I am about to set out for ALT-C 2007 and I know that it's going to be difficult to choose which sessions to attend.  I plan to blog those I attend.

I'd also like to recommend an excellent way to wake up (after all that Ceilidh dancing) on Wednesday morning. Helen Keegan, Josie Fraser and I are running a workshop on Web 2.0. We plan to raise some important issues but in a very light-hearted way, and I am sure you will enjoy taking part. You are guaranteed to laugh (probably at us) so please come along. 

Web 2.0 Slam - Performing Innovative Practice

Wednesday, 5th September 2007

Time:0900 Location: Law and Social Sciences Building, Room B1

Michelle Selinger, CISCO, described herself as an escaped academic, about to start a new post in Australia.  She spoke of the different ways in which people, young and old, use technology.  She used a South Park-esque / MMORPG clip from youtube to demonstrate how young people are collaborating online with multimedia  to learn – about some things (gaming) but not others (the food chain).  Michelle compared young people’s non-linear unbounded approaches to learning outside school with what happens in school.  Citing Seely Brown and giving examples from her own experience, Michelle identified informal methods of learning within organizations.

E-learning can exhibit stasis, closed approaches (VLEs, lectures, linear courses etc.).  Standardised testing can drive down educational achievement (see USA performance in global league tables). Students exposed to innovative programmes (e.g. TU Eindhoven student employee scheme) at University cannot cope because of their prior experience in school – a chasm exists between school and university.

In the chasm that still exists between north and south, students who cross the chasm experience barriers of language, technology, pedagogy.  Cisco Academy is working on improving HEIs in developing countries, alternative access, peer review, cultural relevance, and other matters.

It was useful to look at what employers wanted (collaboration) and what attributes are exhibited by successful applicants (e.g. comfortable with cultural diversity).

Michelle said this is not about a Knowledge Society but a knowledgeable society. Citing Manuel Castells, she emphasized that people adapt technologies for their own use, rather than the use for which they were designed. We move from the 3 Rs to the 3 Ps persistence, power tools and play, to develop young people’s skills in play and creativity.  We need to rethink education in terms of what students do and what they learn, how they learn collaboratively.  Teachers can share through Open Courseware, learners can become teachers, answering each other questions, defining their own learning and environments.  This can happen through networks of people, with improved opportunities for communication, in a manageable way (for all involved).

Industry and universities need to make global links.  Universities can make joint appointments to achieve local relevance and global action.

Michelle finished with some caveats –

• Identify relevant knowledge
• Podcasts instead of lectures
• Make closer links between school and workplace
• Interoperable e-portfolios
• Schools as preparation for lfeling learning
• Not all learners are groundbreaking pioneers
• Assessment can change slowly

The theme speakers at  ALT-C 2007 are :

Tim Rudd, Futurelab - Designing learning spaces

Frank Rennie, Lews Castle College - Large scale implementation

Dr Hans-Peter Baumeister , Reutlingen University - Learning and internationalism Marion Miller, JISC and UHI Millennium Institute in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland - Learning technology for the social network generation.

As I will be at another conference on Thursday, I am hoping that others will be blogging the theme summary sessions.

Agnes Kukulska-Hulme introduced the symposium by using images to explore the tensions between personal space and social space in mobile learning, showing how people seek out spaces that suit them and what they are doing, amenable contexts for working or learning.  Across the world, different technologies are offered and positioned to suit cultural contexts.  People may work alone or socially, virtually and/or physically co-present.  Agnes described the yellow arrow system where people tell location-related stories that can be shared with others simply through mobile phones (SMS).  Buying coffee in an Internet café may provide the excuse to linger, and menu choices may increase that motivation.  Environments may be traditional or futuristic, reflect or reject surrounding culture.

Tom Boyle addressed the individual perspective – the personal net.  He used the example of an individual wanting to find out about waterfowl in a park near home.  A mobile learning device is a personal configurable device, freed from extraneous social structures.  It offers freedom to the learner but demands disciplines.

John Cook spoke about social space as hyper (as in linked) local (as in location) m-learning – a new kind of city in which you’re never out of touch with other friends and learners, and never out of learning choices ( see July Wired).  In the City Centre, you can photo the ‘real world’, get information about buildings around you using Google streetview mashups, communicate with friends through Facebook.

The presentation part concluded with John Traxler, looking back to requirements gathering approaches from earlier.  How can we get people to imagine the future?  People tend to create based on what they already know – it can be difficult to make a leap to the inconceivable.  We need to plan for change and expect serendipity, since innovations are often used in different ways from first envisaged  e.g Teflon, SMS.

Participants then worked in small groups and came up with some interesting ideas about how city spaces could be created and used.

On Tuesday afternoon, I attended the short paper session on Learning and Internationalism.  Alannah Fitzgerald presented the first paper, Social computing and the microcredit activities, brought to our attention by Professor Yunus, 2006 Nobel prize winner.  Learners are exposed to examples provided by the ‘Overcoming Poverty’ network, tagged and aggregated via the Suprglu Web 2.0 service (expecting to use additional technology in future).  Alannah drew out the strengths – meets community needs, hypermedia facilitates blended learning and info discovery, inexpensive; and weaknesses -  requires self-motivation, minimal guidance can lead to weak forms of constructivism, hypermedia can clutter information processing. 

Karen Robinson then presented our paper How can learning technology make a world of difference? Karen set the context for her study, increasingly global and culturally diverse learning environments, increasingly employing information and communication technologies.  Karen presented some interim findings from her research that revealed the diversity of learners’ responses to technology-enabled learning.  It must have been very nerve-wracking for Karen to present in a large venue, but I was really pleased by the number of questions, indicating the interest that her presentation aroused, and her responses to them.

George Roberts and Graham Attwell presented their short paper (that had been rejected as a symposium) as a speed symposium, through youtube videos they and their co-authors  had made.  They used images and concepts to characterize communities, identifying key issues – heterogenous similarity and bounded openness.  George asked where the international boundaries are drawn in Emerge.  The next example examined the existence of Community of Practice in World of Warcraft, deriving indicators from Wenger’s work.. He concluded that CoP did exist in WoW.

Lastly Tore Hoel explored existence of community in a Norwegian elgg implementation where differences were exhibited in terms of blogging experience, level of commitment to the community.

I am a bit late in blogging the Web 2.0 Slam workshop session that Helen Keegan, Josie Fraser and I facilitated at 9.30 on Wednesday at ALT-C 2007.  My excuse is that I was busy helping to update the workshop WIKI on Wednesday and busy at the Towards a Social Science of Web 2.0 ESRC conference at York on Thursday.

Josie, Helen and I had planned a workshop where participants could engage with Web 2.0, celebrating its potential and thinking about the issues raised by user-generated content, sharing of personal information, and many other challenging aspects.  The leap from the abstract to the workshop was hairy, and technical problems in the location threatened to constrain what we could achieve.  In the event, it was a great success, thanks to the enthusiasm and creativity of the participants.  The slams were enjoyable and thought-provoking, helping to raise discussion  about some of the contradictions presented. Thanks to all the other bloggers of this event - Graham Attwell, Steve Wheeler,  Josie Fraser,  Kathy Trinder,  Helen Keegan,  James Clay, Emma Duke-Williams, More from Steve.  I am still smiling to think of the fun we had

The latest Facebook application to home into my view is Friendswheel, that shows connections between your friends.  This seems to be genuinely useful (unlike some FB apps) and I had a bit of fun annotating my wheel as it is today (link to current version of my wheel).

 

 

 I could pick out some clear subnets and some interesting non-connections.  What interested me was some very recent inter-connections that arose from the Web 2.0 Slam workshop on Wednesday.

 

http://www.knowandnetwork.org/francesbell/weblog/77.html

I came across this interesting site last week - Damsels in Success.

Like Knowandnetwork, you can build a  profile and link to friends.  There are also links to jobs and recruitment services.  I am wondering if that is something that might be of interest to Know and Network members.

http://www.knowandnetwork.org/francesbell/weblog/78.html

Danah Boyd has blogged some good advice on online identities.

• "Create a public Internet identity. I strongly recommend blogging, but even a homepage will do. Have a genuine all-accessible identity online that you're cool with grandma and your boss reading. Don't make it uber drab, but do provide context for who you are, what you do, what you're passionate about, etc. Think of it as a digital body and dress it up as if it were going into a job interview. Blogging is especially good because you can keep updating your identity over time in a way that shows that you think. It's much easier to get a sense of someone through their commentary on public affairs or life around them than through a static page.

• Say NO! to Facebook's public search option. Click "privacy" - "search." Under "Who can find my public search listing outside of Facebook?" uncheck both boxes. Be proactive about this. You might not think you care now, but having your Facebook profile at the top of a search for your name might not be what you want when you're looking for a job.
• Expect unexpected audiences. Your profile on Facebook and MySpace might be "private" but when you join the Los Angeles Network or when you accept someone who knows someone, you might find that the audience viewing your profile is not who you expected. Are you prepared for this? Make sure that profile says what you want it to say, even to those you don't expect. If you want to be a porn diva and make it in Hollywood, put up that slutty photo, but if you want to be a lawyer, you might regret that photo a few years from now. Of course, I'm sure there are porn stars who later became lawyers, just like there are actors who became governors.
• Write blog comments as though you're writing your own blog. The more popular a blog, the more likely the comments from that blog are to show up high on Google's lists. If you write inflammatory shit on those blogs just to piss people off, it will come back to haunt you. (It depresses me that a huge chunk of the comments on BoingBoing's new comment system are extremely negative.) Personally, I don't think that you should be anonymous on a blog. I think that you should stand by your name, but write articulately. And blog on your own blog so that the comments are not at the top.
• Treat video and audio just like text. Right now, video and audio aren't searchable, but they will be. Don't think that you can say or do anything you want on a video and it will never come up. That Neo-Nazi video you made and put up on YouTube cuz you thought it was funny will eventually be searchable and associated with your name. Are you really ready for that to appear at the top of a Google ego search?"

I think this such an excellent set of guidelines - positive about having a valued online identity and tips on keeping it in good nick.

She says

"But above all else, seriously, create a public Internet identity, maintain it, link to it, build it, love it, hug it, and call it George." 

On Know and Network, you can  increase your connection to others by completing your profile but restrict who sees what on your profile.  Why not experiment a little?  You'll be appearing in the tag cloud but only for those you want to see you.

http://www.knowandnetwork.org/francesbell/weblog/81.html

Southern California - where else?

How about submitting a paper to this?

The Southern California Linux Expo is proud to announce their Second
Women in Open Source Conference. The conference will be held on February
8th, 2008 at the Westin Hotel near Los Angeles International Airport.
Widespread acceptance and participation by the user community has
established SCALE as a premiere Open Source conference in the Southwest. 2008
marks the sixth year that SCALE has been engaging and inspiring the open source
community. Our event is uniquely community-based and attracts a wide variety of
sponsors, non-profit groups, user groups, and attendees.
Continuing our efforts to encourage women of all ages to be a part of the
free and open source community, we invite you to showcase your work on Free
and Open Source projects. Join us in sharing recent free and open source
accomplishments, success stories, and advancements. Past attendees at this
event have included women in technology, teachers, and parents of young girls.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
● Free and Open Source Development
○ Kernel Internals and Enhancements
○ Unix variants: Tools and Appliances
○ Application development
● User Experience
○ Desktop Operating Systems
○ Tools for Multimedia
○ Free and Open Source Games
● Free Software and Open Source Advocacy
○ Encouraging women to be involved in the community
○ How to expose younger girls to

more 

http://www.knowandnetwork.org/francesbell/weblog/88.html

The poster is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license.

 

My perosnal favourite was Expectation Failed - but then that is the story of my life.