It’s going to be interesting to see how this ALT-C blog unfolds – how many of us are feeding into it from our own blogs? Many open laptops can be spotted from a quick glance around the auditorium – how many people are going to blog the keynote?

This is not a criticism by any means – I love blogging, and live conference blogging fosters a sense of community and really brings things to life.

Steve Wheeler was telling me yesterday about his experience of blogging about somebody else blogging and we had a bit of a giggle about just how far this could go – the idea of somebody blogging about somebody blogging about somebody blogging… ad infinitum. A ‘blog hole’, I suppose… for a pretty comical skit on blog frenzy check out the ‘I’m Blogging’ video on YouTube...

A mash-up of old and new by Simon Hardaker and Helen Keegan 

Thanks to everybody who came along and participated in the 'Web 2.0 Slam' workshop this morning - it was a great session and we were delighted to see that the late night/early start hadn't hampered anybody's creativity! Very lively, loads of fun - we're currently uploading the slides, videos, photos and everything can be accessed from the workshop wiki at http://www.web2slam.wetpaint.com - feel free to contribute! For a fuller description of the session visit Josie's blog...

After spending an hour yesterday afternoon ‘unconferencing’ with Ray Elferink, discussing the why/how/where of gaming in education, I went along to David White’s presentation where he described World of Warcraft gamers and guilds, and talked about ‘abstracting out’ what’s working and bringing it into education.

In terms of online community formation and socialisation, he found that the guild members were using multiple channels, spread over different web-based tools. This very much mirrors my own experiences of online community membership, being an active blogger, Flickrite, Second Lifer, Facebooker (you get the drift). I often feel the effect of reinforcement when friendships from one space cross over to another space, adding another communication tool to our shared repertoire – for instance, Flickr friends who I then meet up with in Second Life and friend on Facebook. Each platform/relationship has its own subtle differences and nuances, but the more platforms we communicate across, the closer I often feel us to be. I suppose people communicate differently in different spaces, so we get a richer impression of one another, seeing different facets of one another’s personalities due to the way we communicate in different online social spaces…

But back to David’s WOW work, where he discussed interweaving socialising and learning, the structured and the free, and gave us an excellent analogy looking at the institution as a rhizome facilitator, i.e. when the environment’s right it will swell and become more successful, as we take the scaffolding away the rhizomal effects come into play and students start to form their own groups…

The blend of the structured and the free was then explored further by Michael Cameron from the University of Durham (paper 1233), where a history tutor is ‘brokering’ between (informal) student discussion areas on Facebook and (formal) discussion areas on Blackboard. Very interesting stuff, so will write more on this tomorrow when things have quietened down a bit!

Well I’m now back home and exhausted after an intense few days at the ALT-C conference, which has been seen us ‘sailing the high seas’ of social software (as opposed to ‘drowning in a sea of…’ – theme of an earlier post ;-)

As anticipated, there was something of a blog-hole effect; bloggers bloggers everywhere, blogging about blogging about blogging, as evidenced by posts from Steve Wheeler, James Clay, Josie Fraser and Haydn Blackey – although extra credit must go to David Bryson who’s put together a fantastic slideshow of images of bloggers blogging during the conference!

On Wednesday afternoon Frances Bell, Josie Fraser, Simon Hardaker and myself spent a couple of hours doing the web-based follow-up (blogging, wiki-ing, Flickring and video editing) from our Web 2.0 Slam workshop which quite a few people have blogged – Josie, Graham Attwell, Kathy Trinder, Steve Wheeler, Emma Duke-Williams…

After a couple of hours we were joined by some of our fellow bloggers, and had a fine time chatting, blogging, Flickring, Facebooking etc. and I loved the fact that we were sat next to one another physically while communicating and linking to one another over a variety of online social platforms… the ever Flickr-fficent (oops – new word!) James Clay touched on this in his post, finding that blogging has enhanced verbal discussion rather than replacing it and I’m inclined to agree…

Facebook featured quite heavily in conversation at this years ALT-C conference with many new ‘friends’ being made – in fact I spied somebody a few rows down the auditorium popping into FB during a speaker changeover and ‘poking’ me… (I was also in FB at the time) at which point I replied via a quick message saying ‘I’m 6 rows behind you, idiot’. Now THAT was ridiculous...

It was pretty funny going into Facebook during the conference and seeing the rows of status updates referring to ALT-C. Here's a visual representation of a Learning Technology CoP remaining connected both online and off:

I’m really looking forward to exploring METAPLACE, the new virtual world platform from Ralph Koster’s Areae (the company he set up when he left Sony in March 2006), as it finally feels as though MMOs will reach the masses.

The reasons for this are that Metaplace is un-gated, browser-based, open source, and has extremely low barriers to entry as users can build 3D online worlds for PCs or even mobiles without having any experience of computer programming… WOW!!!

 …that was an exclamation - not a reference to World of Warcraft ;-)

It’s basically a free tool to allow anyone to create a virtual world which can be integrated into their website (like inserting a widget) – so it will also be interesting to see who’s ‘places’ rank highest over time... although what I’m really interested in is to see how it takes off.

Because the platform has been developed so that pretty much anybody can get their own 3D world off the ground in next to no time, I’m guessing it’s very much dependent on pre-built designs and templates – hopefully they’ll have heaps of high-quality content from the onset, so that users start building straight away while there’s still loads of buzz around the launch.

I’ve signed up for the Beta phase, although I’m not too hopeful as my gaming credentials are pretty weak and the initial focus is ultimately on gaming… BUT with regards the barriers to entry that many of us have grappled with when it comes to Second Life (learning curve, bandwidth requirements vs. inclusivity) it’s really promising that a more accessible, browser-based 3D virtual world looks as though it’s just around the corner…

September’s a strange time of year. After a few months of (relatively) quiet campus life, all of a sudden thousands of students appear – queuing, gossiping, often looking confused – but it’s always a pleasure seeing old faces return and hearing about what they’ve been up to over the summer, and it’s exciting meeting all the new students, starting new modules and generally helping them to get to grips with their new ‘student life’.

But without a doubt, the highlight of this induction season has been my colleague Frances Bell’s use of the Bob Dylan Facebook app, which let’s you insert your own text on to the floor-bound boards in the video for Subterranean Homesick Blues – now if this doesn’t appeal to MSc students I don’t know what will… it’s brilliant!!!

Interesting article over on  TechCrunch:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/21/google-to-out-open-facebook-

"Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google’s social graph data. They’ll start with Orkut and iGoogle (Google’s personalized home page), and expand from there to include Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services over time.

On November 5 we’ll likely see third party iGoogle gadgets that leverage Orkut’s social graph information - the most basic implementation of what Google is planning. From there we may see a lot more - such as the ability to pull Orkut data outside of Google and into third party applications via the APIs. And Google is also considering allowing third parties to join the party at the other end of the platform - meaning other social networks (think Bebo, Friendster, Twitter, Digg and thousands of others) to give access to their user data to developers through those same APIs.

And that is a potentially killer strategy. Facebook has a platform to allow third parties to build applications on Facebook itself. But what Google may be planning is significantly more open - allowing third parties to both push and pull data, into and out of Google and non-Google applications.

In the long run, Google seems to be planning to add a social layer on top of the entire suite of Google services, with Orkut as their initial main source of social graph information and, as I said above, possibly adding third party networks to the back end as well. Social networks would have little choice but to participate to get additional distribution and attention."

Although there's been speculation over whether Google would actually buy FB, such open architecture would really be taking it to the next level... I think I'm scared.

;-)