Archive for August, 2008

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Join us at the Fringe

August 13th, 2008 by Graham Attwell

Josie and Scott have been putting some work into the F-Alt 2008 events – the Fringe at the ALT 2008 conference (please note this is not associated in any way with the official conference etc).

Why have a fringe? Well my personal take on it – given there is no offical organising committee – is that we want to build on those out of session happenings which always seem the highlight of conferences. And I want – selfishly – a quickk fure consultation with colleagues – on he issues which are bothering me in my work. Hence I have signed up for th e-Portfolio WTF session – see proposed session below. I am increasingly caught between the dilemmas of trying to provide structured ePortfolio spaces whilst learners are usning all kind sof different social software to discuss and presnet their work. I hope to get other peoples ideas on this. And I like the idea of quick fire sessions. And of sessions being participant organised and led. Social software and especially Twitter has great potential for letting us do this.

And I don’t think that the humour on the F-Alt wiki should take away from the serious nature of such discussions. Serious fun is one of our memes at the moment – and one i take seriously :) . Sessions are being scheduled outside the main conference times – we do no want to take away form thse who are presneting in official paper sessions. So if you are coming to Alt-C – ad are looking for some serious fun, please sign up on the wiki. Better still offfer to moderate or speak at a session.

The line up to date:

  • e-Portfolios: WTF?

Facilitator: Josie Fraser
Speakers: Graham Attwell

  • Learning Objects: WTF?
Facilitator: Scott Wilson
Speakers:
  • Second Life: WTF?

Facilitator: Nicola Whitton
Speakers: Scott Wilson

  • Edupunk: WTF?

Facilitator: Graham Attwell

Speakers:

  • Microblogging WTF?

Facilitator: Su White
Speakers: Josie Fraser

  • Not not re-thinking the Digital Divide

but thinking about the digital divide, using gender as a lens

Facilitator: Josie Fraser

Speakers: Frances Bell, Helen Whitehead

Posted in e-portfolios, Wales Wide Web | 1 Comment »

PLEs – Designing for Change

August 13th, 2008 by Graham Attwell

Yesterday I read “Designing for Change: Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments” by Fridolin Wild, Felix Mödritscher and Steinn Sigurdarson, who are working on the EU funded iCamp project. Thi is interesting stuff.
At the core of their arguement is the idea that “by establishing a learning environment, i.e. a network of people, artefacts, and tools (consciously or unconsciously) involved in learning activities, is part of the learning outcomes, not an instructional condition.”

They go on to look at AI and adaptive approaches to learning environments.

“Adaptive (educational) hypermedia technologies all differ”, they say, but “they share one characteristic: they deal primarily with the navigation through content, i.e. the represented domain specific knowledge. Information processing and knowledge construction activities are not in the focus of these approaches. Consequently, they do not treat environments as learning outcomes and they cannot support learning environment design.”

Their approach goes beyond personalisation.

“Considering the learning environment not only a condition for but also an outcome of learning, moves the learning environment further away from being a monolithic platform which is personalisable or customisable by learners (‘easy to use’) and heading towards providing an open set of learning tools, an unrestricted number of actors, and an open corpus of artefacts, either pre-existing or created by the learning process – freely combinable and utilisable by learners within their learning activities (‘easy to develop’). ”

They go on to explain a set of tools beng piloted by the iCamp project:

“In this section we describe the development of a technological framework enabling learners to build up their own personal learning environments by composing web-based tools into a single user experience, get involved in collaborative activities, share their designs with peers (for ‘best practice’ or ‘best of breed’ emergence), and adapt their designs to reflect their experience of the learning process. This framework is meant to be a generic platform for end-user development of personal learning environments taking into account the paradigm shift from expert-driven personalisation of learning to a design for emergence method for building a personal learning environment.”

The tools and platform they have developed are based on a learner interaction scripting language (LISL) leading to a Mash-UP Personal Learning Environment (MUPPLE). I do not fully understand how the platform works (does it require users to understand the scripting language?) but it appears to be based on users describing a set of activities they wish to undertake. These activities then allow them to access a set of tools to undertake those activities. The focus on activities rather than tasks seems to me interesting.

I very much like the idea that the learning platform is seen as an outcome of learning and think the approach has great potential. I woudl be interested to hear what others think of the approach. I hope to get a look at the platform and will report back.

Posted in e-learning 2.0, Mature, Pedagogy, PLEs, Wales Wide Web | 4 Comments »

Visualising data

August 9th, 2008 by Graham Attwell

I’m having a happy afternoon playing with differents ervices for visualising data. I am looking at ways of showing data for use in careers counselling. I have created a very simple data set of employment by SOC rates in Kent in the UK. My first tries are using the IBM alphaworks tool which has the merit of being very simple to use.

Here is a matrix chart:

and this is a bubble chart:

Posted in Social Software, Wales Wide Web | 3 Comments »

Bureacracy

August 9th, 2008 by Graham Attwell

No I haven’t been on holiday – although i did spend four days last week at the Cambridge festival (more on that soon).

Instead my excuse for no postings this week is taht I have been bogged down in bureacracy – doing the books. Pontydysgu is a small organisation and we cannot afford a full time adminsitrator. Hence, in addtion to my preferred job title as senior researcher, I also double up as office cleaner and administrator. And, I have to admit, I had taken my eye off the ball for a few months. So the result was a week of spreadsheets and filing. I know soem people like this work but I hate it. I don’t find it creative in any way – and to write in a blog you have to ‘think creative’.

One of the particular curses in our work and funding model is filing reports to the European Commision on collaborative projects. The various agencies responsible for checking these reports always seem to find soemthing wrong. This weeks gem was a request for an equivalent cost for transport from Luxembourg to the UK. Since Luxembourg was not a partner in the project they could not pay the real cost but only equivalents. And my crime had been to file them tickets with real costs. Hm…..

Posted in Wales Wide Web | No Comments »

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    2012 Horizon report

    An advance copy of the the NMC Horizon Report 2012 K-12 Edition, due to be launched on June 14, identifies mobile devices and apps and tablet computing as technologies expected to enter mainstream use in the first horizon of one year or less. Game-based learning and personal learning environments are seen in the second horizon of two to three years; and augmented reality and natural user interfaces emerged in the third horizon of four to five years.

    OER Quality

    A new project is attempting to define quality standards  for open educational resources in higher education; this is part of the OER Quality Project, a joint research between the universities of Barcelona, Santiago de Chile and the University of London.

    The researchers for this project are lecturers and academic librarians and aim to define a set of quality standards and develop a good practices guide both for content design and for  indexing open educational resources in institutional repositories.

    They are looking for university lecturers, readers or professors (distance learning lecturers welcome too) willing to answer 2 surveys  (20 minutes each) and to evaluate a set of OERs, according to certain guidelines and criteria, which will take 30 minutes to answer. To participate, please register here.

    Hangouts on Air

    Personally I am not a great fan of Google+, although as Google increasingly integrates its different services it is hard to avoid. But, as Stephen Downes points out in the ever valuable Oldaily, citing an original blog post by David Andrade, “by far and away the best thing about Google+ is the Hangout feature, essentially a way to have a videoconference with ten of your friends. This latest upgrade allows you to broadcast your Hangouts to as large an audience as you want. “With Hangouts on Air, you will be able to broadcast yourself publicly to the entire world, see how many viewers you have, and even record and reshare your broadcast. The public recording will be uploaded to your YouTube channel and to your original Google+ post.”

    With free skype video calls limited to two people and the increasing cost of proprietary synchronous elearning platforms like Blackboard Collaborate, Hangouts could become the system of choice for open online courses.

    Gadgets and widgets

    The Dutch SURFnet have announced the ‘Edu-Socializing Seminar’, to be held in Utrecht, the Netherlands, on June 12th and 13th. They say “Gadget and widget technology is gaining momentum in the Research and Educational community. Projects like the Role Project, Apache Rave, Sakai OAE and OpenConext implement and deploy these technologies, showcasing the possibilities and benefits of such loosely coupled and distributed environments. The projects address a wide variety of needs from within the community like, among others, personalized learning environments, mashing web and social content, distributed learning and online collaborations.

    The event seeks to explore trends and foster these developments internationally, by bringing together experts from different fields into one event and joining them in a community. With interactive sessions the workshop wants to enable sharing of ideas and knowledge. At the same time the event wants to trigger new developments. With dedicated breakout sessions, common challenges can be addressed and solutions can be targeted.”

    More details on the seminar wiki page.

    ECER 2010

    The keynotes, videos, radio shows and interviews from the ECER 2010 Conference in Helsinki:

    On the ECER 2010 website.

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    Here you find the Taccle handbook for teachers order form.

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