Nathan Garrett :: Blog

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.

http://www.pontydysgu.org/2008/09/emerging-sounds-of-the-bazaar-l

Its September. Its conference season. Its ALT C. Can’t afford the fees? Paper rejected? Tied up in pre-term preparations? Never mind - Sounds of the Bazaar is going out on the road to bring you the highlights of what is happening in ed tech, teaching and learning. And we start off with our first LIVE broadcast next Tuesday 9 Septemeber LIVE from the AltC conference in Leeds, UK.

Not quite sure of the format yet but it will be fun. Jisc Emerge is having a social and rumours say they are laying on free beer and wine. We will be broadcasting live from the social, talking to leading researchers and practitioners from the educational technology world. Plus some of our regular slots and a few surprises.

How can you join in? Well if you just want to sit back and relax (perhaps with a glass of wine yourself) that is absoltuetly fine. 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 streamin. We will be going live at 17.25 UK Summer time, 18.25 Central European time.

But if you’d like to join in the fun you can come on our conference special chat room and share oyur opinions with others,. You can also ask questions to the people being interviewed. We’ve asked Jisc for iPhones to keep us in touch with your questions but in case this doesn’t happen then Cristina Costa who will be moderating the chat LIVE at Leeds will pass the questions on. I will post up the chat room address in the next 24 hours.

OK - look forward to hearing from you next Tuesday.

http://www.pontydysgu.org/2008/09/audio-goodness-rhizomatic-learn

OK - the summer break from the airwaves is over. Next week we will broadcast the first of the autumn series of Sound of the Bazaar LIVE - details tomorrow but put Tuesday 1820, CEST, 1720 BST in your diaries now. And here as a warm up is a new podcast produced by the wonderful Andreas Auwarter from the Bildung in Dialog site (English monoglots - don’t be put off by the the German language introduction - the discussion is in English. As Andeas says in this programme notes: “Steve Wheeler in an interview with Patrick Vetter and Christian Czarnowske. Finally Graham Attwell joins the dialog and this interview brings up to an interesting and short discussion about Web 2.0, Adult Education, Web 3.0 and their meanings of those terms.

Soundpainted with podsafe music from http://www.Jamendo.com.”

This was recorded on a beautiful summers day on the terrace of St Virgil’s conference centre in Salzburg at the EdMedia2008 Conference. To be honest, its chats like this outside the official programme which make conferences worth their while.

Once more my thanks to Andreas - and do join us on the terrace and try to imagine the sun.

Sadly I can’t seem to get the stream to play in my blog. But just head on over to Bildung in Dialog to hear this recording.

http://userweb.port.ac.uk/~duke-wie/blog/2008/09/off-to-china/

I am in the process of getting ready for my trip to the China Agricultural University in Beijing, where I will be teaching some students who are on computing courses there - and hoping to come to the UK next year.

I am not quite sure what to expect!

http://userweb.port.ac.uk/~duke-wie/blog/2008/09/google-chrome/

I’ve just installed the Google Chrome browser to have a play. A few thoughts so far: 

• Though it is based on Mozilla, it doesn’t offer the option to create a Master Password; so, the option to save passwords isn’t as useful. (That’s the main reason I don’t use it in IE, I can’t have the master one). 


• The interface is very clean & well, Googley. 


• It knows I’m in the UK - so the options for default search engine (should I wish not to have Google) are UK versions of Yahoo etc.  And, it seems just about any can be added. 


• The tabs are at the top … and the file menu - with the option to print etc., over on the right (a bit like IE 7)


• It only offered to import bookmarks etc., from IE. Not from Firefox. 

I’ll try it for a while; I think that it might work quite well on the laptop, with its smaller screen, as it is very clean. More later, when I’ve tried it. 

Wikipedia’s got an overview of the technology behind it ( the incognito mode looks interesting), and Google have a comic book format explanation of its technology. 

(No idea how to change the default font, but they’ve picked a rather nice one) 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/02/opinion/02conley.html?hp

The rat race for the well heeled. Keeping up with the Joneses is now a deathtrap.

http://www.pontydysgu.org/2008/09/google-chrome-cartoon-goodness/

I’m not sure about the ‘do no evil’ empre. And not sure about Google’s motivation for launching another browser on the market. But I love their cartoon book explaining the Chrome browser. Also good to see that they have licensed the cartoon book under Creative Commons. Here is one page explaining standards and Open Source.

http://www.pontydysgu.org/2008/09/one-step-forward-one-stop-back-

In June I wrote enthusiastically about Twemes. Twemes is the service which uses hash tags to aggregate posts from Twitter, Delicious and Flickr. We  had a great time using it for communciation in confernces and workshops. One of its greatest virtues is simplicity and sponteneity. We intended to use it as a main channel for communciation at Alt-C. And when we went to set up our hash tag it was gone. Here is the last posting dated Augst 13 on the Twemes blog.

Down But Not Out

“As many of your have already noticed, Twemes.com has not been able find all tagged tweets over the last few days.  This is due to Twitter’s decisions to shutdown and/or limit access to a number of their APIs.  Whether by design or by accident, Twemes.com now only has limited access to Twitter.  We have made appeals to Twitter staff to help us continue to keep Twemes.com in operation but those requests have had no impact on our access to the Twitter API.”

So services can disappear. Very good services. And here is not sign that Twitter are doing anything to substitute for it. We are looking at a couple of things - but have not found anything as simple and good. Any suggestiosn welcome.

The message I draw from this is that there is a big difference between Open APIs and Open Source. It is one thing being able to access and use an API. But you never know when a provider will choose to change it or as in this case to limit access. At least wih Open Source the control lies in the community and hopefully tehre would be an open discussion before making changes which would break third party services. I hope the open source microblogging platform Identi.ca continues to develop.

http://userweb.port.ac.uk/~duke-wie/blog/2008/09/interesting-rout

I’ve used Googlemaps for some time now to plan routes. It’s now recently started including public transport (seems to be limited to buses) and walking. Given that I’d expect the walking route to take the most direct route, while avoiding motorways, I decided to see what it recommended for walking to Exeter from Southsea. I’m not actually planning on doing this, but several years ago, AutoRoute Express suggested that the most direct route (driving) from Southsea to Exeter was via the Isle of Wight. I wondered, therefore, if it would produce a similar route.

It does require two ferry crossings - but to Guernsey!