Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning

The deadline for submissions for the PLE conference being held in Barcelona on 8 and  9 July this year is fast approaching. Abstracts should be submitted by March 26. Full derails can be found on the PLE conference website.

The PLE Conference is intended to produce a space for researchers and practitioners to exchange ideas, experience and research around the development and implementation of PLEs including the design of environments, sociological and educational issues and their effectiveness and desirability as (informal) learning spaces.

Whilst the conference includes a traditional research paper strand, the conference organisers also encourage proposals for sessions in different formats including workshops, posters, debates, cafe sessions, hands on sessions and demonstrations. The conference will also provide opportunities for unconferencing events, including the provision of spaces for informal meetings and discussions.

As well as the face to face sessions, the conference will be supported by a variety of different online spaces.

Selected papers will be published by the International Virtual and Personal Learning Environments Journal.”

We were recently approached by an organisation looking to develop a project on webquests. did we have any experience of using, web quests they wanted to know. And where could they find documentation of our work? As in so many things, we have been working on webquests but have never properly documented it. In particular we have been looking at how to enhance webquests through the sue of social software and Web 2.0 tools. And the subject of webquests is one of the main research topics for Pontydysgu blogger Maria Perifanou. So working with Maria we have developed a  wiki page on webquests. It includes presentations, examples and references. Some of the material is in English, some in Italian.

It took us some time to unearth a copy of Maria’s popular presentation at last years Thoughfest event. But we finally found it and are happy to feature it on this page.

If anyone would like to add to the wiki please email us and we will give you permissions.

Joe Dale says: “Ask a 21st Century educator what their personal learning network or PLN means to them and you’ll probably get a range of impassioned and emphatic responses. I posed this question via Twitter during my talk at Language World 2009 and was delighted by the quality of the replies I received.”

This clip is a compilation of those answers, pasted into PowerPoint and filmed using Camtasia Studio with a backing track from podsafe artist Andreas Viklund.”

I caused some amusement on Twitter yesterday, tweeting out “Anyone know of closed group microblogging service which will run on windows 2000 / IE6?.” Lets provide some background to this.
I am helping run an on-line course for a large education provider.
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Another quick article in the ‘rethinking e-Portfolio and Personal Learning Environments’ mini series.
One of the problems in Technology Enhanced Education, I am coming to think, is that new media are very different from traditional paper and book based media. And as Friesen and Hug (2009) argue that “the practices and institutions of education need to [...]

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Some more very quick notes on teaching and learning, e-portfolios and Personal Learning Environments.
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The bill includes a three strikes rule to cut off internet access for alleged file sharers – which according the Guardian newspaper “could suspend the broadband connections used by anybody accused of file sharing three times whether or not they [...]

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The second in my ‘Rethinking’ series of blog posts. This one – Rethinking e-portfolios’ is the notes for a forthcoming book chapter which I will post on the Wales wide Web when completed..
Several years ago, e-portfolios were the vogue in e-learning research and development circles. Yet today little is heard of them. Why? This is [...]

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I think this is big news although it has received little press attention. According to Information World Review, Click Use, the license that the UK government has used to allow reuse of government data is to be replaced by a Creative Commons type license. Information World Review quotes Jo Ellis of OPSI as saying: “We [...]

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Through the Mature project I have been invited to submit a proposal for a lecture or workshop for the JTEL Summer School to be held in Ohrid in June. The JTEL summer schools, the publicity claims, usually attract about 80 researchers, providing an exciting forum for cross-disciplinary dialogue, fostering new research collaborations and partnerships, and [...]

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This is what started to be a very short post where I aimed to share D’arcy’s really interesting video about ‘How do you connect to people online’?, which Irmeli Aro shared with me via FB.   But I ended up tying it with today’s session on social media to raise of researcher profile.

How do you connect [...]

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I think the emphasis with careers guidance is often put in the wrong place, on the word career rather than guidance. This means that much of careers guidance is based upon the actual career a student may have rather than guiding the student as they take steps which will eventually leading to their end career. [...]

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