Frances Bell :: Blog
November 22, 2008
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 | 3 comment(s) November 21, 2008I have been following the recent discussion about ads on Edublogs with interest. Chris Sessums, someone I really respect, posted about his experiences with Edublogs in a tone that I have never before heard from him, he is angry. Ben Werdmuller posted some intelligent musings about links being context, which I completely agree with. Stephen Downes has picked up the story but slightly missed the point. As far as I can make out, it is not the fact that Edublogs introduced ads, it is the fact these ads are embedded within some students actual blog content. There is no doubt this is difficult space. Online services offer great potential, but nothing in life is free and someone needs to pay the bills, the question is, at what cost? Posted by Dave | 0 comment(s) http://my-world.typepad.com/rworld/2008/11/what-is-needed-for-a-com ELESIG is a community of researchers that started with a small group of universities, which grew out of eLearning Pathfinding. Elesig has identified a number of functions that distributed (online) group/community members need to fulfill. The slides may be forthcoming. Community functions:
Posted by George Roberts | 0 comment(s) http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Socialtech/~3/402179481/being-there.
Photo credit: Invasion by Henryleelucas Dave White's recent post, Not 'Natives' or 'Immigrants' but 'Visitors' & 'Resident' slipped by largely without comment, which is a huge shame. It's a must-read post because it does what a lot of people have been trying to do and not managing that well - move us beyond Prensky's seminal dichotomy of Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants. Prensky's metaphors powerfully explain differences in approach and experience between users who have grown up with technologies (the natives) and older users who find difficulty in accessing new technological cultures and practices (the immigrants) as not just a cultural but a neurobiological one. Prensky's arguments are easy to knock down, particularly if you happen to subscribe to a more fluid account of development. What they haven't been however is easy to replace or move forward from. Dave's work probably succeeds in taking the argument forward precisely because it's user-centric, looking at how users engage with technologies. His research points up the importance of 'being there'; the distinction between users who inhabit a space or place online, and users who don't view themselves as having any kind of non-functional engagement with online environments and tools. Dave calls these visitors and residents (as you may have gathered from his academically typical unwieldy title), and if you haven't gone blind already head over to his post to see the initial sketching out of these roles. These are far more granular distinctions, robust enough to cut across socio-cultural differences, and agile enough to encompass a wide range of behaviors and belonging. my initial thoughts on seeing the post still stand:
Posted by Josie Fraser | 0 comment(s) http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Socialtech/~3/302862833/young-people
I'm delighted to announce that the Young People and Social Networking Services report that I have been working on for Childnet International, with the generous support of Becta, is now available from Childnet's digital literacy and citizenship site, Digizen. It's a pretty comprehensive report, with the whole shebang available for download under a Creative Commons License on site, or from here: and weighing in at 37 pages. The online version breaks the sections up for your viewing pleasure - so you can just dip in to the sections which are of interest or use to you. The report was written from a UK schools and Further Education perspective, although much of the information will be useful to people working outside of these two contexts. It isn't a completely introductory level document, but should be useful and informative for people who have a responsibility care towards children and young people - including governors, principals and senior management teams, Safeguarding boards and local authorities - people who are making decisions concerning educational provision and resourcing. It will also be very handy for anyone working within the sector and wanting to use internet based services with young people. What's in the pack? What are Social Networking Services? looks at where we are in terms of definitions, and splits services up into six main categories: Profile-based services (eg Bebo, Facebook, MySpace); Content-focused services (eg Flickr, YouTube); White-label networks (although I could have written a book about these); Multi-User Virtual Environments (although some of these aren't necessarily social networks - particularly those designed for younger children); Mobile services; and Microblogging/Presence update services (Social Search engines & Lifestream aps also get a mention as adjunct services). The version that's on the site is the short one. you can download the 9 page PDF on site or from here: Download social-networking-overview.pdf Evaluating Social Networking Services comes in two parts: an evaluation chart which has an online version and an easier-for-me-to-read downloadable version: That's designed to be printed off big (well, A3). The services which were kind enough to take part are used as examples to help people make their own evaluations of services. Big thanks to everyone at Bebo, Facebook, Yahoo!, MySpace, Ning, Taking It Global and Google who pitched in and gave permissions. There is also a checklist guide that accompanies the chart, designed to walk you through what to look out for when evaluating services for use with young people. This covers a lot of things, including profile privacy, moderation, customisation, security and access issues, data management tools, and interoperability. Benefits & Opportunities is a section looking at the potential positives for young people and organisations of using social networking services. Barriers & Risks looks some of the issues preventing educators from exploring social networking services and some of the e-safety issues involved. The Ideas and Examples returns to the different kinds of social networking services outlined in the first section and looks at what educators in the UK and around the world are doing. I'd like to continue to develop and expand this section so all suggestions are welcome - and of course you can always enter your fantastic project for this years International Edublog Awards :) So that's it! Except to again thank the fantastic advisory board who worked on the project, keeping an eye on how the research was developing and what the final report looked like.
Posted by Josie Fraser | 0 comment(s) November 20, 2008Most social sites advertise how, through connection to others who share the same interests as yourself, it is possible to grow your network, enhance online experiences, share knowledge and so on. Could this be the wrong approach? While there is no doubt you can meet like minded people, it could be argued that access to new information, thoughts and increased awareness would come from exposure to those who do not share your interests. The question of relevance exists, but still, just a thought. Posted by Dave | 0 comment(s) I have not had enough time to digest this report yet, but it certainly looks like a comprehensive study into just how today’s youth are utilising online technology. Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project
Posted by Dave | 0 comment(s) http://userweb.port.ac.uk/~duke-wie/blog/2008/11/day-1-relive-08- Keynote 1: Edward Castranova Our workshop Learning to Walk before you Know your name: Ian Truelove & Graham Hibbert Get Real - This isn’t Real this is SecondLife: Margaret de Jong Derrington Fearing your Avatar: Kathy Trinder Workshop - Learning together and Learning alone in SecondLife: Blogged with the Flock Browser Tags: ReLIVE08, SecondLife, Listen to this podcast Keywords: Imported Posted by Emma Duke-Williams | 0 comment(s) November 19, 2008
We were meeting to discuss OpenDD, the social mesh and other thoughts that are emerging as important in the social networking space. There are only so many times that users on the web will be willing to sign up to a new service, fill in a profile, friend people on that service and then invite in their existing network. As more services, products and applications become social, this presents a problem. We see OpenDD playing a part in helping with distributed networks, however, in order for it to really happen, it has to be a community endeavour. It was great to talk this over with Andy and get his initial feedback. Looking forward to continuing the discussion, and experimentation. On a slightly different note, today, I had the worst pizza imaginable. Those who know me will understand I eat pizza all the time (you can probably tell from the photo on this post). However, I should have realised that even my love of pizza could not stretch to this: BBQ Meatball
A fantastic feast is one way to describe it… I have another Posted by Dave | 0 comment(s) November 18, 2008 I like to consider myself a liberal-minded person, open to various perspectives and points of view quite different than my own. With this premise in mind, I want to share a situation which I am having great difficulty wrapping my head around.As part of my course on integrating technology into the secondary curriculum, I have students create learning logs as a way of introducing them to weblogs and their many uses. I gave students an opportunity to pick from a number of free, online weblogging applications. Several of my students chose to host their learning logs using Edublogs which seemed at the time to be a reasonable solution. As I was reading through students weblogs I found links embedded in their content that seemed rather odd. For example one student mentioned the word "energy" in her blog entry and I found a pop-up link directing me to Exxon/Mobile. Hmmm? I thought and I read on. This same student also mentioned "college" in her entry wherein a hyperlink associated with the University of Phoenix popped up. I found this rather odd, since the student was currently enrolled here at the University of Florida. I left a comment on her site asking her why she chose these odd links, only to find that when I returned to her content, the links had disappeared. I checked my other student learning logs in Edublogs and found a similar pattern. It then dawned on me that these links were being added to their content without their notice. I quickly dashed a note to Mr. James Farmer, the CEO of Edublogs, asking what was going on here. Were these hyperlinks intentionally being embedded? Was there a disclaimer that users of this free site signed acknowledging that hyperlinks to different advertisements would be embedded in their content? What was going on? I never heard back from Mr. Farmer, so I decided to go see what information I could find about this situation on the Edublogs site. I found a forum discussion where several Edublogs users were concerned about this practice. Here is a sample of what they said: I was updating one of my blogsites this weekend. I noticed that when I changed the theme "ContentLinks" ads started randomly appearing. I cannot have this on my school's blogs. I changed the theme back to "Borderline Chaos" which doesn't appear to have the pop-ups. Is this a feature on all themes now? Is there a way to turn it off? If I become a supporter, would this feature be removed? I also noticed this issue. I'm using the "Blue Moon" theme. I will try changing my theme. If this is a new edublogs policy, there should have been some notice ahead of time. This is unacceptable for a school blog and I am quite offended by having these ads forced uppon us! Edublogs, do you have an answer?? Content Links in the middle of my posts which include unauthorized advertisements is unacceptable. One of the reasons I moved my blog to Edublogs was to avoid ads in my blog, and this is even worse than Adsense found off to the side which people can easily ignore. Please remove these or let us know if they are here to stay, I will move my blog to another more school friendly blog host if thats the case. These comments were made 5 months ago when this new "feature" was turned on. They mostly continue in this vein from a handful of the hundreds of Edublogs users. Mr. Farmer offered this response to the situation within the forum as follows: Apologies for this, it was a bug in our system and should be fixed now, we have been experimenting with (extremely occasional) advertising in order to support Edublogs and you can find more information here: http://edublogs.org/forums/topic.php?id=5303&replies=3 The link then takes you to another forum post which is dated "8 months ago" which suggests that this feature was in the works longer than Edublogs users were aware: Andrew and I have been giving Edublogs and revenue some serious thought of late.
Keywords: advertising, computing, edublogging, edublogs, ethics, learning, libel, slander, teaching Posted by Christopher D. Sessums | 2 comment(s) |
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