Antonio Fini :: Blog
http://lnx-otecexp-009v.ou.nl/wg/wordpress/?p=287 For many ordinary users, the hail of the PLE (Personal Learning Environment) is negatively charged with the challenge of managing an increasingly complex environment, with some apps being online (Google Docs, Zoho, YouTube, Facebook, etc.) and some local (Word, Outlook, etc.), sometimes spread over more than one computer in different places (laptop, PC, mobile device).
Lately some new applications have emerged to make this easier and merging them into an integrated user experience. One I mentioned previously was Syncplicity which allows automatic syncing of documents between different computers and also linking them to your online applications.
Another application worth noting in this area is Gladinet Cloud Desktop. The main difference to Syncplicity is:
Syncplicity: local files –> online editor
Gladinet: online files –> local editor
Gladinet aggregates your online files from Google Docs, Picasa, Amazon Storage, Skydrive and integrates it neatly as a new virtual drive into your Windows Explorer. This is cool! You can now take a picture which sits in your online Picasa album and edit it in your local image editor.
http://lnx-otecexp-009v.ou.nl/wg/wordpress/?p=282 A few days ago, the British OU quietly launched their new open platform called Platform. It promises to allow users to ‘chat, chill, and connect’, but I could find very little of that. Indeed, it looked more like a copy of the BBC news portal than a social site, and even when diving into the inner spheres of the Platform, where the student societies are located, it only redirected to other sites. So I was unable to find any of the mentioned experiences.
Weblogs, now an integral component of present-day pedagogy, are not, it seems, part of the Platform. The section dedicated to them gives the impression of a carefully selected branded business information column, not the vivid, frank, and sometimes plain stupid bottom-up reports by the community.
Maybe it is too early to judge, but the social promise in the title still needs substantial realisation to lift this beyond a mere marketing site.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Socialtech/~3/384562595/4th-alt-c-ed UPDATE - venue changed to the OLD BAR - still in the same SU building :)
Really looking forward to our fourth ALT-C Edublogger meetup next week, taking place at Leeds Student Union Old Bar, Tuesday 9th September, 19.30 onwards. The Alt-C evening meal (for those who are attending the conference & have signed up for it) is served in the adjacent Refectory building, and as usual will provide a handy initial meeting point for some of you. Otherwise, head over to the Mine Bar. We may be moving on somewhere else but we'll stay at the Mine Bar until at least 20.30.
We've been lucky enough to have had some great special guests at previous meetups - including James Farmer, Stephen Downes, Barbara Dieu, Christopher D. Sessums and Barbara Ganley. This year's meeting promises to be as jam packed with world-class edubloggers as ever, including Scott Wilson and Graham Attwell. George Siemens will also be in town - he's speaking at ALT-C early Wednesday - and I'm looking forward to meeting up with him for the first time in 3D.
As ever - this is an informal, fun get together. You don't have to dress up and you don't have to be an old school edublogger to come along. Everyone who has an interest in edublogging is welcome. To co-inside with F-ALT, the first ever grass roots fringe event at ALT, which will be tackling a range of cutting edge topics in a fast, dynamic debate framework, we'll be holding the microblogging session on the night. Su White will be facilitating speakers Helen Whitehead, James Clay, Jay Cousins, Andy Powell & maybe me in a kung-fu style roundtable. Good quality heckling and any imaginative audience participation will be entirely welcome.
 falt08
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Socialtech/~3/382286349/digital-divi 
I'm really excited to be teaming up again with with Frances Bell, Helen Keegan and new girl Christina Costa to be delivering our second ALT-C slam workshop. Last years session explored what web 2.0 meant to participants, and went down really well. This year we're trying to be even more reckless ambitious and inviting old and new friends from all over the world to pitch in to this years slam topic/competition, which is, in keeping with ALT-C's over-arching theme, The Digital Divide. What we hope to get out of the session is a wide ranging exploration of dimensions of the digital divide: To produce and collect short real-world and digital pieces on what the digital divide means to people, how it can be interpreted, and what it's impacts are. In other words, what does the digital divide mean to you?
Obviously whole we're hoping for a reasonably diverse bunch of participants on the day, there are going to be limits on the heterogeneity of a group of people at an ed tech conference in Leeds on any particular afternoon. So we'd really like to encourage other people to join in. We are looking for participants from all over the world to contribute to building a resource which is interesting, innovative, and engaging topics. We'd like to build a cross cultural snapshot mosaic of what the digital divide can mean and how it's experienced.
We'll be capturing and uploading content until midnight GMT on the 10th of September, and then giving everyone a chance to vote for their favorite slam, from those created and performed on the day and those contributed by educators across the globe.
So, interested in experimental, collaborative and distributed research processes? Thinking our session sounds like fun and might end up being a useful resource? Then join in!
1. Come along to our session! This time it's scheduled at a reasonable hour :)
2. Create something for the wiki. You slam could be a picture, a slideshow, a podcast, a 90 second Flickr video - anything. Tell us one thing the digital divide means to you.
3. Already been working on the digital divide? Great! Repurpose something already up or just send us the link if it's already in a fast, accessible format.
4. Checkout the entries once they're up and vote for your favorite.
5. Keep your fingers crossed for us! "If you, as an individual or small group, have got something to say about the Digital Divide between now and midnight Wednesday 10 September 2008 check converter, then you can create a slam, publish it here, comment on slam pages.
Then you can vote for your favourite between 11 and 14 September (deadline midnight GMT). We will announce the winners here and by message to members on Monday 15 September. That means that people from around the world can join in, not just those coming to our workshop. You can run your own workshop, or create your own slam, maybe with your friends. More details on how you can participate, just stick to our few simple guidelines."
There will be prizes! Probably not very good ones, but prizes nevertheless.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Socialtech/~3/289285527/edtech---mob 
Picture credit: Mom & Mrs Pat Butcher by virgo200745
Grab your floppy hat and sun screen and head out to the bright new day that is the Edubloggers Summer Picnic: Hyde Park 15 June 08. This one's in honor of Instructional Media Analyst Stella Lee who's on loan to us from Athabasca University, Canada, for a week:
It's been a while since we had a proper meetup. So why not come to London's Hyde Park for an afternoon of great company and the finest food and wines known to mankind?*
Sign up now!
And don't forget to help spread the word!
Who?
Anyone working in educational technology, or in formal or informal learning & interested in geeky stuff. This is an ideal day out for for learning technologists, IT people, teachers, librarians, cultural workers, researchers, or people interested in talking about how tech supports learning & learning communities. Relations, friends, loved ones and offspring are all welcome.
Where?
Hyde Park: Meet by the Serpentine Gallery (check back for updates/rainy day alternatives)
When?
2pm - later. There will probably be an early evening pub move. I'd be pretty amazed if there wasn't.
What?
Bring food, drink, footballs, frisbees, blankets... activity ideas welcome - we may have footie & rounders matches depending on the relative fitness of attendees.
*You need to provide these yourself unfortunately
http://web2elearn.wordpress.com/2008/11/26/tempi-che-corrono/ Bello questo video, che ci ricorda, con tanto di colonna sonora azzeccatissima, la velocità e la complessità dei nostri giorni… il lifelong learning oltre che una necessità diventa una corsa contro il tempo!
http://lnx-otecexp-009v.ou.nl/wg/wordpress/?p=271 Is this the future or has the past reached the Web?
Experimental 3D site Barcinski-JeanJean provides visitors with a stunning immersion experiense. You need a pair of these cool retro red/blue specs to view the 3D scape. It’s worth, though, to spend the time finding these in your attic, because the site incredibly combines Flash design and mouse navigation, hyperlinks and 360-degree panorama photography to give you absolutely realistic immersion.
 Older readers might recognise these retro-specs The potential for education is enormous, if the immersion factor can be transferred to museums and art galleries it may even save a few field trips. The only downside: after three minutes viewing I could not get up from my chair for another three minutes due to cross-eyed vision (or was it the amazing experience)?
Hallo
I have uploaded on elgg community site new language pack for Georgian language.
Dear Administrators, please look http://community.elgg.org/pg/plugins/highlander/read/9324/georgia
and add it to eduspaces too.
Thank you much in advance!!!
Keywords: elgg translation, georgian language, language pack, localization
Posted by Eduspaces Central - Rusudan Tsiskreli
| 5 comment(s)
http://lnx-otecexp-009v.ou.nl/wg/wordpress/?p=267 New figures from search engine analysts show that we use the search engine increasingly and overwhelmingly for navigational queries: for finding, not for finding-out.
My bookmarks, for example, whether in any of the multiple browsers or in Web services like del.icio.us have become so disorganised that I cannot find things anymore. Rather than revisiting them and cleaning out tags, dead links and the now inadequate folder structure, it is more efficient to vaguely remember what the site was about and google it. It is no coincidence that Google Chrome merged the search box and the address bar.
Navigational queries can take different shapes: you might type in ‘apple’ and expect to get swiftly directed to ‘www.apple.com’. Or, you might search more semantically like ‘geotagging photo site’ or ‘online video editing’.
So what does it tell about us, learners and users of technology? Have we become dependent on Google because we failed to learn? - failed to learn to organise our information properly, failed to remember what apparently had enough relevance for us to revisit? Did the convenience of the search power of these tools make us complacent and lazy to train our memories to learn and remember?
As some of you will have noticed, we have given EduSpaces a new skin and added a couple of features, namely; Shouts, Push to Twitter, Incoming Twitter and FriendFeed on all profiles. This combination of features allows users on EduSpaces to continue using the external tools of their choice while still updating their followers on EduSpaces. A few may ask why we have revamped EduSpaces, the answer is simple, this site launched four years ago this month, before Facebook, MySpace, Twitter et al were household names. Yes, it has gone through a couple of rocky patches, however, people kept on using it, so we wanted to show our commitment and say thank you. 
The service will continue to be free to use, however, we are considering putting a couple of links on the frontpage to a few worthwhile educational charities, I hope this is ok. Anyway, thanks to those users who kept supporting the site, we appreciate it.
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