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if anybody still reads this blog, it would be lovely to see you over in the new place!

thanks Eduspaces

The VITAE partnership have recently published the book "Mentoring for 21^st Century Skills - It’s all about the Learning". The project itself is based around the use of social technologies in VET (vocational education and training), and our aim has been to empower vocational teachers to mentor their students and colleagues to work competently in the digital world.  In the book, we present a collection of papers and articles which represent the varied backgrounds and interests of the authors, all of whom belong to the VITAE team who developed a variety of materials and approaches. While some articles are practical in their focus, describing the application of pedagogic models and the experiences of the participants; others are more theoretical, offering explorations of the approaches taken in developing the VITAE model.

The chapters are as follows:

Chapter 1: Teacher competence development - a European perspective
Chapter 2: The VITAE Approach
Chapter 3: Exploring Web 2.0 and Mentoring as Tools for Lifelong Learning
Chapter 4: Guided course development on the basis of an e-learning patterns template
Chapter 5: Fun and Games in professional development
Chapter 6: The VITAE e-portfolio – a catalyst for enhanced learning
Chapter 7: Community-based mentoring and innovating through Web 2.0
Chapter 8: Web 2.0 – Learning Culture and Organisational Change

Although there are print copies for sale, we’ve use CC licensing so if you want to download a copy of the book follow this link

Just wanted to say a public CONGRATS to the students from Salford who recently took part in the BBC BITESIZE competition – and won!

 *applauds*

Beating back competition from other universities in the North, our winning team have earned themselves a month-long placement with BBC Formal Learning where they’ll be developing their ideas for the BBC Bitesize revision site.

The winning team:

• Amy Bishop – BSc Level 1 Audio Technology
• Daniel James Cutts – BA Level 3 English Literature
• Kalpesh Vasta – BSc Level 3 E-Commerce Systems
• Maheshkumar Barve – MSc Management
• Mishal Saeed – BA Level 1 International Relations and Politics
• Nicholas Earnshaw – BSc Level 2 Digital Broadcast Technology
• Yuriano Adikusumo – MSc Audio Production

However, the standard of applications was so high that we were able to put two teams forward, and it was a close one by all accounts as the other team also delivered an excellent pitch - so not to forget our runners-up:

• Alexandra Hudaly - BA Journalism and Broadcasting
• Craig Greenup – BSc Level 3 Business Information Systems
• Emily Jayne Gaskell – BA English, Drama and Performance
• Dan Lafferty – BSc Level 3 Professional Sound and Video Technology
• Emma Bloor – BSc Professional Sound and Video Technology
• Frantisek Dolezel – BSc Level 2 Multimedia and Internet Technology
• Melissa Ingman – BA Graphic Design
• Sivasubramanian Mohankumar – MSc Audio Acoustics

As you can see there was a real mix of disciplines and cultures across the teams, which is something we're really keen on at Salford. We (myself and Frances Bell) promoted the competition within the University through the use of posters, flyers and mailouts, encouraging interested students to complete an online application form telling us about themselves, their skills and one big idea for BBC Bitesize. We were particularly impressed by the standard of the applications and the selected students were then invited to form a team to compete against teams from other universities in the north, pitching their ideas to the BBC in order to compete for the placement. Frances has uploaded lots of photos from the day on her Flickr stream - now we're looking forward to seeing our student's ideas translated into reality!

It’s fascinating to hear Dawes describe his passion for ‘making stuff’; from his Steinski-inspired musical beginnings involving splicing/cutting tape up with razor blade (hey, this was pre-sampler) to his groundbreaking Cinema Redux project (which was featured as part of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC), Dawes manages to constantly reinvent and breathe new life into old through play, experimentation and a sense that anything is possible.

We were taken on a journey which took in craftily-edited cowboy films (timing, nuance, the element of surprise), an old school bookshop where the books are still wrapped in paper (experiential layers enhancing the experience), magical narratives (mysterious origami swans left on a train), editing and suspense.

However, it’s the way Dawes approaches – and talks about – coding in Flash which really got me thinking in relation to the way we often teach multimedia programming. It’s fairly standard to take a step-by-step, procedural approach to coding, starting with ‘hello world’, then possibly moving on to making a ball bounce, making a set of traffic lights etc. This works fine in many cases – students can build up their skills and understanding through a series of exercises which build in complexity, which makes good pedagogical sense.

However, some students don’t respond as well to such a highly structured approach and I can’t help but wonder whether they might prefer to just play around with code that offers a more immediately rewarding aesthetic. When – as a non-programmer - I started coding in Director (many moons ago – it was then the multimedia platform of choice) I just used to play around, taking a magpie-like approach to stealing bits of code off the internet and changing things. I liked to make squelchy shapes and sounds and things that were fun to play with (i.e. click on). I was never a fantastic programmer by any means, but I made some pretty cool stuff and it was something I enjoyed doing. It basically appealed to my creative/visual side.

Seeing somebody like Brendan Dawes describe his own approach to interaction design/programming - which is highly sensory, involving experimentation and enjoyment – makes me wonder whether some of our students might prefer to just play around and ‘make stuff’. I don’t think it’s necessarily for everybody, but it will be interesting to try to incorporate some more playful elements into multimedia programming courses here in AAV and see which students prefer which approach.

More about Brendan http://www.doodlebuzz.com/about/

http://www.doodlebuzz.com – a typographic news explorer

http://www.brendandawes.com/

The reason for the ‘Ewan Effect’ (should that have a trademark sign after it?) is that he came along to the kick-off meeting for the VITAE project, which finished a couple of hours ago. Three days of project-based discussions (which I’ll report back on after this – too much to write here) and heated debates with – among others - my new friend and expert on all things intercultural Laurent Borgmann (the reason I mention him specifically is that due to certain ideological differences we argued so much – in a good way!). Laurent runs the award-winning Absolutely Intercultural (podcast) site, along with Anne Fox, coordinator of the VITAE project - one of the kindest and most chilled-out women I’ve ever worked with (always good attributes for coordinating international project) - in fact the whole team’s ace!

*Inner voice says STOP! You said you were going to leave this for another post!*

SO, the hiatus meant that I didn’t blog about:

a)       The supa-dupa BAZAAR conference in Utrecht, mid-December. Probably the best (un)conference of the year – i LOVE this project. Open content for all – SHOW THAT YOU SHARE! I was a workshop leader, along with Josie, Wolfgang Greller, Marco Kalz, Steve Wheeler, Veronika Hornung, Graham Attwell, Ray Elferink and George Bekiaridis, and it was a superb event. Thanks so much to the Bazaar team for inviting us – you’ve done a fantastic job guys! Hey, the ‘Sounds of the Bazaar’ show has come out of this, and it’s essential listening for all us EdTech types, thanks to Graham’s well-informed interviews, choice of interviewees, and all-round production skills. For pics see the world's greatest photo sharing site...

b)      FLICKR!!!! Anybody that knows me on a day-to-day basis knows about my passion for all things Flickr. Although most people (in EdTech-land) will only know one account (work-related), I’m actually the ‘proud owner’ of 4, and after 3 years of being a Flickrite I’m finally about to embark on a small Flickr-related research project...

c)       Finishing work for Xmas and immediately coming down with Flu. Yet again. Why is that?

Holy Moly – after saying I’m going to avoid the ‘hey, this was really good and I’m excited (yet again)’ route, I’ve done just that. Some habits are hard to break… like New Year resolutions – easier said than done ;-)

In the very first session, I asked the group to fill in individual questionnaires to find out what they were interested in, what they wanted to do professionally, and their experiences and uses of different technologies (inc. online). Although I had developed the framework, I wanted to try to fill it with information which was relevant (to them) and professionally useful, so this was a great help in deciding which areas to focus on, audio and video being extremely broad in scope...

The session themselves were pretty fast-paced, using various media and a blend of presentations, demonstrations, group discussions, online media (lots of YouTube) and class exercises, such as Googling one another and socio-technical blog anaylsis e.g. ‘in 20 minutes find 3 blogs that you would subscribe to  (it doesn’t matter what it is as long as it’s something that really interests you) then we used NetSupport so that each member of the group could sit at their own PCs and talk the rest of the class through blogs that they had found, considering design, functionality, content, audience, style etc. – in a sense they gave the class themselves, to one another.

The first half of the module was largely blog-based, and the students developed online CVs and multimedia work showcase sites, complete with matching business cards. Through the hands-on elements they explored issues of digital identity and the presentation of the self online, mashups, copyright and licensing – with a big push towards Creative Commons, of course!

In the second half of the module we moved over to wiki-based research projects on a wide range of topics related to emerging technologies, audio and video. The students presented their multimedia wikis to one another today from different labs, using radio mics to take questions etc. which allowed them to experience a different kind of presentation i.e. remote conferencing, which none of them had done before. My colleague Cristina Costa helped out with the web conferencing, we took photos and the students really got into the spirit of things. The atmosphere was fantastic - they were open, supportive to one another, engaged and learnt a great deal from one another's presentations/wikis. (Also thanks to Stephen Downes, whose ‘How to Create an RSS Feed With Notepad,a Web Server, and a Beer' article made an appearance or two and was very much appreciated by the students).

Many of the students have their own studios and already do a lot of production work, but I was really impressed by their dedication and intentions to carry on developing their sites as part of their business/future careers. They are great bunch, the sessions have been so enjoyable and one of the most rewarding aspects (for me) has been learning about what they do outside of university… all the ‘informal learning’ which is massively influential in terms of who they actually are and where their interests really lie.  To be able to see them demonstrate everything that they do - both formally and informally - through developing the ‘digital self’; to demonstrate their understanding of issues explored in class through blog-based critical reflection; and finally to see them really enjoying and engaging in the web conference (despite some initial scepticism) where they were questioning one another about their research wikis and learning from each other, has resulted in this being the most satisfying module I have yet developed/delivered. I can't wait for next year's cohort - this form of guided development of identity alongside digital literacy practices is something which could easily be developed across the curriculum, and so that's something i'll be pursuing as I build up more of an evidence base...

It's possible to attend the awards from a variety of online 'locations'; Worldbridges, Terra Incognita (alternative SL location), Twitter, Skype... i love the fact that the audience are distributed across a variety of platforms. 

(10 minutes later): 

Gah! Spoke too soon... lost the sound, now the cystal-clear audio has turned to shards of glass... think an incoming in-world voice call threw my settings somehow. Will have to log out and back in again - although no guarantees i'll be able to return as the sim is full.

*sigh*

Ah well, will try to visit from another location if all else fails.... these awards are incredibly important within the Edublog community, so well done to all of the winners, and James, Josie et.al. for hosting the ceremony across multiple locations!

I was there along with Graham Attwell, Dai Griffiths, Steven Warburton, Steve Wheeler and David White to speak at a special focus panel session entitled ‘No Life in Second Life?’. Diverse panel, diverse set of SL experiences, but luckily it all seemed to fit together rather well and there were plenty of questions and discussion with the audience – no mean feat with an audience of several hundred! Luckily Graham took on the role of ‘roving mic’… along with a last-minute keynote later on in the afternoon, which he delivered with his usual rousing aplomb... More pics on Flickr…

Professor Sugata Mitra delivered an awe-inspiring (and extremely witty) keynote where he presented his well-known ‘Hole in the Wall’ experiments, which ran across India over a number of years. In each experiment, he would place a high-speed computer in the wall, connect it to the Internet, and watch who, if anyone, might use it. Within minutes, children would fathom out how to point and click and by the end of the day they would be browsing the internet. Mitra replicated his experiment across India, in other settings, each time with the same result. Within hours and without any instruction, children would be browsing the Web. Mitra’s mission to overcome the digital divide in India is a reminder that children CAN self-instruct; with children, the most important word in education is ‘if they WANT’ to, and learning is often a question of triggering the right emotions…

The idea of learner empowerment - children or otherwise - is becoming increasingly prevalent, and for good reason. Graham presented us with some wonderful examples of student work centring on comic books, blogs, wikis, podcasts… with warm and fruity undertones of Illich, Freire etc.

Luckily, Andrew Keen (another keynote speaker) was on hand to warn us all of the perils of shifting the emphasis from the ‘authority’ to 14 yr-old monkeys tapping away at typewriters… and of listening to the ‘utopian, anti-authoritarian, ex-hippies’ who champion Web 2.0 in education.

Err... that'll be us then.

large version on Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=261399491&size=o#

“The merged realities of ‘All Saints Gardens’ on Oxford Road, and its online three-dimensional counterpart in ‘Second Life’ will, for the first time, allow ‘first life’ visitors and ‘second life’ avatars to coexist and share the same park bench in a live interactive public video installation. Entering into this feedback loop through a portal between these two parallel worlds this event exposes the identity paradox in Second Life. ‘Liberate your Avatar’ examines this new crisis and reflects the history of ‘All Saints Gardens’, relocating Emmeline Pankhurst as an avatar within ‘Second Life’ where she remains locked to the railings of ‘All Saints Gardens’.”

Does this sound as good to you as it did to me? It certainly didn’t disappoint...

Quite a crowd had gathered, sat in the park, watching ourselves on a huge screen – together with avatars! Using clever trickery (i.e. chromakeying) Paul had us all mixing together… at least we were when we looked at the screen. It was so engaging that we forgot the avatars weren’t actually there physically. The visual blend of ‘us’ (real) and ‘them’ (virtual) was incredibly powerful – hey, they were even sitting on our knees! – that I think we all felt as if we were all in the same space. The mix of RL and SL on the screen was so compelling that the sensation of being ‘there’ – or the avatars being ‘here’ felt…. Well, almost normal I suppose. A glimpse into the future…?

Emmenline Pankhurst even put in an appearance - chained the railings as she had been in this very park 100 years ago… so we were, in a sense, reliving history through our very own feedback loop. The potential for this kind of project in terms of history education is pretty obvious.

One of the things I loved about the whole event was that it was staged in a public space, and anybody could partake – which they did. Oh yes, we had the lot – including the odd resident drunk, one of whom couldn’t quite get a grip on what was happening so watched himself on the screen pouring his Special Brew onto an avatar… who wasn’t actually there. The wonderful Carol Batton also turned up, and added her own inimitable take on proceedings. Carol is a very well-known Manchester poet and a bit of local legend really. Brilliant woman and I can’t wait to read her poems based on this event – she was quite taken by the whole thing ;-)

So big thanks for Paul for this event/installation. It was very special indeed – and a welcome burst of inspiration for all those who were lucky enough to be there and have an interest in Second Life.

BRING ON THE FUTURE.