Helen Keegan :: Blog
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Socialtech/~3/Mja1ds0c5mo/personal-p There are three main ways we can characterise most peoples online internet and mobile activity and presence. Let me state up front that these distinctions are purposely blunt, but do act as effective and critical distinctions, especially when talking to people about how and why they can manage their online identities. They're also very indiscreet, leaky categories, although it is of course possible to find examples of people who's online identity is confined to or dominated by a single category. Why are these differences important? Because they provide us with the building blocks to talk about and actively reflect on our online activity. How we represent ourselves, and how we are viewed online, is increasingly a part of daily social and economic life. Critically, for people working within social media or supporting digital literacy, they provide a robust framework within which to talk about key issues: privacy, data ownership/mobility, representation and voice. The three main categories I use then are personal, professional, and organisational. Personal use might include using dating sites, having a social network account to connect to friends and family, uploading your family photos to a photo-sharing site. Personal use is most likely to be the category where attention to social network service permissions - who is able to see what - is particularly important to users.
Professional use could include the use of a professional networking site, or the use of a social network, a blog or other website to showcase and record work, develop connections and contribute to national and international professional networks. It includes a public facing CVs, publicly accessible parts of a personal learning environment, or an e-portfolios, conversations across mailing lists or social network services. Typically, these activities are public facing, so the most pertinent issues are typically about voice, representation, reputation and trust,
Organisational use would involve the employee using tools or platforms on behalf of their employer or in the line of their work duties. For example, an employee may run a blog as part of their role, maintain a social networking profile in order to make information accessible to students and parents, deliver assignments using a Virtual Learning Platform or set up a group account for learners on a video sharing site. Organisational use may be public, promotional and conversational, or operate within walled garden environments, or, indeed, a mixture of the two.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Socialtech/~3/fPMvnV7cPCU/fakester.h 
Many of my readers have a fairly 'meh' approach to old media - they'll read the Metro if they find it on their bus/tube seat, they may enjoy the weekend deforestation editions as an excuse to lounge at the weekends - they're mostly too connected to actually just chew over their toast & stare into the distance - and fill up their recycling boxes. They'll happily hijack the odd Daily Mail readers poll. They'll follow their favorite tech writers & journalists in Twitter. Mainly they get their news from their network - which means in practice a mix of online newspapers & services, across a range of sites where people may be paid to research, reflect & write, but mostly aren't.
Who do I know that reads the Telegraph? Off the top of my head, no one, although there must be a couple of you who have. New Telegraph tech bloggers Paul Carr & Andrew Keen have been link/troll baiting this week with a couple of posts about the undesirability of online anonymity - Carr's takes massive chunk of Schopenhauer out of historical, cultural and technological contexts, And Keen's verges on Brass Eye territory so much (110%, in fact) that all that's missing is the poll made up of foxes heads on sticks. It doesn't take a genius to work out that effectively removing internet anonymity, even if that level of authentication was remotely possible, might cause a few more problems for everyone than it solves for a couple of disgruntled tech journalists.
One of (the many) objections to the Ministry of Anonymous but Authenticated Names approach is that one of the best things about the internet has always been the opportunities it provides for play. Mediation through avatar, text, and all the other internet props can obviously be misused, but it also enables a creative exploration of identity, representation, engagement. When I first started hanging out online in the 90s, in the days before meeting up and eventually marrying people you met online was the norm, I just assumed that everyone I met was probably a mustachioed Texan cop or a retired librarian, pretending to be a hot and overly intelligent seventeen year old boy.
Then blogging took off, and the internet as playground began it's transformation into the internet as factory. The early insistence on transparency has been adopted by nearly everyone who has a professional stake in their online presence, and what has been variously named the link or reputation economy is critically an economy of trust - trusted connections defined within a dominant aesthetic of a particular kind of authenticity.
While I'm not arguing against the numerous benefits of accountability and responsibility, I do also miss the old internet, and I look for trusted connections with people who haven't let the factory rob them of their sense of wonder, and even mischievousness.
It's in this vein I've been on a mini-crusade to support the fakesters in my neighborhood, which at the moment is primarily Twitter. 'Fakester' is a broad term, covering any account pretending to be someone they aren't. They could be pretending to be another living or dead actual person, or a fictional or personally created character, or the incarnation of a place, thing, time, organisation etc. So it includes historical, religious and cultural figures, as well as alternative persona, marketing scams and campaigns, God (well, a bunch of them) and the Mars Phoenix, NASA’s celebratory robotic lander.
Following complaints and a proposed lawsuit Twitter recently began to introduce verified accounts for the Twitterati & the popularly impersonated celeb member, "people who deal with impersonation or identity confusion on a regular basis". However, their Terms of Service only disallow users to impersonate other Twitter users. This doesn't help Kanye West out much, but it does encourage him to sign up to twitter & I bet it gets the Twitter staff a fair few celeb lunches too.
Personally, I'm not that interested in following celebs via Twitter, although I can understand that there's a lot of (potential) money and (actual) publicity at stake. I'll also be clear that I am obviously not in favor of illegal or malicious impersonation, a topic which I've engaged with quite substantially in terms of my work for the UK government on cyberbullying. I'm keener on those more imaginative misuses of twitter, many of which have educational potential and application, but regardless of that, make life more interesting :)
danah boyd wrote a defence of fakesters way back in 2003 - about a hundred years ago in internet terms. Her early work tracked the presence of fakesters on Friendster, drawing attention to the blurring between the authentic-inauthentic-constructed lines fakester accounts throw non-fakester accounts into, the way that fakester accounts challenged social (network service) norms, and the fact that the fakesters were often the most interesting accounts to connect to.
So who's faking it on Twitter?
One of the most beloved of the Twitter fakesters has to be @darthvader, self appointed Evil Orphan Annie and geek magnet. Recent #imperialedicts have included "Open more Starbucks" and "Continually raise the price of stamps without warning".
@MarsPheonix, NASAs account for a mission to land a robotic craft at the North Pole of Mars was so popular that Wired ran an epitaph contest for the lander. Many fakester accounts basically just publish the text or quotes of the persona they assume. The ultimate fit-for-purpose example of this has got to be @JennyHolzer, the American conceptual artist who is most celebrated for her public displays of aphorism, perfectly suited to her anonomus Twitter account, where HABITUAL CONTEMPT DOESN'T REFLECT A FINER SENSIBILITY and MONOMANIA IS A PREREQUISITE OF SUCCESS. Jenny Holzer isn't on Twitter, although if she were I'd like to think she was @fakejennyholzer - shouting SUFFERING IS CAUSED BY ATTACHMENT AND NAIL GUNS and THE CAPS LOCK KEY IS REALLY STUCK ISN'T IT at us. One of my favorite fakesters has got to be @palmer_eldritch, a title character from the Philip K. Dick novel. as well as Phil Dick related comment & content, Palmer has recently transformed into a veritable mecanical turk of an auto-bot, selectively re-tweeting related content from around the twitterverse, including "@tanuki0: I've read too much Philip K Dick, I'm starting to doubt the nature of reality." and "@FatherRoderick: Getting ready for Mass. Still very sleepy. Shouldn't have watched that Blade Runner documentary late last night." Sir Bonar Neville-Kingdom, Data Sharing Czar, aka @sirbonar and his Whitehall musings on the surveillance society pretty much leads the field in fakester political satire. "It seems some
hobbyist suffering from Aspergers has done a stunt for the news media
in which he appears to clone a British ID Card" and "If only we could
achieve total fusion of all possible data, I think we could at last
feel secure. I wonder how much data that is?" are amongst his recent musings. You can also catch a video of him addressing Open Tech 09 on Data Sharing here.
I'm a big theory fan, so I follow a bunch of would be swafty-philosopher fakesters, including @zizekspeaks, who purports to be Hegelian philosopher and Lacanian psychoanalisist Slavoj Zizek. "Interested in Deleuze & Twitter? If so, you're probably misreading Deleuze." Is he real or not? Perfectly, for a Lacan follower, it doesn't really matter.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Socialtech/~3/h_7c0z8lZMc/interestin 
Really delighted have spoken at Russell Davies's Interesting this year. It's easily one of my favorite conferences - entertaining, educational, creative, unpredictable and inspiring. My topic was psychological violence in late 1970s/early 1980s girls comics, & here are the notes. Enjoy! During the 1950s - 1970s children's comics were an important part of the UK cultural landscape, with individual titles typically selling 200,000 - 300,000 copies per
week. Following a dip in sales figures in the mid 1970s, a group of predominantly male writers, including UK comic legend Pat Mills, were brought in by IPC to rework content away from catatonic tales of foreign princesses and posh schools, and into the twilight zone, via some evident concerns with environmentalism and interests in paganism. Girls comics up to 1970s can be pretty much placed on the spectrum of the history of conduct literature, a genre that appeared in print in the UK as early as 1475. Conduct literature promotes and aims to reproduce acceptable moral, domestic and social behaviour, and particularly concerns itself with the souls and reputations of young women and wives. Piety and virtue are typically valued above all other attributes. Modern day equivelants are still popular, and every so often someone will knock out another best seller that instructs insecure women how best to conform in order to get some loser to date them. 
We can find lots of examples of prescriptive behaviour tracts thinly disguised as quizzes and not so
thinly disguised as articles on what being a proper girl involves in the three titles I'm focusing on: Tammy, Misty, and Jinty. Make friends with your MIRROR! Is the title of one piece from the 1981 Jinty annual - less of an article and more of a manifesto for self regulation: "Let the mirror be your best friend! It will never lie to you! Don't forget, if you haven't got a double or triple mirror, you can get good views of your back by holding a small mirror and using this to look into the reflection in your long mirror." Obviously written by someone irretrievably harmed by reading Discipline and Punish while on acid, the annual also contains specific advice on the correct way to sit in a chair, as determined by body shape. The illustration above shows three women who's incorrect chair occupation means that they will never get married. Advice to Di, who enjoys sitting backwards astride a chair despite being otherwise normal, includes "She should really remember that, although she's got a nice shape, leaning forward in close fitting jeans is stretching the point! She'd feel just as dashing, and look less hippy, sitting around the other way, an maybe resting the heel of one shoe on the chair seat while circling her knee with one arm. Try it!" Mills et al's involvement in late 1970s and early 80s produced some of
the most interesting childrens' comic book writing, ever. During
this period, the repetitive moral lessons that constituted girls comic
book content - the inevitable punishment and comeuppance of vanity,
selfishness, and slattern like behaviours, the Cinderella-miraculous
ending and reward of sacrifice, hard work, and humility - didn't
disappear. The boarding schools, ballet classes and horse fetishism were still there too, although new scenarios involving science fiction and horror settings emerged. Under Mills's stewardship, IPC girls titles
wholy perverted the existing tropes by taking them to their hysterical,
nightmarish conclusion. The horror, punishment, and suffering of the innocent was totally
amplified by the new story lines, for example in the notorious Tammy story Slaves of Orphan Farm, where every week the writers attempted to outdo Gods testing of Job. In The Slave of Form 3b, a domineering student discovers she can hypnotize a weaker classmate into doing her evil bidding. The unsuspecting dupe eventually wins the respect of her school and even a medal for bravery, but not before falling off the roof while hypnotized and becoming crippled. A Life for A Life, a short strip from Jinty's 1978 annual told the story of two London hospital employees - nurse Celia and Doctor Josef, marrying. They had previously met years before when SS Officer Josef had been taking Celia out to shoot her, and Celia sacrificed a chance to escape in order to save Josef (presumably not his real name) after he bungled the job and accidentally shot himself. Alan Moore, commenting on that period: "...Pat Mills and John Wagner had previously spent eleven years
working on the British girls comics. They had grown cynical and
possibly actually evil during this time. I think it
was John who used to write a script called "The Blind Ballerina" and as
the title suggested it was about a ballerina who was blind. John would
just try to put her in to increasingly worse situations. At the end of
each episode you'd have her evil Uncle saying, "Yes, come with me.
You're going out on to the stage of the Albert Hall where you're going
to give your premier performance" and it's the fast lane of the M1.
And she's sort of pirouetting and there's trucks
bearing down on her."  The huge success of Tammy, which ran from 1971 to 1984, was partially based on some actual research by IPC magazine into what girls enjoyed reading about. Apparently they liked to be made to cry. Vulnerable amnesiacs who avoided multiple, mysterious attempts on their lives to discover their parents had been killed in some kind of transport 'accident' sent sales figures of up to a quarter of a million a week, along with stories which included:
Alison all Alone - Alison has been kept prisoner by her foster parents for reasons unknown. Roberta's Rebels - Roberta Russell decides she will do something
about her hierarchical school system where the "Serfs" slave to the
sporty "Supremos." The Ice Girl- A girl must keep her ice skating secret from her father, who was crippled in an ice-skating accident. Sadie in the Sticks - an exploited girl whose only refuge is her talent for making objects with matchsticks Lights-Out for Lucinda - Lucinda becomes trapped in a district
where people still think it is World War II, due to her father drugging
them so he may use them as slave labour. Cora Can't Lose- Cora Street goes on an obsessive binge to win
as many sports trophies as she can, in order to win her parents'
respect. Danger looms when Cora suffers a head injury which will kill
her unless she has an operation, but she is so obsessed with winning
trophies that she ignores the warning signs. Becky Never Saw the Ball - aspiring tennis star Becky Bates is making a comeback after going blind. Particularly hilariously, and never really explained, was the way Becky had her entire head bandaged. Jinty, which ran from 1974 to 1981 before being incorporated by Tammy, introduced science fiction, adventure, and horror to the girls comic market.
Battle of the Wills -
a girl discovers a scientist with a duplicating machine that enables
her to continue with her gymnastics while her double is forced to do
ballet.
The Human Zoo - twin girls and their classmates are kidnapped by telepathic aliens to
whom humans are mere animals. The treatment the humans receive
parallels the treatment meted out to animals on Earth (zoos, circuses,
slaughterhouses, bloodsports, vivisection and beasts of burden).
Worlds Apart, written by Pat Mills and drawn by Guy Peeters, was my personal favourite and still a classic of science fiction:
six schoolgirls find themselves in a series of strange worlds governed
by their main characteristics: greed, love of sport, vanity,
delinquency, intellectualism, and fear. Jac Rayner loved it too: "Worlds Apart, where six girls find themselves trapped
in a series of worlds which are distorted versions of their own
desires, and can only escape through the death of the girl whose mind
they're in… Any story which starts 'The day began like any other. A
road tanker carrying highly dangerous chemical waste left a government
research establishment' has got to be good, but as we journeyed through
the fatty, sporty, vain, criminal, brainy and scared lands, we not only
got the girls' staples of peril and adversity (with some handy moral
lessons), we got a superb adventure story"
Misty only ran for two years before being cannibalised by Tammy. Focusing on horror and mystery, Misty is probably the title that had the most impact on it's readers, and retains a huge fan base. Mistycomic.co.uk, a fan site archive and community hub that's now been officially recognised by current Misty copyright holders Egmont. Classic strips included: The Four Faces of Eve - Eve Marshall is trying to unravel her true identity, but she seems to be the bits and pieces of four dead women. Winner Loses All - The lead character has a horse called Satan. She has sold her soul to the devil in order to help her father, who subsequently died anyway. extra link love: Pat Mills interviewed by Jenni Scott at Oxfords CAPTION convention Creating Tammy: A True Story Some of the story descriptions in this post were taken from Wikipedia - you can see the originals by clicking through the linked title names. 
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Socialtech/~3/GhPgGtnDgHY/stream.htm OK - so this is my first attempt at selectively re-purposing content from my twitter stream. There are a bunch of export tools, but what I'm interested in is panning the stream to provide content that it's easy to miss within twitter, and difficult to access outside. Haven't decided where this will go yet, so I'd appreciate feedback (feel free to be as critical as you like - is this just pointless?). I'm also not entirely happy with the army of avatars - I've included the originals of people I've retweeted during the time frame I've taken the content from (yesterday) to stop it from being quite so Josie-scary. I'm thinking this might work better in smaller chunks - just a hand full of links or a thread. I've left out a lot from yesterday - a brief discussion with about the politics of fruit and vegetable taxonomies, conversations about virtual learning environments and informal learning (although have left some links in), and a chat with and about the dark side of interoperability and my future as a writer of sports stars autobiography titles. The conversations and broader context stuff that makes twitter a fun place to hang out. Maybe all this needs to be is a row of pick of the day links?
'Human flesh search engine'
I thought it was about librarians - RT : 'Human flesh search engine'
. if we called librarians 'human flesh search engines' most would never get past their own internet filtering software
RT : Read, comment, discuss. The Future of Universities in a Knowledge Economy
RT : New blog post and video on User Generated content, user generated contexts and learning
Checking out Hyperwords for Firefox
Andrew Keen on the simple joys of homophily RT : how Sarah Palin made me love the Internet
& fr those of you who haven't installed hyperwords, homophily :
I thought we already had a term for homophily -- Balkanization?
Balkanisation useful - emphasises geo, social & political. Homophily more personal/granular? both good terms
good tools for tweeting into and out of Powerpoint here:
RT : Streams of Content, Limited Attention - & Twitterwalls (Thoughts on 's paper)
RT : "Even if you are a complete psychopath you can earn an A+ in your citizenship exams." Proff Richard Pring
RT : Hhhmm counted tweets for and . Lennon was wrong. the Beatles aren't bigger than cheeses
1st herald of the tech apocalypse: IBM's supercomputer can think like a cat
The Creator of Wikipedia Turns to Education Videos.
All the tweets - including souvenir trend spam! RT : twitter event report -
Narcissism: the new shark in social networking pool. With obligatory Greenfield quote RT :
"The unicorns don’t look realistic enough." Clients From Hell
Net Gen Skeptic: Conference Board Study Warns Against Generational Stereotyping:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Socialtech/~3/V-wv0rPI9cM/jailbrake- I spent last weekend holed up in London at the Young Foundation,
working with a stupidly talented group of young people, designers,
developers, programmers, policy makers, service designers, youth service
experts and anyone else you can imagine needing to pull together
together solutions to social issues that involved tech. Jailbrake, the
competition/camp we'd all signed up to, focused on supporting young
people out of the cycle of re-offending.
Youth offending isn't an area I've had a great deal to do with,
although I have previously (& briefly) worked as a member of AoC's Offender Learning Group. Primarily I was
there to contribute in terms of risk management issues, since I've done a
lot of work on social technologies and young people, and also to check
out how Social Innovation Camp works - the extremely rapid
development process Alice Casey referred to recently as 'hacking
stuff together for social justice'.
Between January and March, a call went out for
approaches to using mobile and web-based techs to support young people
involved in the criminal justice system, with the broad aim of putting
the brakes on re-offending. Keeping a young person in custody for a year
currently costs around £140,000 in hard cash, with massive additional
social costs. 6
ideas made it through this initial round and the people who came up
with them were invited along for the weekend. I helped out Common Ground - the team
who went on to win the judges vote (congratulations!), but spent most of
my time working on & in the end pitching for Steven
Whitehead's Phone A Friend idea, later rechristened Spill.
Spill was a small team, but we also benefited from floating
support of other people contributing to the the weekend, and
particularly from the input and encouragement of the young people - some
of whom were working as volunteers on youth advice projects - who took
the time to find out about our ideas and tell us exactly what they
thought. As well as Stephen Whitehead, our team included Noemi
Mas, Ian Bach, Lauren Currie
& special thanks have to go to our
developers, Ben Nickolls from Ribbit and Glyn
Roberts who built our working service prototype in time for us to demo
on Sunday afternoon.
Stephen's Spill
project idea was to use mobile technology to enable young people who are
in trouble for the first time to be supported through and out of the
criminal justice system by young adults who have 'been there and done
that'. What we came up with over the course of the weekend was not just
the technology to support that in a cost effective way, but the whole
project cycle development and implementation plan needed to support and
run the service effectively. It would be great if Spill were taken up by
the youth offending sector, but essentially what we designed is
massively transferable: the frame work and infrastructure for a safe,
co-produced, mobile phone peer mentoring service. In terms of our planning, we had two groups in mind. Callers -
13-18 year olds, who may or may not have access to some professional
support services, and need to talk about their situation - this might
include questions about the legal processes and what next, their rights
& obligation, or just someone to acknowledge anxieties and point
them in the right direction. Our adviser
group was made up of young adults coming out of the criminal justice
system, perhaps still on probation, not currently in employment,
education or training, and wanting to develop skills, experience,
confidence and to support young people in ways that they themselves
might have benefited from but not had access too.
Our service design solution matched these two groups of
young people and used a mobile service to help meet the needs of the
first group by developing the skills of the second. We picked mobile
because this would enable callers to select when and where they accessed
services, using an already familiar, personal technology. Mobile
allowed us to negotiate 'on call' periods with our adviser group, and to
decentralize service provision - once they were comfortable with the
process of handling calls, there would be no need for them to come to a
specific office to answer a particular phone at set times. Their own
phone would become the hot line. This shift from centralised call
centers to a distributed mobile phone network has massive implications
and opportunities for the provision of any phone support service,
particularly within the voluntary sector, including potential cost
savings benefits and greater flexibility for (& potentially
availability of) those taking calls. The
process of the call looked like this:
The
adviser logs onto the system through the web interface, leaving their
phone number and submitting the times which they are available to be on
call. This could be done centrally by an administrator but adviser
access obviously provides greater flexibility, and the process is very
simple/form based.
The caller would
text a command (ie CALL ME) to a number. This reduces the caller cost
significantly, but for those unable to call out, we set up a prototype
web-based interface. Using the web version the caller would simply enter
their phone number and hit the submit button.
We also talked about introducing a limited, additional caller
command menu, for example in order to request someone previously spoken
too, or to specify the preferred gender of the adviser. These are all
feasible in terms of the technology, but dependent on adviser
availability. So users would be able to make requests, but where these
could not be met, would connect them with the best/next available
adviser, giving them the opportunity to talk to someone or call back
later.
The adviser receives a call to
their handset. The call is indicated as a service call, but they don't
receive any information regarding the caller, i.e. the callers number,
at any point. Answering the call prompts the call back service: The
callers phone rings, again, with a service indicator, not with the
number of the adviser.
The call-only
costs of the service come in at 6p per minute, so you can extrapolate
the cost of the service level you'd expect support from that. For our
pilot it came in at around £4.7K per year.
Working
with current and ex-offenders raised a wide range of risk management
issues. Actually, these aren't particularly unique this group, but are
the same issues faced by any group wanting to work with young people or
provide advice - a need to ensure quality of service; to support caller
anonymity; to support people giving advice (what they are expected to
provide, support available to them, anonymity); and to ensure there is
no inappropriate contact or activity between the caller and adviser. We
managed these risks in several ways. Since our solution would be likely
to be perceived as a high risk approach, the idea was for a localized
pilot which would enable us to prove concept and build confidence. The
volunteer adviser recruitment process, and the initial adviser training
process would both be designed to support the identification and
navigation of risks. The co-production approach we envisaged as leading
the service design and implementation can be used in the process of
defining and addressing risk, although it's effectiveness isn't of
course limited to that. Ensuring the service can technically support
anonymity is obviously critical to the security of callers and advisers.
The project-coordinator, or person with responsibility for training and
supporting the advisers, would also need to take responsibility for
sampling and reviewing calls, and feeding back on these as part of the
adviser development process. Caller feedback would be enabled by mobile
and web in case of specific concerns about the service, calls would be
archived and retrievable for a specified period of time, and service
guidelines would be made available in a readable format to all users. Again,
our template design for service implementation is transferable, and
could be adapted to a wide variety of service needs and variables. So
that was my weekend :) If you're interested in finding out more
about the service please get in touch, and find out more about all the
projects here. The big message that I took away from the
weekend was this: All of the projects came in at relatively small cost,
especially in comparison to the direct and indirect costs of keeping a
young person in custody for a year. You could maybe even fund all six
projects for that amount. If you only managed to keep one person out of
custody, you'd break even, and you'd be significantly improving someones
prospects, and the lives of their family. Projects like the ones coming
out of Social Innovation Camp are offering real, innovative
opportunities for effective social change - if we want to see a
difference these are the kind of risks we need to be taking.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Socialtech/~3/zel1wPR9sKM/new-job.ht I've been working as a freelance consultant for 3 and a half years now. Working for myself has been a blast - I've had the bumpy patches and the insecurity of not necessarily knowing where my next job might come from - but I've also had the pleasure of meeting, working with and learning from many, many smart, passionate, funny and thoughtful people.
I'm extremely proud of what I've achieved with the support and confidence of my all employers, and grateful for the opportunities they've given me.
The Cyberbullying Guidance I produced for Childnet International on behalf of the Department for Children Schools and Families (now the Department for Education) gave me the opportunity to work and negotiate with all the major Social Network Service and Telecoms providers, children's charities and government agencies, and the countries school employee unions and associations, as well as talk to children across the country about their experiences of technology.
JISC Emerge was a truly creative process, and an exploration of digital identities and communities that I feel extremely lucky to have been a part of, from the initial bid development to my role as Lead Community Architect. The project team, participants and contributors included many of the leading lights working in educational technology in the Further and Higher Education sector in the UK today.
Most recently, my role as critical friend in the JISC Institutional Innovation Support, Synthesis and Benefits Realisation project has meant I've got to work alongside cutting edge Green ICT and Learning Spaces projects.
I've done a huge amount of trouble shooting, policy guidance, social network strategy work and been fortunate enough to be invited to chair, run workshops, speak and deliver keynotes all over and outside of the UK. Standouts for me have to be being awarded Educational Technologist of the Year by my professional body, the Association for Learning Technology, my keynotes in Plymouth, Tipperary, Porto and my trip to Aveiro. 140Conf was a ball, as was Interesting. I even got my first gig as an after dinner speaker this year & am looking forward to my midlife crisis.
So sincere thanks to everyone who has employed me over the last four years - it has been a pleasure to work for all of you. This post would be funnier if I had an hilarious tale of clients from hell but I really don't have anything bad to say about anyone.
Huge thanks have to go to everyone in my network - all the inspirational and encouraging people I've worked alongside formally and informally. There are too many of you to thank here, so I've put together the slide show of some of the amazing people (well, the ones that would let me photograph them) and highlights from the last three years.
I'm delighted to say I've accepted a post with Leicester City Council as their ICT Strategy Lead, providing leadership within the Transforming Learning
Environment (TLE) division for ICT planning, policy and delivery, supporting
the city's ICT Strategy for Children. It's an amazing opportunity to work with schools and colleges at local level and to make a concrete, positive difference to the
education of children and young people in Leicester. People who know me will know about my commitment to the local - for me, meaningful transformation is fundamentally a whole community enterprise - and to a national digital literacy strategy, which I've been banging on about for so long it actually seems on the verge of entering mainstream educational discussion.
I'm really looking forward to the new challenges ahead, and to working within the Local Authority sector at this time of major change. In terms of my consultancy practice, I'll be looking to shift my previous work with schools, colleges and Local Authorities to a partnership rather than consultancy footing, and more on some ideas for that shortly. I'll still be accepting a (very) limited amount of consultancy and I'm always interested in hearing about speaking opportunities.
Here's to the next chapter! Onwards :)
http://www.pontydysgu.org/2010/09/how-to-live-stream-events/ I talked in previous posts about our work with the European Conference on Educational Research to ‘amplify’ the conference, recently held in Vienna. This involved setting up various social media channels including a Twitter stream and a iTunesU page, producing a series of video interviews with conveners of the different networks which organise ECER and b9radcasting three live radio shows from the conference.
We also undertook to stream four keynote speeches, run in two parallel sessions as well as the opening. Easy, I thought. Like many of you I have live streamed from different events, pointing a camera or even a MacBook at the speaker and linking in to uStream or Justin.tv or one of the other social video platforms. It turned out not to be so simple.
We were working with a community not generally used to social media. And quite simply, the idea of pointing them to a platform advertising poker, acne treatments didn’t seem a good idea. Plus we had an issue with the reliability and quality of the free services. Livestream looked a better idea especially though their premium accounts. This allows you to have your own channel and remove the adverts.but a single channel on Livestream costs 350 dollars a month, with twelve months billing in advance. And we needed two channels. Back to the drawing board. We discovered that Ustream has set up another service called Watershed and indeed for a time were tempted by this. Watershed offers per view payments, but the prices are relatively high. And the terms and conditions of service for the monthly or annual contracts was impenetrable. No problem, we thought, we will ring them and clarify the conditions. Then we discovered there was no telephone number on their site. All you cold do was ask questions on a bulletin board, largely filled with complaints about the service and the total lack of technical support.
OK – so that didn’t seem such a good idea. Last resort – ask a friend. I twittered out for anyone with ideas of a service we could use. And somewhat to my surprise, no-one could come up with a solution, other than the services we had already looked at.
Back to searching on the Internet. Of course there are many companies offering professional streaming services but they all seem geared towards corporate or media organisations, not towards education or for relatively low numbers of live viewers.
I finally stumbled on a web site from a Canadian company called NetroMedia. Their prices were not clear but they said that for one off events you could fill in a query form. So I did, not with any great hope. To my surprise about half an hour later, I had an email reply asking for more details about the event I wished to stream. And to my even greater surprise, some forty minutes after returning this a person rang me. Yes, a real live person!!!
She calculated how much bandwidth we would need and offered us a service for 100 Canadian dollars, plus 20 dollars for unlimited technical support. (Note that if you buy into this or a similar service, it is important to buy sufficient bandwidth in advance, extra bandwidth per view is relatively expensive). Woo, away we go. Even better some twenty minutes after paying them, Darren, the technical support man rung us. This was very helpful, because although the set up is relatively simple, we required two video streams going out simultaneously, and that required a little fiddling.
NetroMedia do not offer a portal for streams. Instead they provide a streaming service and you embed a Flash video player in your own web site. This suited us just fine. The up stream was encoded through the free Adobe Flash Media Encoder, which worked well on both a PC and a Mac. The only thing I would like is to have more direction control over what we were streaming – e.g to be able to switch between a feed from the data projector and the video but I am sure we can work out how to do that. I am very happy with the quality of the streaming (you can view the recordings by clicking on read more on each of the channels on the ECER video streaming web page) although we were helped in this regard by the kind loan from Helsinki University of two very good video cameras.
Of course, if you are working in a University or large organisation, you may be able to run your own streaming server.But such an investment is beyond Pontydysgu, or I guess many small organisations. Yet video streaming is going to be an important part of Amplifying future events. And we need a reliable and reasonable quality of service. I would certainly go to Netromedia again. But I also wonder if there is some way we could collectively organise resources for streaming in the educational technology community to both share know-how and expertise and infrastructure.
http://www.pontydysgu.org/2010/09/free-workshop-on-educational-tr The autumn conference season is in full swing. One of my favourites is Online Educa Berlin - this year being held on 2 and 3 December. If nothing else Online Educa is a great social event – a chance to catch up with friends from round the world. Online Educa also organises a series of pre conference workshops on 1 December. and this year we are organising a workshop for the European funded G8WAY project on educational transitions. Whilst there is a fee for many of the workshops, the G8WAY event is sponsored by the project and is free to participants.
The workshop will focus on the issue of how educational transitions can be made easier for young people through Internet-based services (e.g. career advice, information and guidance).
According to the workshop website the importance of helping young people in their quest to find employment is widely recognised and there is growing interest in the potential of technology-assisted learning when it comes to helping young people make the transition from education to employment. However, this area of learning remains in its infancy and throws up a series of issues for policymakers, researchers and practitioners alike.
The European project G8WAY: Enhanced Gateway to Educational Transition is investigating how social software and Web 2.0 applications can be used to help young people in make transitions.
The following key issues will be explored in the workshop:
- What are the challenges of educational transitions – how can young people start a career in recession-hit European societies?
- What is the potential of social software and Web 2.0 tools in the context of transitions?
- What role can careers guidance and support play in this process?
- What is the future of technology-based learning regarding career education?
The active involvement of participants, exchange of expertise and creation and further development of ideas will be the key elements of this pre-conference workshop.
whilst the workshop is free places are limited and pre registration is necessary. If you are going to be in Berlin, don’t miss our workshop.
http://www.pontydysgu.org/2010/08/technology-will-not-save-educat Another article reporting from the European Conference on Educational Research held in Helsinki last week.
Most of my time at the conference was spent working on our Amplified project, using multi media and social software to turn the conference outwards and improve the experience for face to face delegates. More reports on this work later in the week.
But I did get to go to two sessions. The first was a symposium entitled ‘Technology WILL NOT save education – views on teaching learning and researching in the Digital Age’ .
Here is the abstract:
Deeply immersed in the Society of Knowledge great efforts, including the use of educational technology have been carried out in order to improve education. Changes in the cultural contexts where education takes place have posed new questions both in educational practice and research. Very often changes in educational practices are subject to factors within the context where they are pursued and it is probable that the results vary depending on different cultural factors. Within the field of Educational Technology it becomes essential to manage cultural change in order to make technology happen.
Educational institutions have to provide answers to all agents involved in the educational field: a change of methodology is needed and, in many instances, this will depend upon cultural factors. Thus, cultural contexts have to be taken into consideration in their policies and activities. Cultural change does not come with technology but with the transformation of educational practices and the revision of traditional methodologies. The role of educators is key the same as the position of educational institutions which have to provide the means to facilitate cultural change.
The emergent social networks and Web 2.0 applications have given way to a great variety of educational possibilities which may help consider students, not under traditional categories of race, class and gender but instead taking into account local and global contexts and diversity. Web 2.0 applications are powerful socialization and communication tools that support the process of construction of knowledge and can have an incredible educational potential for instruction.
This symposium seeks to provide a forum for the presentation and discussion of research in different fields which provides an outlook from different points of view of teaching, learning and researching in the Digital Age. Its departing point is the assumption that technology will NOT save Education unless cultural change takes place.
The different papers in this simposium try to account from different viewpoints for aspects which aim at improving education. Thus, the first paper discusses the need of networking culture in different disciplines regarding approaches and practices of researchers which have made use of web technologies. The importante of networking is also revised as a catalyst of social and educational change. The second paper deals with the construction of a new model of curriculum more in relation to new learning needs and approaches and the eminent role that educators play on it, especially considering their adaptation to change and their practices within teaching and learning processes. The third paper deals with the use of Personal learning Environments as systems that help learners be in control of their own learning process by setting goals sharing ideas and managing learning content in both individual and group basis. The last of the papers faces the educational potentialities of Web 2.0 applications as powerful socialization and communication tools that can support processes of knowledge construction and can have an incredible educational potential for Foreign Language instruction.
I chaired the symposium, with my good friends Linda Casteneda, Ricardo Torres and Maria Perifanou presenting and Mar Camacho acting as discussant.
We spent a lot of time thinking about the format, not wishing to do the usual 3 25 minutes presnetations with a short time for questions and discussion. Instead we reverted the usual order, with Mar opening by presenting a brief overview of the ideas behind the symposium and then inviting delegates to provide a brief opinion about our approach.
We then had three ten minute presentations from Linda, Ricardo and Maria. Linda presented research she had undertaken at the University of Murcia in Spain. Basically, despite efforts to introduce technology into the curriculum for student teachers at the university, she concluded little had changed in terms of teaching and learning practice. Her conclusion was that technology on its own will not change anything. To make effective use of new technologies requires fundamental curriculum reform and the development and adoption of new pedagogies for teaching and learning. Ricardo and Maria both reflected on instances of effective practice, drawn from their own work. Ricardo looked at the development of Personal Learning Environments in a programme he teaches in Barcelona. And Maria reported on the development and use of webquests for teaching Italien in Thessaloniki. It had been our intention to group the different issues raised by delegates and speakers and use them to break into smaller discussion groups. However in the end the range of issues and the different levels of experience of participants led us to move towards a single group discussion.
The discussion was successful in terms of the active involvement of nearly all the participants. However it tended to be unfocused. A series of different issues were raised. One prevalent concern was that the rigidity of assessment regimes prevented innovation in pedagogic approaches. Another was the resistance of school and institutional management to change. A third was the attitudes of students, who while expecting the use of technology in teaching and learning, were still reluctant to take control of their own learning processes in the way required for effective use of new pedagogic approaches.
Other issues included digital literacies and teachers dispositions towards using technology for teaching. Whilst they were happy to use it for preparing lessons, for presentations and for administrations, they were less comfortable to use it for teaching and learning in practice.
One interesting issue was who should “set the agenda” for change. One participant was concerned that the way technology was being introduced in education was taking away ‘agency’ from teachers in the classroom.
It was a enjoyable session. But whilst most seemed open to and supportive of our hypothesis, there was little consensus on a way forward.
http://www.pontydysgu.org/2010/08/third-and-final-radio-programme Very busy last day on the ECER 2010 Conference in Helsinki on Friday and travelling on Saturday made it a bit difficulty to upload the podcast version of the last of our radio programmes. Further details will follow.
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