The Eduspaces migration saga has certainly fired up a bit of proactivity around here.! I have managed to install Wordpress and have started a new blog. Only time will tell if it becomes my main blog. Even if it does I will be pulling the posts into here one way or another. I just felt the need for a bit of independance and control.

My new blog is at http://www.terrywassall.co.uk/terry. I'm slightly embarrased about the co.uk domain as it is not in the least commercial. But it was cheaper than org or anything else more laid back. Part of my embarrassment is over being so tight! Any way, I enjoy good 'company' although not restricted to the uk.

I have imported all my posts from here but it was a real pain. Just about every one of them needed some tidying up, the import created a new blank catagory for every post - over 150 since August 2005, and I have had to copy and past all comments manually. I will also need to re-attache a whole load of pictures. And then there is all the tagging and categorising. Frankly I am a bit bored with WP already! And there is no sense of community around a personal WP blog compared with the experience of blogging here.

Incidently, the famous 5 minute WP install was true, once I found out how to create the db and user.

Well! What a turn up! As of today we learn that TIG will not be taking over Eduspaces and it will not become EducatorCentral. We will remain Eduspaces and we are now going to be looked after 'for the foreseeable future' by the Eduspaces Team. I hope we will be able to know who this is (Misja!?) but I would like to say a big thank you. This is the best possible outcome and one, I must admit, I did not foresee. Just goes to show that the 'foreseeable future' is no great guide to the future as it happens. I'd love to know the whole story. Is it just an insurmountable legal issue or did TIG decide them and us might just not be a marriage made in heaven? Did the old team get a little nostalgic for such a formative part of their history and culture? As I have posted elsewhere (probably in an Eduspaces forum so lost for ever?) I think it is hard to underestimate how important Eduspaces (Elgg.net as was) was for the growth of interest in Elgg as an OS application and, to some extent, a key factor in the subsequent careers of the founders and some, at least, early users. And especially important I think is that it will remain as an excellent example of Elgg in use.

I wonder if the Presentation tool will be reinstated? Will Eduspaces be upgraded to the new Elgg 1.0? Or perhaps it will continue as an exemplary example of Elgg Classic?

The experience of the closure, TIG migration, and back to Eduspaces has not been entirely painless or without gains either. I now know how to install and run Wordpress and this in turn has given me the (probably misplaced) confidence to install and run Elgg for a family social network. Every problem is an opportunity! Of course. And every opportunity is a problem.

http://www.terrywassall.co.uk/terry/2008/03/18/todays-excellent-edusp

Today we learnt that Eduspaces will continue to be Eduspaces (not Educator Central) and is not being taken over by TIG. No offense to TIG I hope but I must say I consider this to be very good news. I joined the TIG site and had a good look around. Good stuff and interesting but with what appeared to be quite a different constituency and ethos to that of Eduspaces.

I have decided to post to my new Wordpress blog for the moment and import into Eduspaces. There are a number of reasons for this. I have set up my own domain and installed WP myself and, much to my amazements, it all works! The much talked of WP 5 minutes install was not too wide of the mark. I want to continue to learn about WP and am now using it as as a content management system for my web site too. As it is my own installation I have a great deal of freedom over which template to use and have an opportunity to learn a bit about php, css and so on. I want to be able to install and run Elgg too in due course and I feel something like WP with its extensive documentation and relative simplicity is a good stepping stone along the way. The final consideration is the ease of exporting posts, comments, categories etc. compared with Elgg at the moment. Using WP to ‘host’ my posts and then feed them across to Eduspaces seems like the most flexible and secure option and I have noticed several  other Eduspaces’ bloggers doing this now - Josie and Graham for instance.

http://www.terrywassall.co.uk/terry/2008/03/19/blogs-and-discussion-b

I have recently been helping some colleagues in our Life Long Learning Centre to set up a discussion board for tutors to share ideas on good teaching practice. We are using an OS product called phpBB installed and administered by our central web team. I thought the system pretty good and have now got an installation of my own to explore.

Use of discussion boards seems to be on the increase again and I wonder if this is a sort of backlash against the relative complexity and time commitment of using communications tools based on blogging functionality. As a great fan of social networking and systems like Elgg and Ning, I have spent the last few years encouraging colleagues to use these in preference to the old fashioned, heavily structured, largely text based threaded message forums. But, for some things, I have found discussion boards in our VLE and Student Portal, the Forums here in Eduspaces (once upon a time) and those available in Ning groups more effective and significantly easier to use. I am gradually forming a better idea of what systems like Elgg are good for and what is better suited to focused threaded discussion. I hope to turn this into some sort of guidelines/best practice document, probably collaboratively written in a Google doc in due course. I would be grateful for any thoughts on this and any observations on your own experience, dear Reader, of the two different systems.

http://www.terrywassall.co.uk/terry/2008/03/19/blending-research-and-

This January I gave a presentation on ‘blending research and learning ecologies’ at the Leeds University 5th Learning and Teaching Conference . I only had 30 minutes and as usual tried to do way too much. The few questions I left time for were very good and, again as usual, I thought I performed better in the freestyle of Q&As than I did in the formal presentation. Trying to make sense of stuff in discussion with others seems to be more comfortable and natural somehow. Anyway, gratifyingly, the feedback collected on the session by the conference organisers turned out to be pretty good and I have been asked to write an 800 word version for the University’s Learning and Teaching Journal. Only 800 words! Clearly they don’t know me very well. I’ll do my best however. Just in case anyone is interested I’ll post it here too.

http://www.terrywassall.co.uk/terry/2008/03/22/my-ple/

Chris Sessums posted two days ago on what makes his personal learning environment. Academics tend to think more in terms of research and scholarship rather than learning which is both a pity and a mistake. I have for sometime been trying to persuade academic colleagues that they, just like our students, are first and foremost learners. OK, hopefully we are pretty competent learners, even perhaps expert learners, and our students are generally still learning to be learners, sort of ‘apprentice’ learners. But I think the learning to learn business doesn’t end for any of us these days, not even academics.

Chris invited us to tell what our personal learning environments consist of. Here goes a first shot at it.

Text books, research monographs and papers, libraries, journals, newspapers, TV and radio news, RSS feeds from selected news and information sources (e.g. BBC, Earthwire, CommonDreams, Union of Concerned Scientists, RealClimate, etc…).  Google Scholar.

Novels, films, TV and radio documentaries. Biographies, autobiographies, political, economic and history books. Friends and family. Listening to my wife.

Conferences. Conference bars. Staff development events in my Uni. Email correspondence with colleagues.

LeedsBlogs (Elgg based social community). Lurking in a number of Ning communities. Eduspaces. A fairly extensive, mainly educational, blog roll.

I’m sure I can add to this with a bit more thought and imagination. Like Chris says, it’s all networks of one sort or another. Even to engage with a journal article is to enter into some sort of dialogue with the author, their status, reputation and the context in which they wrote the article. For me it is always engagement and dialogue with others, face-to-face, on-line, synchronously, asynchronously, or with the words of past generations. Marx, Weber and Durkheim, Foucault, Chomsky and Alan Bennett are all nodes in the networks that make up my personal learning environment.

Colin Edwards in the Spanish Motogp qualifying loses the front and, miraculously, picks it up again. Don't try this at home.