cristina :: Blog

http://www.pontydysgu.org/2008/09/how-you-can-participate-in-alt-

This post provides a summary of how you can particpate in the Alt-C conference wherever you are.

It’s the Adanveced Learning Technologies (ALT) conference this week in Leeds in the UK. Together with Cristina Costa I will be reporting from the conference on the Pontydysgu blogs.

In the past if you couldn’t spare the time, forgot to submit your abstract and thus had no institutional support for the conference fees or just couldn’t face another four days of papers and workshops, that would be it. No conference, no networking. The times they are a changing. First we have all manner of distance communications. And secondly we are beggining to loosen up in our ides of how knowledge is shared with the grwing popularity of technology enhanced unconferencing. AltC is not open to all this year. But there are events you can participate in wherever you are and differents spaces to interact with conference delegates.

First a plug for Sounds of the Bazaar. We are broadcasting LIVE from the Jisc Emerge social at Alt-C on Tuesady at 1725 UK summer time, 18.25 Central European time. Sit back and relax (perhaps with a glass of wine yourself) and listen to what the party goers are saying.  Just point your browser to http://radio.jiscemerge.org.uk/Emerge.m3u This should open in your MP3 player of choice and after a few seconds delay start streaming. Better still, if you’d like to join in the fun, you can join our conference special chat room and share your opinions with others. You can also ask questions to the people being interviewed. Cristina Costa will be moderating the chat LIVE at Leeds at the following url - http://tinyurl.com/soundschat - no account needed.

What else is going on? Alt-C themselves have go in on the act and are providing access to the keynote speeches through Elluminate. Just head  over here to get the full details. Alt has provided a Crowdvine social network site for the conferrnce. Sadly that is only open to registered delegates. But there is an open aggregator here (or download an OPML file with the aggregator RSS feeds).

F-Alt is the first ever fringe being held at Alt-C. It sounds like it is going to be a lot of fun. You can get full details on the F-Alt wiki. There’s a chance that sessions may be broadcast live on ustream. Keep watching on twitter for more details. You can find a FriendFeed aggregator here.

Last but not least, the Alt-C Digital Divide slam is open to all. Full details on the wiki. Go on - its much more fun than that report you should be writing. Create your own entry.

I am sure there will be more. Just hang out in the right spaces to find out what is going on. Or, of course, you can watch this blog for regular conference updates.

http://b2ob.blogspot.com/2007/11/reaces-em-cadeia.html

http://b2ob.blogspot.com/2008/04/de-ameaas-oportunidades.html

http://b2ob.blogspot.com/2008/04/barreiras-pontos-fortes-oportun

https://redgloo.sse.reading.ac.uk/ssswills/weblog/2622.html

Helen Hathway, our subject librarian, has just sent round an email with the subject "Alternatives to Wikipedia". She points out that academic staff, and others are quick to criticise the use of Wikipedia in references, but that we don't always suggest alternatives.

The University of Reading library pays for access to a number of resources, which can be accessed online by members of the university. A full list of titles of such reference materials, including Britannica and the OED, subject specific titles and collections is at: http://www.reading.ac.uk/library/eresources/Reference/lib-ereference.asp

Jade Burris (formerly Coutts) has accepted a position in the Psychology department at St Joseph's University in Philadelphia. She will be performing ECERS-R in local schools for a grant through the United Way, teaching Education courses, developing curriculum for a newly planned ECE major and providing support for migration to online courses.

Congratulations, Jade!!!

https://redgloo.sse.reading.ac.uk/ssswills/weblog/2621.html

Last night I attended a CPsquare call on work undertaken by Karen Guldberg and Jenny Mackness in the area of: Learner Experiences in an on-line Community of Practice.

It is great to be able to talk to authors in an informal call on the work that they are doing and its application in other areas. They had undertaken a taken an interpretative phenomenological approach to their research, immersing themselves in the learner experience and taking an insider view, on the experience of participating in the CPsquare workshop on Communities of practice. They highlighted 6 areas that they recognised as themes in the responses:

• Emotion
• Connectivity
• Understanding norms
• Learning Tensions (Duality)
• Technology
• Identity

Many participants used emotive terms when expressing their feelings about the workshop, for example "fired up" or "frustrated", and I think this reflects the type of people who take the workshop.

We had a lot of discussion about Connectivity, I cited Shirky who I believe talks about the different levels of connection that people establish.

The issue of norms, was nicely summed up by John D. Smith who gave an example where everyone in a group had said (separately) they felt like an outsider, even the acknowledged expert.

Learning tensions for me was nicely summed up by the line between Action and Reflection.

We only briefly touched on Technology and had no time for discussing Identity. We will have to make another event to talk about Identity, because that is a topic that I think is of growing importance.

I think Karen and Jenny have done a great job with their work so far. They rose to the challenge of presenting late in the evening (many CPsquare events are late evening in Europe, so that most of the rest of the world are awake).

http://www.pontydysgu.org/2008/09/blogging-and-podcasting-for-sel

This was recorded live at the EduMedia conference in Salzburg. Many thanks to Andreas Auwarter who recorded the audio and did the post processing.

http://www.pontydysgu.org/2008/09/social-software-personal-learni

I accepted an invitation to do a keynote presentation at a conference on Web 2.0 at the University of Minho in Braga, Portugal on October 10th. What I dinn’t realise is that they wanted me to write a paper. I am not so keen on formal papers these days - I far prefer multimedia but I finally got down to it. I greatly enjoyed readng up for he paper and quite enjoyed writing it - though am frustrated at all the things I did not say. And I still find the academic text format a bit stifling. Oh - and I hated doing the referencing (though that is my fault - I should have done it as I wrote). Anyway here is the paper. I am trying to out in scribd to see if this makes sense as a way of blogging a paper.

If you prefer you can download the paper here - portplesfin

http://www.pontydysgu.org/2008/09/moocs-at-f-alt/

From Open Education News:

“There has been a lot of buzz about the free and open Connectivism and Connective Knowledge course to be facilitated by George Siemens and Stephen Downes in September. To date, over 1,200 people have signed up for the course prompting a new label, Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), to describe this super-sized open education course”. On a new blog about the course George says:

“As a group, we all share in the success (and failure) of MOOCs …We have to walk a line between innovating teaching and learning while still keeping things at a level that permits the ideas we’re presenting to translate into the realities of educators and administrators … While Stephen and I are facilitating this course, I think it’s critical that the larger community identifies with it and takes ownership of it. Our course isn’t happening in a vacuum - we’re building on our own previous work and the work of others. And once our course is done here, others will hopefully learn from our experience and build on it. Spiralling innovation. But I’m hoping we won’t only see people building on our work. I hope we’ll see others building with us … Research opportunities are enormous. MOOCs are uncharted, largely undocumented, territory. This course will produce a significant amount of data - both quantitative and qualitative.”

It is great that teh course is free and open. But is this real innovation. Are we not just reinventing mass rows of students sitting passively in tiered lecture tehares albeit on-line. Is thsi just another Tayloritic model of education. Cheap - yes! Efficent - yes! Effective - perhaps not. Particpation…learner support? Is the innovation technical or pedagogic?

These issues and more will be the subject of the F-Alt (the fringe conference at Alt C) warm up session in the bar at 9pm in the bar at Leeds Univeristy on Monday. It probably won’t be massive. Bit it is open and you are all invited.