A busy news day. This press release from Jisc dropped into my in-box.

” New research commissioned by JISC and carried out by Ipsos MORI suggests that students are starting to mix their social networking sites with their academic studies and inviting tutors and lecturers into their virtual space.
The research builds upon on an initial study – Student Expectations – carried out last year when 500 students were asked to indicate their expectations of technology provision when entering into higher education.
This new data is based on students now that they are studying as first years at higher education institutions, compared to the previous study when they were still at school.
Key findings show that:

• General use of social networking sites is still high (91% use them regularly or sometimes). Frequency of use has increased now that they are at university with a higher proportion claiming to be regular users (80%) – up from 65% when they were at school/college
• 73% use social networking sites to discuss coursework with others; with 27% on at least a weekly basis
• Of these, 75% think such sites as useful in enhancing their learning
• Attitudes towards whether lecturers or tutors should use social networking sites for teaching purposes are mixed, with 38% thinking it a good idea and 28% not. Evidence shows that using these sites in education are more effective when the students set them up themselves; lecturer-led ones can feel overly formal
• Despite students being able to recognise the value of using these sites in learning, only 25% feel they are encouraged to use Web 2.0 features by tutors or lecturers
• 87% feel university life in general is as, or better than, expected especially in terms of their use of technology, with 34% coming from the Russell Group of universities saying their expectations were exceeded
• 75% are able to use their own computer on all of their university’s systems with 64% of students from lower income households assuming that they are able to take their own equipment, perhaps due to lack of affordability and ownership.

Sadly the press release gave no link to the full report and I could not find it on a quick search. I will come back with some comments on the press release when I have ten minutes to spare.

No time to stop to look at this in any depth (am writing a new paper on Personal Learning Environments). But Brendan Barrett from the UN University reports that the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe has just endorsed a recommendation to promote e-learning including the following specific reference to Open Source software and Open educational Resources:

“E-learning can be a powerful means of creating open educational resources accessible to everybody thus counteracting a divided knowledge society. In this regard, the Assembly calls on member parliaments to support the so-called “open source” movement in software development and initiatives for open educational resources – freely accessible on the Internet, and to adopt measures to combat the digital divide in order to close the gap between those who have access to ICT and the acquisition of ICT skills and those who do not, thus ensuring digital literacy for all.”

This is good news! You can find out more here.

Tania writes to ask:

“1. Do you know of any interoperability standards for e-portfolios /personal learning environments- I have trawled Pontydysgu, IMS and JISC and EIfEL with no success.

2. in Europe, are there any successful multi country eportfolio projects in any discipline/area?”

There are standards including UK-LEAP. But are any of the standards really useful? Should we focus on interoperability and associated standards for exporting amd importing ePortfolio data, rather than the ‘big’ educational standards.

As for the second question – can anyone help?

Great fun on Emerging Mondays radio show last night. Ignoring risk assessments we broadcast live from across Europe, with Mark Kramer talking live over a public wifi link to skype on a mobile phone from the football fanzone in Salzburg. Many thanks too to Steve Wheeler and George Roberts for their contributions. And of course to our listeners – without you there would not be much of a show.

Icecast server statistics are a little difficult to read. At a minimum we had 69 listeners – although there may have been more. Countries included UK, Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium, Romania and the USA.

For those of you who missed the show – or if you enjoyed it so much you want to listen again 🙂 – here is the podcast version. We will also announce the next show very soon.

SleaveNotes

In this issue I talk about Dave Cormier’s paper on Rhizomatic learning and the community as curriculum.

Steve Wheeler reflects on the contradictions facing education institutions using social software.

Hank HorKoff from ChinesePod talks about using new technology for language learning.

Mark Kramer talks live from the football fanzone in Salzburg about how we ware using mobile devices.

Neil Oughton from Beaumont College in the UK explains how he is planning to use WordPress in his college.

And poet George Roberts reads another of his poems.

The music is by Ally Valentine from the DD10 8TW album. It is available for free download from the Creative Commons supported Jamendo web site.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Don’t forget tomorrows (Monday) LIVE internet radio edition of Sounds of the Bazaar. The programme will go out at 2000 Central European summer time (1900 UK summer time). To listen to the programme just click on this link. This should open in your default MP3 player (e.g. i Tunes).

The programme is the first in a series called Emerging Mondays. The theme for the programme will is “Social software – finding value? The right tools but the wrong approach?

The show features Steve Wheeler from Plymouth College talking about social software, Jay Cross from Internet Times on informal learning, Hank Horkoff from China Pod in Shanghai on personal Learning Environments and language teaching and learning and of course our culture spot with the Last Poet in Oxford.. We will be holding a regular ‘phone in’ slot over skype and would love to welcome you live on the show. Make sure I have your skype address – mine is GrahamAttwell and we will be happy to chat to you on Monday evening.

I greatly enjoyed the Edumedia conference in Salzburg. Regardless of the formal sessions, what makes the conference is the people and the settings.
ON tuesday we organised an unconference session on the terrace of the conference centre. Or rather we did not organise it. In the best tradition of unconferencing it emerged or just happened. Anyway, the outcome was that Steve ‘Wiki’ wheeler, mobile Mark Kramer. Andreas the podcast Auswarter and a bunch of friends spent two and a half hours discussing the future of technology enhanced learning. The discussion embraced the meaning of mobility and mobile learning, motivation, informal learning, the future of education institutions, deschooling society, web 3.0, MUVEs, emotional learning and more. And thanks to a veritable plethora of recording devices edited highlights of our conversations will be released soon, I am sure.
Much of the discussion centred on mobile learning and, in particular, mico blogging. We were all intrigued by the success of our tweme at the Edumedia conference. The tweme (the word tweme is a mashup of twitter meme) was not an official conference initiative and all that had been done to publicise or explain it was a quick announcement prior to my keynote presentation on the first afternoon of the conference. Yet, despite the very limited bandwidth, a lively community and discourse emerged – see www.twemes.com/edublog08
I am increasingly intrigued by microblogging formats as a way of capturing the incidental learning which happens all the time. Incidental learning is heavily context specific and os based on social interactions.
Incidental learning is episodic but rapid and frequent. Our learning and knowledge base is constantly redrawn, challenged ro adjusted to take account of an on-going stream of incidental learning episodes. This might best be called Lifestream Learning. And twitter and other such microblogging formats offer a compelling way of both capturing and representing such a learning Lifestream. Even more, twitter allows us to express the emotions which as so intrinsically involved in incidental learning in social contexts.
Of course there is a danger of being overwhelmed by a river of data. We need further tools and approaches to filter, search and aggregate our learning life streams. Still more we need tools to assist us in representing such learning, of visualising our knowledge and of combining our own knowledge representations with those of others.
We do not have such tools at the moment (I sort of feel it should be something like the matrix). But being able to capture and represent a community shared lifestream such as Edumedia – even if it was just for two days and we will never experience the precise context again.

What do you do on Mondays?
Eastenders? Corrie? The Archers? Meet a mate down the pub? Or perhaps a quiet night in?
We have the answer to those Monday evening blues. Its called Emerging Mondays. Emerging Mondays features a once a month topical and lively media meet up for all Emerge members and friends. The format is simple. Starting at seven clock, once a month, Emerging Mondays will feature an hours live internet radio followed by a social event in second Life.
The first of our series is this coming Monday, June 9 at 1900 hours UK Summer Time, 2000 Central European Summer Time.
The theme for our first programme will be “Social software – finding value? The right tools but the wrong approach?
The educational technology community has embraced social software with a wave of experimental projects and activities. But is it working? The tools are great for encouraging new participatory approaches to learning and for building peer activity and networking. However, is there a dissonance between such approaches to learning and the structures and curricula of our education systems? Does the adoption of social software challenge hierarchies and power? What is the role of teachers and trainers in a era where knowledge is distributed through networks.
The radio broadcast can be accessed by going to the following web address: http://icecast.commedia.org.uk:8000/emerge.mp3
This weeks show features Steve Wheeler from Plymouth College talking about social software, Jay Cross from Internet Times on informal learning, Hank Horkoff from China Pod in Shanghai on personal Learning Environments and language teaching and learning and of course our culture spot with the Last Poet in Oxford.. We will be holding a regular ‘phone in’ slot over skype and would love to welcome you live on the show. Make sure I have your skype address – mine is GrahamAttwell and we will be happy to chat to you on Monday evening.
And, of course, I am looking forward to meeting up with you on the Emerge SL Island after the event.
Its enough to make Mondays worth looking forward to.

Lots of fun at the Edumedia conference in Salzburg. Somehow managed to speak at the same session as Jay Cross. With the two of us on the attack I think some participants thought they had strayed into a meeting of dangerous revolutionaries.

And I just about managed to get something going with twemes. Twemes is an aggregator of twitter, delicious and flickr working on a unique tag. The tag for the conference is #edumedia08. OK there was not enough bandwidth for accessing the web and both my phone and camera ran out of power.

But I could connect to skype and the ever knowledgeable Cristina Costa told me of a skype-twitter interface and it worked. Some eight of us at the conference have been using the tag. You can follow the tweme at http://twemes.com/edumedia08. I must say I like the mix of languages.

On the train this morning I read ta new paper by Dave Cormier entitled “Rhizomatic Education: Community as Curriculum (note – free access but you will have to create an account). thsi is a great article and I will return to some of the ideas Dave raises later this week. But I like very much the idea of community as curriculum. Dave says

“In the rhizomatic model of learning, curriculum is not driven by predefined inputs from experts; it is constructed and negotiated in real time by the contributions of those engaged in the learning process. This community acts as the curriculum, spontaneously shaping, constructing, and reconstructing itself and the subject of its learning..”

And that is what I am trying to do in Salzburg.

It is another week of hectic fun here at Pontydysgu Towers. Tomorrow morning (Monday) I am off at the crack of dawn to the EduMedia conference in Salzburg. I’m doing two presntations – one on the MOSEP e-Portfolio project and another on podacsting and blogging in self directed adult education. Best of all – lots of my favourite peopel are going and I’m looking forward to a pint or tow with you tomorrow evening.

I will post the presentations on SldeShare when I get five minutes. And I am messing with memes – or rather twemes. What are twemes? Twemes are a mash-up of twitterm delicious and flickr. You can see the edumedia tweme here. And if you are using any of these services to add things about the conference please tag them with #edumedia08.

Click advance notice. Sounds of th Bazaar LIVE is launching a new monthly series sponsored by the JISC Emerge programme. And each of the monthly broadcasts will be followed by a social event in Second Life. Cool or what? The first of the series of Emerging Mondays takes place on Monday June 9 at 1900 UK summer time, 2000 Central European Summer Time. I will post the url for the programme laler this week – together with our guest list. But put it in your diary now – don’t forget – Emerging Monday’s Sounds of the Bazaar LIVE Monday 9 June.