Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning

The Open Seminar Sessions @ EVOLVE are back!

This Month is about Personal Learning Environments. Hopefully a lot of food for thought here!!

This month our guest speaker is Scott Wilson from CETIS UK, who will share some thoughts about Personal Learning Environments

The idea of a PLE (Personal Learning Environments) is that learners can configure different services and tools to develop their own learning environment, bringing together informal learning from the home, the workplace as well as more formal provision by education institutions. The PLE is controlled by the learner and as well as offering an environment for accessing different information and knowledge allows access to web based publishing and other opportunities for creating content and expressing and exchanging ideas. The idea behind the PLE is to harness the power and potential of social software and web 2.0 applications for learning.

The session will take place in September, 22 2008 at 1800 UK time (please check your time here)

We will meet in Elluminate meeting, which you can access here. [ This is an open meeting. Attendee(s) don’t require a password to join, even if requested to do so. Just type your name]

I left AltC early last Thursday morning to travel to Leiden in the Netherlands for a meeting of the Eurtrainer porject. Eurtrainer is developing a network for trainers in Europe and together with Cristina Costa and Dirk Stieglitz, I am organising an online confernce on the training of trainers on November 5 and 6. The conference is free and you can register online on the Trainers in Europe web site.

Anyway here is the main conference blurb.

First International on-line conference – 5-6 November 2008

The Network to Support Trainers in Europe is launching its first annual on-line conference on “the Training of Trainers” on 5 and 6 November, 2008. The confernce is co-sponsored by the Jisc funded Evolve network.

Who is the conference for?
The conference is for all those interested in the training and professional development of teachers and trainers. This includes teachers, trainers, tutors, researchers, managers and policy makers and other interested individuals.

About the conference
The conference will take place through the internet using the Elluminate conference tool. We hope this will not only reduce the carbon footprint of our activities, but will allow wide participation by those who might not be able to travel. The conference will utilise simple web-based tools and will be accessible by anyone with an internet connection and a web browser. For those of you not used to presenting on the internet, we will provide full technical support and a short pre-conference training course.

To find out more go to the conference technology page.

Conference themes
The conference will be organised around four themes:

• Theme 1 – The changing role of trainers in learning
• Theme 2: E-learning for trainers
• Theme 3: Work-based learning
• Theme 4: Support for the professional development of trainers

Go the the conference themes page to find out more.

Speakers

Speakers include:

Professor Alan Felstead and Nick Jewson, Cardiff School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, UK

Professor Alison Fuller, School of Education, University of Southampton, UK

Professor Alan Brown, Institute for Employment Research, University of Warwick, UK

George Roberts, Oxford Brooks University, UK

Barry Nyhan, Ireland

Seija Mahlamäki-Kultanen and Anita Eskola-Kronqvist, HAMK, Finland.

Eduardo Figueira, Academus, Portugal

Simone Kirpal, Institut Technik und Bildung, Univeristy of Bremen, Germany

John Pallister, Wolsingham School

Cristina Costa, Pontydysgu, UK

Doris Beer, Germany

Vance Stevens, Abu Dubai

Carla Arena et al – United States, Japan, Ukraine, Argentina and the UK

Anne Fox, Denmark

Regina Lamscheck Nielsen, DEL, Denmark

Linda Castañeda, University of Murcia, Spain

Titles and abstracts for the presentations can be found on the programme page. Presentations will be 15 minutes allowing 15 minutes for discussion.

Exhibition

There will also be an on-line exhibition. Go to the exhibition page for details of how you can participate.

Registration

The conference is free. However, we would ask you to please register for the conference in advance as places are limited. Please go to the registration page. It is possible to register for one or more of the four seperate conference sessions.

More information
For more information email the project coordinator Simone Kirpal – kirpal @uni-bremen.de or the conference organiser Graham Attwell – graham10 @mac.com.

Missed the LIVE Sounds of the Bazaar from the Alt-C conference? Never mind – here is the podcast. The programme features live interviews with Laurie Phipps, George Siemens, Scott Wilson and many, many more. And poems by Steve Wheeler and George Roberts.

Thanks to Joe Roso who produced the programme, Josie Fraser who did the interviews, Cristina Costa who moderated the chat and everyone else who participated. Great fun and I hope we will do another one soon.

More reports on the conference in the next few days.

NB The first two minutes are a bit noisy – but d stick with it because we sorted it out very fast.

Live at Leedfs [ 37:04 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (5091)

We are at ALT-C.

We arrived yesterday evening and the fun immediately started!

It is great to be among friends, to get together with those who we work with all year around online. It feels great. It makes the event more interesting. It might become the main reason this event will be reminded for. Bit isn’t it always like this? The People ..the people, they are the ones that really matter and impel us to to learn, explore new domains and revisited old areas of interested through a new lense – according to the resources they link us to, the ideas  they share, the persceptions and feeling the provoque in us.

Today Graham Attwell, Steven Warburton and I presented our sort paper about Evolve. Graham and Steven were brilliant as usual. From the 15 minutes of “fame”, there was particularly one thought that summed up exactly what I think to be one of the keys for sustainability of communitis, groups…or whatever you choose to call like-minded people who somehow come together online. Graham, trying to answer what is key to sustainabily referred to the emotional factor how that drives individual participation and effective communication. And this is so true!

How many of us remain in the same groups and communities we joined for the same reason that motivated us to join in the first place. I would risk to say that only very few, if any at all. We evolve with the communities we belong to, as they mature to. And what specially keeps us attached to the community is not necessarily the learning it enables or the information we gathered from there, but above all the learning relationships that get formed while doing so. The bonds. The feeling of comfortability of interacting with each other and the levels of trust that deepen with time, and which evolve as a natural reaction of the individuals involvements with each others’ learning process.

As we say in the webheads sharing is caring, and definitely everytime we are sharing something is not only because we came across something that interests us, but also because it is something that will interests others…most time more than us.

Blogging from the conference while lunch time …typing too fast …hope this makes any sense! 

Don’t foregt todays LIVE Sounds of the Bazaar radio broadcast from the AltC conference – 1725 UK summer time, 18.25 Central European summertime. Address is http://radio.jiscemerge.org.uk/Emerge.m3u – not any other as mya have been mistakenlyposted earlier!!!!

This post provides a summary of how you can particpate in the Alt-C conference wherever you are.

It’s the Adanveced Learning Technologies (ALT) conference this week in Leeds in the UK. Together with Cristina Costa I will be reporting from the conference on the Pontydysgu blogs.

In the past if you couldn’t spare the time, forgot to submit your abstract and thus had no institutional support for the conference fees or just couldn’t face another four days of papers and workshops, that would be it. No conference, no networking. The times they are a changing. First we have all manner of distance communications. And secondly we are beggining to loosen up in our ides of how knowledge is shared with the grwing popularity of technology enhanced unconferencing. AltC is not open to all this year. But there are events you can participate in wherever you are and differents spaces to interact with conference delegates.

First a plug for Sounds of the Bazaar. We are broadcasting LIVE from the Jisc Emerge social at Alt-C on Tuesady at 1725 UK summer time, 18.25 Central European time. Sit back and relax (perhaps with a glass of wine yourself) and listen to what the party goers are saying.  Just point your browser to http://radio.jiscemerge.org.uk/Emerge.m3u This should open in your MP3 player of choice and after a few seconds delay start streaming. Better still, if you’d like to join in the fun, you can join our conference special chat room and share your opinions with others. You can also ask questions to the people being interviewed. Cristina Costa will be moderating the chat LIVE at Leeds at the following url – http://tinyurl.com/soundschat – no account needed.

What else is going on? Alt-C themselves have go in on the act and are providing access to the keynote speeches through Elluminate. Just head  over here to get the full details. Alt has provided a Crowdvine social network site for the conferrnce. Sadly that is only open to registered delegates. But there is an open aggregator here (or download an OPML file with the aggregator RSS feeds).

F-Alt is the first ever fringe being held at Alt-C. It sounds like it is going to be a lot of fun. You can get full details on the F-Alt wiki. There’s a chance that sessions may be broadcast live on ustream. Keep watching on twitter for more details. You can find a FriendFeed aggregator here.

Last but not least, the Alt-C Digital Divide slam is open to all. Full details on the wiki. Go on – its much more fun than that report you should be writing. Create your own entry.

I am sure there will be more. Just hang out in the right spaces to find out what is going on. Or, of course, you can watch this blog for regular conference updates.

This video has been produced by Pontydysgu and friends as our entry for the Alt-C2008 Digital Slam competition. We discussed the idea over skype and then each recorded our own part of the soundtrack. The text is from Wikipedia entries about the Digital Divide. We wanted to bring music and pictures togather to explore the multi faceted and often contradictory phenonomon of the digital divide. And we wanted to bring voices and pictures together from different countries and cultures. We had orginally intended to include Greek language in the mash but found that there is no Digital Divide entry in the Greek version of Wikipedia. We will write one.

Anyway hope you enjoy it.

Words – Graham Attwell, Cristina Costa, Dirk Stieglitz and Maria Perifanou.
Music – Break Rise Blowing by Countdown.
Text – Wikipedia
Pictures – Abrilon, Lisachaos, Maebmij, ninnet, AnantaB (all Creative Commons, Flickr)
Production – Dirk Stieglitz

This was recorded live at the EduMedia conference in Salzburg. Many thanks to Andreas Auwarter who recorded the audio and did the post processing.

Yes its the AltC conference next week. Lots going on. On Tuesday we will be broadcasting LIVE with a Sounds of the Bazaar special from the Jisc Emerge social. Point your browser to http://radio.jiscemerge.org.uk/Emerge.m3u and it will open the LIVE stream in your MP2 player of choice. And you can join in with live chat at http://tinyurl.com/soundschat – hosted by Cristina Costa.

And we are supporting the first ever conference fringe F-AltO8. There is a fabulous free badge for everyone who signs up in advance on the fringe wiki – http://f-alt.wetpaint.com.

I accepted an invitation to do a keynote presentation at a conference on Web 2.0 at the University of Minho in Braga, Portugal on October 10th. What I dinn’t realise is that they wanted me to write a paper. I am not so keen on formal papers these days – I far prefer multimedia but I finally got down to it. I greatly enjoyed readng up for he paper and quite enjoyed writing it – though am frustrated at all the things I did not say. And I still find the academic text format a bit stifling. Oh – and I hated doing the referencing (though that is my fault – I should have done it as I wrote). Anyway here is the paper. I am trying to out in scribd to see if this makes sense as a way of blogging a paper.

If you prefer you can download the paper here – portplesfin