things that are different between Market Street in 1910 and the same street today.

I seem to have spent the last two weeks in meetings. Breakfast meetings, slype meetings, FlashMeeting, pub meetings (my favourite). Anyway one of the best of the meetings was with a team of students at HsKa – the technical university of Karlsruhe in Germany. The students have been working with us over the last five months on a project to develop a new platform called Serennu ar sgeip for school teachers to manage virtual presentations form people in different occupations to students in their class.

Today we had the final review presentation with the students and their teachers. And it was awesomely good – both the presentation and the platform. This is a teaser post. Both the teachers and members of the team have promised ot right up their experiences of the project to post on this blog. We will also talk about our perceptions of the project in a mini series which we will be running here. And of course we will tell you more about the platform based on wordpress and available under an open source license.

Congratulations to the HsKa team. We are looking forward to your reflections.

Pontydysgu is happy to be involved in two new projects which have been approved by the European Commission’s Lifelong Learning programme. L2T, coordinated by the Sozialforschungsstelle (sfs) at the Technische Universität Dortmund, aims to meet the increasing need for well developed ICT skills  in the field of “social media” for teachers as well as students.  It also contributes to spreading the use of the added pedagogical value of social media for teaching purposes and therefore the adoption of innovative teaching methods in schools.

RadioActive Europe will work with different groups of young people and adults to develop internet radio and will set up a European Internet Radio hub.

The projects are expected to start in November, 2012.

For those of you interested in smart textile and low cost wearables as an artistic context to engage young women in technology and engineering in education, feel free to check the International Journal of Art, Culture and Design Technologies (IJACDT), ISSUE ON CREATIVITY, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGIES CULTURES edited by Gianluca Mura (2011), p. 12-21. You can access the abstract here, or view a sample PDF here. The Guest Editorial Preface by Gianluca Mura, Politecnico di Milano University, Italy can be accessed here. You might as well like to refer the Journal (IJACDT) to a Librarian via this link.

“The International Journal of Art, Culture and Design Technologies (IJACDT) links art, design, science, and culture with emerging technologies. IJACDT provides a forum for exchanging ideas and findings from researchers across the design, arts, and technology disciplines. This journal covers theoretical and practice experiences among industrial design fields, architecture, art, computer science, psychology, cognitive sciences, humanities, cultural heritage, and related fields. IJACDT presents different arguments within project culture from the historical, critical, philosophical, rhetorical, creative, pedagogic, and professional points of view.”

I ran across this interdisciplinary symposium disseminated via Yasmin:

The Universe Resounds: Kandinsky, Synesthesia, and Art Symposium
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
2–7 pm

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Peter B. Lewis Theater
1071 Fifth Avenue
(entrance on 88th Street)
New York City

http://www.guggenheim.org/universe-resounds

In conjunction with the final days of the Kandinsky exhibition on view through January 13, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is pleased to announce The Universe Resounds: Kandinsky, Synesthesia, and Art, an
interdisciplinary examination of painting, synesthesia, and abstraction from modern to contemporary times, including from the perspectives of art history, neuroscience, music, film, physics, and performance. A reception and exhibition viewing follows the symposium.

Topics and Speakers

Kandinsky’s Synesthetic Vision: Color/Sound/Word/Image
Magdalena Dabrowski, Special Consultant, Department of
Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art, Metropolitan Museum
of Art, New York

Notes on Kandinsky and Schönberg
James Leggio, Head of Publications, Brooklyn Museum, New York

Kandinsky’s Legacy in Film and Popular Culture
Kerry Brougher, Deputy Director and Chief Curator, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.

Nonobjective Films
Courtesy the Center for Visual Music, Los Angeles

Neuroscience and Music
David Soldier, Professor of Neurology, Psychiatry, and Pharmacology, Columbia University Medical School, New York, with Brad Garton, Director of the Columbia Computer Music Studio, Columbia University,
New York

Hypermusic Prologue
Matthew Ritchie, artist, New York

Moderated Discussion
Caroline Jones, Professor of Art History and Director, History Theory Criticism Section, Department of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston

For complete information, schedule, and tickets check online or call
the Box Office at 212 423 3587, Mon–Fri, 1–5 pm.

Eyetracking Forum
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
9 am
Martin Segal Theatre
The City University of New York Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue (at 34th Street)
New York City

Science & the Arts at the CUNY Graduate Center and the Sackler Center for Arts Education are pleased to announce an Eyetracking Forum. This session for art and science professionals examines the science of
eyetracking from multiple perspectives, including filmmaking, interface technology, psychology, and data visualization, and concludes with an exhibition walkthrough.

Moderators: Adrienne Klein and Grahame Weinbren

Space is limited, RSVP required: publicprograms [at] guggenheim [dot] org

Participants

Kenneth J. Ciuffreda, O.D., Ph.D., is the former Chairman of the Department of Vision Sciences at SUNY State College of Optometry, New York, whose current research involves normal and abnormal oculomotor
systems.

Isaac Dimitrovsky is a programmer who lives and works in New York.

Rebecca Shulman Herz is Senior Education Manager of the Learning Through Art program at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and author of Looking at Art in the Classroom: Art Investigations from the
Guggenheim Museum (Teachers College Press, 2010).

Bruce Homer is Associate Professor for the Ph.D. Program in Educational Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Adrienne Klein is Co-Director of Science & the Arts at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Ken Perlin is Professor of Computer Science at New York University, directing the NYU Games for Learning Institute.

John F. Simon, Jr. is a practicing new media artist who works with LCD screens and computer programming.

Paula Stuttman is an artist, independent art lecturer, and part-time Assistant Professor at the New School, New York.

Grahame Weinbren is an interactive filmmaker whose work is represented in the permanent collection of the Guggenheim Museum; he is also a member of the graduate faculty of the School of Visual Arts, New York.

George A. Zikos, O.D., M.S., directs the Manhattan Vision Associates/Institute Vision Research, New York.

via Yasmin, image via http://www.guggenheim.org

I am in Evora in Portugal at a two day meeting of the European funded ICONET project. ICONET builds on a previous project called Informal Competencies and their Validation (ICOVET) which developed an interview procedure for the validation of skills and competencies, a manual, and a programme for further training. ICONET is adapting and trying out the approach and tools in different sectors and different contexts in seven European countries.

The project has now only six months left to run and we have spent the afternoon discussing project dissemination. Mant of the discussions parallel recent talks in various Jisc programmes about how to ensure project sustainability and maximise the use of project outcomes following the end of external funding.

One measure is to design a range of dissemination products geared for different target audiences. New technologies can help gretaly – we havebeen looking at using video and audio as well as the more common brochures and flyers.

But the discussion today has also raised issues about what is realistic to expect from a modestly funded project. The ideas we have explored would require major changes to education systems if they were to be widely adopted. We do not have the infuence to do this. Probably the best that we can hope for is to show the possibilities of informal learning and hope that others will pick up and build on our ideas.