Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning

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Terry Friedman is planning to publish a new version of the popular Coming of Age book.

And along with Leon Cych, he is planning a 24 hour telethon in which the contributors to Coming of Age are “on” for up to 20 minutes, either talking about their contribution or being interviewed about. I thought I would produce a short video (or slidecast) for the occasion. And by short I meant short. I always set out with good intentions but they always end up 25 minutes or more. I am proud of myself. This one is 6 minutes and I think it gets the key ideas across.

If you don’t like cartoon strips or prefer reading to watching a video or just want to find out more, you can download my contribution to the book below.

Coming of Age 2.0

Audio version of a new slidecast entitled “Schools out. Personal Learning Environments and why they might be useful”. The video version will be out later today.

Schools out. Personal Learning environemnts and why they might be important [ 6:05 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1272)

I haven’t spent so much time in Facebook lately. I wrote a post about how it was becoming boring. But in the last few weeks Facebook – or at least my view of Facebook – seems to be changing as more advanced applications continiue to be developed and deployed. Above you can see a screenshot of my Facebook wall this morning. No longer is it dominated by status updates. In fact I am not even sure they are being displayed on the wall. Instead it is recording my friends interactions with different goups and through different applications. The problem is I am not usre this is any better.

I suppose it is useful to know that Josie attended BarcampUKGovewb and Mobile Geeks of London III. I didn’t know about those events -and it gives links to find out more. That Lou and Paul have joined a group called ELESIG is not so helpful. I don’t know what ELESIG is. But as for the Twitter and Jaiku information – that is really useless. Josie says – “I did put up a nice wallpaper. That must count for something?” And Ewen is just about to pull out of Manchester station and will lose his wifi link! These are fragments of conversations about which I have no context to understand. Just for the record – I ahve no interest whatosever in custom cars or in pictures of them.

I guess that the problem lies in the plugins I have installed and in my settings. But the problem is that as Facebook becomes more sophisticated to get much out of it takes considerable time and effort. The original selling point was that it was so easy to use. And of course as our ‘friends’ have increased – so has the noise. My feeling is that to be of much use they are going to have ot allow us to form groups of friends and to display activity within those groups seperately. Perhaps then I could understand what is going on in the block of cyberspace that facebook represents.

Sorry to those of you whose comments got rejected last week. As you might guess we get a lot of spam. We have a pretty good spam filter called Spam Karma. Last week we changed our server (ironically due to spam attacks) and were forwarding from the old dns settings. The software – not surprisingly – quickly blacklisted that single IP which was forwarding. Thus nothing got through.

Thanks to Ray’s help we have sorted this now and all comments that shoudl have been displayed have been recovered. Now I just have to answer them!

It is a long time since I have featured the MOSEP project on this blog. MOSEP is a European Commission funded project, developing and testing materials and programmes for teachers learning about the development and implementation of e-Portfolios. European projects are not always easy. For readers from outside Europe, they typically involve a partnership of five or more organisations from different countries who work toegther over a period of two years to research and develop innovative approaches in education and training. Developing a common understanding and approach is difficult, especially given that fuinding only allows five or so face to face meetings in the period of the project. Co-ordination can be a problem. And of course we have to overcome langauge barriers.

MOSEP is a very good project – not least due to the excellent coordination by Wolf Hilzensauer from Salzburg Research. In the first year of the project we wrote a handbook – Grab your future with an e-Portfolio. The handbook can be downloaded in PDF from the link above and there is now a printed copy which can be obtained from Salzburg Research. We have also developed on-line learning materials on the MOSEP wiki. The materials have been designed to be used flexibly – users are free to remix to suit particualr needs and contexts. And Salzburg Research has worked closely with the Mahara project who are developing an Open Source e-Portfolio product.

At present the project is piloting the MOSEP ‘course’ in different contexts and countries. Yesterday John Pallister ran the programme for tecahers at Wolsingham School in the north of England. On his blog John says: “I felt that the course concept was understood and well received. A lot of work still needs to be done with the wiki.

I have begun to think that if other trainers used the same approach, creating sequences of activities for a specific training purpose, and save them as ‘courses’ – the wiki, as a resource will grow.”

I know for many of the people who read Wales Wide Web introducing e-Portfolios and developing learning materials on a wiki will be nothing new. But for me this project is particularly satisfying – we are moving the use of Web 2 tools for learning outside the Edubloggers circle and into the mainstream of education and training and that can only be for the good.

Great new edublogs search engine created by Stephen through Google. We’ve added it to this site underneath our site search on the top right of this page.

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On Tuesday I made a presentation in London called Learning and Knowldge Maturing at an information day for the EU Seventh Framework for Research. The previous Thursday the organisers had asked me for a copy of the presentation. I use a lot of pictures in my presentations and files are big – too big for email. So I uploaded it to Slideshare as a quick way of getting it to them. Friday, I had a message from AmitRanjan who said: “any chance this could be converted into a slidecast…the audio will add context.”

I groaned at the thought of the work but of course Amin was right: if you use mainly pictures and few words (and no bullet points) the audio is very important.

I have made a number of slidecasts before and the workflow was tricky. Send the slides to iPhoto, import into iMovie, record soundtrack in GarageBand. Import Soundtrack into iMovie, sync sound with slides, export to preferred format, upload to blib.tv, Google or utube. Phew. Takes a day to do it.

This time I thought I’d give Slidecast a try. Slidecast is on-line software developed by Slideshare. The workflow is relatuvely easy. the slides were already on Slideshare. I recorded the audio on Garageband (if you are on a PC you can use audacity) as before. Uploaded it to my blog Slideshare does not host audio. Gave Slidecast the url and then used an online tool to sync up the audio and the slide transitions. The whole process took about 2 hours to produce a 25 minute slidecast. That is pretty OK for me. And slidecasts do get watched – we’ve had some 600 views already – with only about 20 of them coming from this web site.

It is a busy week here at Pontydysgu. Today Graham Attwell is speaking at a European Framework meeting at the British Library in London. And on Thursday and Friday Graham, together with Dirk Stieglitz will be attending the first meeting of the Leonardo da Vinci funded Eurotrainer 2 programme. Pontydysgu is developing a network platform for the project and will be organising a series of on-line events. More on this soon.

The Guardian covers an interesting report: “MySpace 08: People. Content. Culture”.

Future Laboratory, who produced the report identified six types of MySpace user, say the Guardian, classifying 38% as “essentialists”, who primarily use social networking sites to stay in touch with friends.

“Just under a third, 28%, are “transumers” – those who follow new trends rather than make them.

Around 10% are “connectors”, who specialise in identifying and linking to cool content; and 5% are “collaborators”, who create events and projects online by teaming up with other users.

One in 20 MySpace users get their thrills from “scene breaking” – hunting down new bands and talent online and sharing that through the site; and 4% classify themselves as “netrepreneurs”, who use social networking sites to make money.”

I thought this was pretty cool stuff so tried to get hold of the report. No link to the original in the Guardian (they are very bad at that). Surprisingly few references on Google. Finally found a reference to the project on MySpace. Very strange – a sort of mash up between MySpace and a research site – I think they are trying to look trendy. But nowhere can I find the original report. The Guardian covers it in a blog article. But – unless I missed something – I suspect they have just rewritten a press release. No is it research, is it marketing or is it just hype.

Anyway this is what the “Future Laboratory” say about their rsearch on MySpace. Now at least they have put up something about what they are doing. And I suppose I am naive in wanting to see such work in the public domain. But it saddens me that important work on culture is now the preserve of the marketing people – not research.

“1) The research for PROJECT:CREATIVE LAB is due for completion by November 30th 2007
2) Any submissions can be made through the PROJECT:CREATIVE LAB MySpace page in the comments section or by mail
3) PROJECT:CREATIVE LAB is searching for 10 case studies only, and will make a shortlist of possible candidates before deciding on the final 10
4) PROJECT:CREATIVE LAB’s team of researchers will be responsible for choosing the final 10 case studies and hold the right to change or remove case studies from its report at any time
5) PROJECT:CREATIVE LAB holds the right to approach and choose case studies even if they have not submitted themselves or been submitted by others
6) Chosen case studies will be asked to:
a) Answer a series of questions via email;
b) Take part in a short telephone interview with a PROJECT:CREATIVE LAB researcher;
c) Submit photographs, imagery, video files, MP3 files and examples of work to support the case study,
and d) Provide further contact details for possible future research
7) All successful candidates will have to sign a media release form to confirm permission that their name, work and imagery can be used in future media and press coverage for/by MySpace UK and Lexis PR
Candidates will receive £200 for their participation. This will be given to the case study upon the final delivery of the report and dependent on candidates complying with all terms & conditions
9) PROJECT:CREATIVE LAB is part of trend research, insight and brand strategy consultancy The Future Laboratory, who have been tasked to create a bespoke report called ‘The voice of a generation’ on behalf of MySpace UK
10) MySpace will own the rights to the final report delivered by The Future Laboratory
11) MySpace and Lexis PR will use the report for internal and external use within their marketing, strategy and press departments.”

Sorry if you couldn’t get the Wales Wide Web on Monday. It seems someone attacked our servers. Grr – I hate those people. Thanks to Ray and anyone else who sorted it out.