Emma Duke-Williams :: Blog

http://userweb.port.ac.uk/~duke-wie/blog/2008/07/09/do-bebo-and-f

In this week’s Multiple choice (in the Guardian Education Supplement), a parent, teacher & student were asked the above question.

Both the teacher

As a teacher, I think this kind of site has got to be part of the future.

and the parent

but I do think it’s possibly more likely you’ll get more from teenagers from Facebook than from having them hand in a conventional essay.

were more positive than the student:

I don’t think we should access MySpace or Facebook during lesson time, but some social networking sites could be involved in learning as long as they were used at break time or after school.

I tend to side more with the student, in that it’s the informal use of Facebook etc., that will be of use. The points that both the parent & teacher make, however, would cover the use of tools used to develop specific learning networks - using the skills students have developed using social networks.

I’d be wary of using the same tool for both; I like to keep personal life & work separate. However, others are less pedantic - roll on true “open Social” I say!

(N.B In the online version, the student & parent views were labelled in the opposite way to the paper based version. I’m assuming the paper is right, as the comments fit better that way)

http://userweb.port.ac.uk/~duke-wie/blog/2008/05/22/teaching-and-

Jennifer has made some very valid points following the TL^t Summit 2008

In particular:

• It is time to toss out the “blog, wiki, podcast” mantra. This is bigger than tools isolated for singular purpose. If we keep pushing the tools into categories, new users will continue to only use the tools for those purposes. We should be twisting, stretching and breaking these tools, not neatly packaging content with them.



and



• A wiki is no place to start an intentional, sustainable community. I’ve always said this to my internal customers, but it has been based on my use of them. I’ve now heard many many people describe how the wiki did not work for creating a sustainable network. Let’s let it go, move on and get more creative with our wiki use.

I’d definitely agree with the point about wikis, that they aren’t that useful for community building; but that’s not to say they’re not useful. While I agree to a point about the “blogs/wikis/podcasts” point she makes, I do think that they do offer some form of structure to help people get going; yes, we can be creative with them, but some (?many) people need some ideas to help them get going. What’s probably useful is the range of ideas that can be shown to work with a particular tool (just as today most Powerpoint trainers encourage their users not to use bullet points & noisy text effects; but to look at all the other ways it can be used).

Jennifer also made a point about Twitter being in heavy use. I’ve decided to revitalise my account (can’t promise that I’ll use it for anything other than reading other people’s things mind), but I guess I ought to try to get into it. Perhaps it’s because I’ve never really taken to text messaging in a big way, that it doesn’t feel really “me” - nor do I use the status updates on Facebook. One of the reasons I don’t like Twitter is the fact I can’t subdivide contacts into smaller groups to send targetted messages, however, this blog doesn’t let me do that - and with RSS feeds people are getting the information whether they like it or not. It’s not as if the only way folks can read this is to come here.

I recently read a paper about people who read, rather than keep blogs. Wonder if anyone’s done any research into people who have a twitter a/c to follow others, rather than to be followed themselves. Is this stalking?

Via: Stephen Downes

http://userweb.port.ac.uk/~duke-wie/blog/2008/04/23/facebook-chat

I read about Facebook Chat a while ago, and I’ve now just seen that it’s been enabled for me.



I’ve not yet tested it, but I think that it may well be a very useful extra (as I’ve mentioned in the past when it didn’t exist)

http://userweb.port.ac.uk/~duke-wie/blog/2008/05/20/olpc-getting-

I’ve been investigating the OLPC quite a bit. I’ve also got back into reading about it. Due to the changes at the top, there’s been a fair bit of news coverage, including an article in the Guardian, which Stephen Downes pointed to. I’ve made comments on Stephen’s post, so won’t repeat those here.

Over the weekend, I read about Sugar Labs; due to the changes at OLPC, quite a few staff who have left have set up Sugar Labs, where they are intending to start to really look at the software, to see if it can be made available to other platforms (e.g. the Asus EEE), and so on. Via the Sugar lab & general playing, I’ve found out quite a bit more about Sugar; and some of the advantages. One thing that I’d sort of seen, but hadn’t quite appreciated is the journal. That, in essence, provides a record of everything that a user’s done. From what I can tell, rather than storing a file of, say, a Write document, it saves the current set up of the program. That means that if you go to Browse, you can see (as far as I can tell) you get back the history of where you have been. So, while the inability (as far as I can tell) to create lasting bookmarks could be a problem, this ensures that you can start to find things again. As the default home page is Google based, perhaps I had better investigate the Google Bookmark service (though it’s not possible, as far as I can tell, to install the toolbar)

I’ve had a few problems with the power cutting out without warning. It seems that others have this problem, however, I’m not quite sure how to fix it; as there seem to be several possible cures, mostly for earlier builds. I’ve set it up to keep a log file of the battery state anyway. At least the journal saves things regularly, so not too much is lost.

http://userweb.port.ac.uk/~duke-wie/blog/2008/05/16/weblin/

I’ve just discovered weblin from Aleks’ links. I’ll be interested to see what use this can be put to. I seem to vaguely remember a feature in IE 6 that let you discuss pages with other users, but I never worked out how to use it. I think that one was asynchronous, where this is Synchronous.

I’ve yet to work out how to register, though. There doesn’t seem to be a link to register. I can login, get it to re-send my activation link, get it to remind my of my password … if I could only create a password in the first place!

http://userweb.port.ac.uk/~duke-wie/blog/2008/05/15/facebook-meet

How to put students off Facebook in one easy step?

I’ve tried to add it, but I’m told that our administrator has blocked access to it. I’m not quite sure whether I think that’s a good idea, or a bad one.

In someways it’s good, as there is the worry that Facebook may use the data inappropriately, however,

When it was still open only to college students, Facebook profiles often featured users’ course schedules with links to their classmates. Sync offers similar functionality, but within the private space of the application itself. In other words, it doesn’t show up on profiles at all.

“It’s a private application, so there’s sensitive information there that you wouldn’t want published to all your friends,” Gage said. Still, she said Blackboard hopes that students will use the application to connect with classmates and form study groups in what Michael L. Chasen, Blackboard’s president and CEO, referred to as “a new kind of social learning community” in the company’s announcement.

“Sync offers similar functionality, but within the private space of the application itself. In other words, it doesn’t show up on profiles at all” suggests to me that the data should be relatively safe; though, of course we have the issue that it’s on a US server, and we’re bound by stricter, EU regulations. So presumably that’s why they’ve blocked it.

I also wonder how much we want to encourage students to by pass Victory, it may be better to ensure that they go to it initially, and then (inevitably!) to Facebook.

The other issue is, of course, that students will start to move from Facebook to something else…

Overall, I think that blocking it was the right decision.

http://userweb.port.ac.uk/~duke-wie/blog/2008/05/14/google-and-fa

Looks like Facebook is going to stop being quite the blackhole it currently is …

http://userweb.port.ac.uk/~duke-wie/blog/2008/04/15/cms-conversio

Scott Leslie has started a useful wiki, recognising that many are tied to a CMS (i.e. VLE), but may, in the future want to get the stuff out … We’ve now got WebCT Vista (locally known as Victory), and it seems that it’s not the easiest to get material out of. Maybe it will get easier in the future.

http://userweb.port.ac.uk/~duke-wie/blog/2008/04/15/vle-what-do-y

Cristina Costa has a guest posting on Graham Atwell’s blog: VLE? What do you exactly mean by a VLE? She says:

The learning environment doesn’t come with the software, that much I can assure you. The learning environment is the world the moderator creates together with the learners, while engaging (with) them in a relevant way.

How true! And, I don’t think that we really help matters by concentrating the training for both staff and students on “which button to click when”. We tend to forget “why”

http://userweb.port.ac.uk/~duke-wie/blog/2008/04/14/metadata/

Metadata. A clear animation explaining metadata (though I’m still confused about some of the icons on the spacecraft!). They’ve also got a link to a metadata creation site (UK use only; Athens authentication required).

I’m still unsure about metadata. It requires effort to create, and it can be open to a lot of personal interpretation. Much as I have a difficulty with tags - forgetting what I’ve used; and it’s just me that’s using it. The more I think about metadata, and the difficulty of getting agreement on what terms should be used, what level is what … I think that it requires a lot of extra input on the individual to create the data. Time which might be better spent on something else…