Elgg Everywhere :: Blog

I have hold those conferences at Universidad Pública de Navarra, thanks to the Centro Superior de Innovación Educativa, that hired me for that and provided the conferences for free to the whole Internet with a Creative Commons License. The only problem is that they are in Spanish. Perhaps I will offer them in English too in the future. I really like the poster they created for them (very much "hand made"):

Thanks to those conferences I have been ofered to hold some more of them and have also received some good offers to be hired.

The most important thing for me in this days is that we all share our lifes with our families and friends, and that we all make the new year that is about to come a way to make our dreams come true. A big hug for you all. By the way, it seems like Eduspaces is not shutting down anymore, and so, this blog and home page will remain intact.

I have received an email telling me that Eduspaces is shutting down on January 10, 2008:

 Hi All,

We would like to inform all users of EduSpaces that we will be shutting
down the service on Jan 10th, 2008.

We have provided a mechanism for you to export all your blog posts in
either an RSS format or HTML. To do this, go to your blog and select the
submenu option you require. For those of you with files, you might want to
download those as well.

Thank you to everyone who has supported EduSpaces over the last three
years.

Best regards,

The EduSpaces team

As you can see, those of us having blogs here are offered to export our blog posts in html and rss. I am thinking to move this blog to an account in English at our Elgg installation in Spanish ( http://www.sociedadytecnologia.org ). Anyway, I will tell you what I will do with this blog before Eduspaces has shut down.

There is an important discussion on this topic in the site forum. there is also a how to on moving from Eduspaces to Edublogs. Stephen Downes and Graham Attwell among others have written about it at their blogs. You can look for information about it also at Technorati and Google blog search.

I am very sad about Curverider shutting down one of the most succesfull Elgg installations, anyway I am happy that Elgg continues to be a good open source project with such a good community. Thank you for providing such a good service. 

 Did you know? 2.0

An excelent reflection made by an excelent team with renewed ideas.

There are also some slides based on it, which won the World's best presentation contest at Slideshare.

You can know the whole history about it, and even join the movement at their wiki: Shift Happens.

This post is just a Dashboard of my Personal Learning Environment. I talked about it in my previous post.

Note: all  the links to the tools are linked to my personal profile in them (so, you the tools themselves become part of my profile, for example my photos on Flickr, my videos on YouTube, my links in del.icio.us and so on)

 Main tool: Elgg (at EduSpaces.net)

• Aggregator (input of all kind of news and resources from other applications)
• Blog (output of articles)
• E-portfolio (profile, tags, shared files, presentations)
• Social network (friends, friend's blogs, communities)

Browser: Firefox

Learning Management System: Moodle

Frontpage News: Canarias7, El País, New York Times, Menéame (24 h.), Digg (24 h.)

Search: Google (general), Wikipedia (Encyclopedia), Technorati (Blogs), Yellow Pages  (Business and people) Windows Desktop Search (Local files in my computer)

Communication Tools:  Thunderbird (e-mail), Skype and Live Messenger (instant messaging, phone calls and videoconference), Web Conferencing (Elluminate), Twitter.

Knowledge base of classified links: del.icio.us (it is also a social network, a recommendation system and even a very good micro-blogging tool) 

Media publishing and searching: Flickr, YouTube, Slideshare

Social networks: Sociedad y Tecnología (Local), Ning (Internet Time Community and several more),  EduSpaces (Education), Facebook (contacts), LinkedIn (professional), Explode (meta-network, creates a network of people no matter were they have their sites).

Web applications: Google Docs, Google Maps, Google Reader, Zoho (applications for business) 

Last updated: March 12, 2008 

Internet has always been an excelent resource to use in education. First, since 1969, it was used to use advanced programs in powerful remote computers (Telnet), in a little time, people started to share files (FTP), to communicate by e-mail, and to discuss lots of topics in forums (Usenet news), but it was used mainly by the Goverment, Colleges and big corporations for about 20 years. Since the first web page appeared in 1990, things became much easier and Internet became extremelly popular. It was an excelent resource to find and publish information and to communicate with other people.

By the mid 90's, a new kind of web applications were created to deliver courses online. They were called Learning Management Systems (LMS) or Virtual Learning Environments (VLE). They offered content management, communication tools and assesment, among other features. The most famous ones have been WebCT and Blackboard (commercial ones) and Moodle and Sakai (open source ones). These systems are still used everywere nowadays. They are course-oriented, with a top-down design, were course designers and teachers control the application. The use of this kind of applications was called "e-learning", a term coined by Jay Cross.

10 years after, the new Web 2.0 applications and social software created a revolution on Internet, fostering user-genereted content, social networks and advanced web applications. People started to use blogs, wikis, social networks, user generated content, and many other Web 2.0 technologies in e-learning.

New ideas emerged, and people started to use new concepts as social learning and communities of practice (Ettiene Wegner), informal learning (Jay Cross), a new learning theory called connectivism (George Siemens). So, people started to use this kind of ideas in e-learning, creating a different kind of learning, called "e-learning 2.0", a term coined by Stephen Downes.

The course-oriented, teacher-centered approach of the LMS was not enough to cope with this new ideas in e-learning, and a new concept was used: the Personal Learning Environment (PLE). Personal Learning Environments are systems that help learners take control of and manage their own learning, they are distributed, social and learner-centric. They are composed of a suite of tools that the learner uses to learn whatever they want. So, the learner chooses their own personal learning environment, taking whatever tools that help them to achieve their own goals. Different people have different ideas to build their own PLE.

I have built mine using a suite of tools commonly used as a framework to create PLEs. It is the Elgg open source social networking platform, that is where I am writing this blog. It has a blog to publish articles, an e-portfolio (profile, shared files and presentations), an aggregator to collect all kind of information from different news sources automatically and a social network to connect people and let them share all these things. It is complemented with other external applications that let me do many other things such as publish and search all kind of media (YouTube for videos, Flickr for Photos, Slideshare for presentations,...), make a knowledge base of links (del.icio.us), make videoconferences and chat (Skype) and many other things. I still use my old LMS to build formal courses, workshops and communities. I will post the dashboard of my own Personal Learning Enviroment in my next post, and will keep it updated.

If you want to know a lot more about PLEs and what people are thinking about them on Internet just take a look at: http://del.icio.us/davidds/ple 

So, that's how PLEs are shaping e-learning 2.0 and help to make good use of Web 2.0 technologies in e-learning. I hope this post makes things clear. Tell me what you think about all this if you want, as comments. I love feedback.

One day, one man called "Juan Mann", from Australia, felt alone in an Airport and decided to offer "free hugs" to anybody. After being ignored for about 15 minutes, people started to think it was a good idea. Then, Juan decided that his sole mission in life was to reach out and hug a stranger to brighten up their lives.

In September, 2006, he was offering "Free Hugs" in the street when a friend of him, Shimon Moore, recorded him with his video camera. He made a video with the recording and added a song of his own music group (Sick Puppies) to it. They posted it in YouTube. This is the video...

Today, just 10 moths after the release of the video these are the facts:

• The video is in the list of the most viewed videos in the whole history of YouTube (16,615,621 views)
• The video won the "Most Inspirational" video award in the 2006 YouTube Video Awards
• There are 1,780,000 search results in Google for the expression "free hugs". 
• A "Free Hugs Campaign" movement has been created, with local groups all over the World.
• Juan Mann and his "Free Hugs Campaign" has 20,983 friends in MySpace.
• The group called "A Campaign for Free Hugs" has 26,126 members in Facebook.

It was a matter of minutes the time I had to wait to have "Juan Mann" as a personal friend in both, MySpace and Facebook.

Of course, business has also been affected:

• Initial distrust of Juan's motives eventually gave way to a gradual increase of people willing to be hugged, with other huggers (male and female) helping distribute them. After some time, security guards, then police told them they must stop, as Mann had not obtained public liability insurance worth $25 million for his actions. Mann and his companions used a petition to attempt to convince authorities that his campaign should be allowed to continue without the insurance. His petition reached 10,000 signatures, and he submitted it and was allowed to continue giving free hugs
  
• In Spain, a cable company called "Ono" used a very similar video to sell their products in a very popular "campaign". The Spanish "Free Hugs Campaign" organization (Abrazos Gratis, in Spanish) told everybody what they were doing and they had to quit that form of advertisement.
• Sick Puppies music became extremelly popular all over the World because of the video and the song they gave for it: "All the same". They moved to the United States and became famous.

I think it is a very good example of what can be done with Internet with the power of people with good ideas.

By the way, here is a BIG FREE HUG from John Lennon, he sent it worldwide in 1971, the same year the first e-mail was sent. He called it "Imagine", and it's coupled with some magic words.