Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning

I Love the commoncraft stop motion videos. This one is described as “Time-lapse footage of the making of “Twitter Search in Plain English”. Music: Freestyle Percussion Magik: Flamenco Flight.”

I spent a lot of time yesterday evaluating ‘virtual classrooms’ or spaces for online simultaneous communication.

The background: over the last two years I have recognised, presented and participated in a considerable number of seminars, workshops and conferences using Elluminate. Whilst it has its bad days, in general Elluminate is reliable and I am fairly confident in getting people online and in facilitating communication on the platform. So when I was asked to help organise an online course for careers guidance professionals, I based it around a mix of self directed activities using PBWorks and simultaneous online sessions in Elluminate.

Then came the problem. Elluminate is a Java based application and requires both Java to be installed and the opening of a couple of ports which are sometime closed by systems administrators. Indeed the ports had been closed but that obstacle could be overcome. But, for one reason or another (I am not quite sure what), the application could not be got to run on Windows XP machines on the clients network. So I was left looking for an alternative.

First on the list was Net Webinar. I was not much taken by this given the web page marketing hype (and the price) but we had been recommended to use it by our client. It is Applet based avoiding the need for Java or downloads and I could set up a free month’s trial. The application seemed very much to emphasise the role of the presenter. There was no shared whiteboard and the main role of participants seemed to be to ask text questions. Sadly last night the person I was collaborating with was unable to access the webinar I set up (I suspect an issue with Windows 7 netbook version). Today I tried again with another colleague and it all worked quite well but I couldn’t hear any audio from her. The manual is also curious, seeming to focus more on toll paid telephony than anything else!

Next we looked again at Flash meeting. Although I use it regularly for project meetings I had never tried it with the whiteboard and tools enabled. For interactivity, this requires each user to have their own account. Furthermore the design does not really work, neither are the presentation tools far developed. Flash meeting is as the name suggests a meeting tool, I think.

On to DimDIm. I like the design, although functionality is limited by only five microphones being available. And the big failing of many of these system seems to be that the Flash system they use is unreliable. When switching between modes – whiteboard, presentation etc. it seemed to do things to my audio. And this morning, trying it amongst three of us, one person could hear everyone, whilst two of us could not hear each other. Promising but two buggy to risk with a non techie audience.

At this point I tried a skype shout out. The first reply was from Nergiz Kern. “NergizK @GrahamAttwell @cristinacost Maybe a bit unconventional but what about http://www.scribblar.com/ ? (If all else fails).” I liked the approach , unconventional or not. But once more the audio failed miserably. On skype someone (by now I have forgotten who) recommended WizIQ. oh dear, the moment I tried to invite Cristina Costa (who by now I had inveigled as a fellow tester), the whole site went crazy on me. Things were moving all over the place. More Flash problems I suspect. Another one ruled out.

I tried another two systems this morning. Similar results. With he notable exception of Flash meeting, the implementation of Flash in these systems seems very buggy. It might work on a good day for most people. Or it might not. And even in Flash meeting we spend a lot of time saying “can you hear me.”

I didn’t try Adobe Connect. I cannot afford it. And the trial version is too limited to use for the sessions I am trying to organise. It should also be remembered that Elluminate is not free – it is just that I am lucky to have access to an install.

So my conclusion – Flash doesn’t really work. And none of the free systems are yet good enough for working with non technical first time users. Disappointing really. My latest thinking is to re-jig the session and use an embedded slidecast, along with an embedded chat room in PBWorks. It is all free and with a bit of luck and a following wind it might work. Or perhaps to use Edmodo.

I’d be very interested to hear of your experiences of using these, or any other online seminar or workshop tools.

I was greatly inspired by the Wise Kids conference on Young People in a Digital World – Preparing, Inspiring and Supporting, held in Bangor in Wales on Wednesday. This was the second of two regional conferences, with videos from the first, in Swansea earlier in the week are available now online (the video by Tanya Byron, who advices the UK government on internet safety is encouraging from a policy point of view).

Here are a few impressionistic comments which by no means express the breadth and quality of the event.

Two things which particularly encouraged me. The first was the breadth of organisations represented by participants. This included teachers, local government officers, youth workers, researchers and delegates from internet and software companies and the  voluntary sector. The second was the active involvement of young people themselves in the conference.

And for me, the highlight was the youth panel of some ten or so students from Ysgol Trfyan. They were thoughtful, articulate and above all opinionated. Having previously presented a Welsh language drama about e-safety, they went on to answer questions from participants in the conference. all but one said that if they were forced to choose they would give up television rather than the internet. But there main message was their opposition to the ban on accessing social networking sites and particular Facebook from school. They said the reason they had been told for the ban was that social networks had been used for cheating in exams (unlikely as I found this, a report in last weeks Guardian claims the use of mobile phones for cheating is on the increase!). However they could not see why Facebook has been banned when there was still access to other sites including games. “Facebook is better for learning than games”, said one. Another said: “Whatever they ban we will find a way around it:. And although there may have been an element of campaigning going on, when asked what site they accessed first when they went on the internet, nine said Facebook, one YouTube, and one shopping.

Members of the panel has obviously researched the question of e-safety in some depth in preparation for their drama performance. However, whilst they felt schools should do more to teach internet safety and that also parents should pay more attention to what their children were doing on the internet, they were against nanny programmes. They were also dubious that present age restrictions of access to sites like Facebook were working. One member of the panel said that if her younger sister insisted she was going to set up a Facebook account,, despite being under 13, at the end of the day it was pointless to try to stop her but instead she would try to watch out for her sister’s safety!

The issue of safety tended to overwhelm the conference. As chair Alan Davies said, we seemed to be doing a lot of preparing, and supporting, but not so much inspiring.

Especially in the workshop sessions there was a lot of inspiring. I enjoyed the presentation by Rebecca Newton on Moshi Monsters. But my favourites were the workshop sessions by John Davitt – Occupy the Hand and Mind – simple strategies to make learners active with New Tools – and Leon Cynch‘s brave exploration of the suddenly unfashionable Second Life.

However these sessions were very much geared towards teachers and trainers. There is a big gap – a gap between what such pioneers as John and Leon are doing and the reality of what our systems administrators and school managers are allowing. And it is that gap which was so eloquently exposed by the students from Ysgol Trfyan. The issue of firewalls, white lists and so on is not an administrative issue. If education is to keep in touch with the way young people (and older people too) are exploring and using the internet for learning, for work and for play, then we have to rethink the present absurd policy of banning social software.

Yes, online safety is an issue. But Wise Kids has shown that internet safety is computable with open systems and that educating young people is a better policy than policing them.

We would like to welcome Ilona Buchem to Pontydysgu blogs. Ilona’s Polish language blog is called ‘Paradygmat’. Paradygmat, she explains, “means paradigm and I hope that the Latin origin makes this word sound familiar to a broader audience.

Based on the approach of Thomas Kuhn, the term paradigm can be seen as a set of practices, such as methods of observation and interpretation, that define a scientific discipline during a particular period of time. A paradigm shift may occur when shortcomings of the basic assumptions in the prevailing paradigm build up and can no longer be ignored. The existing paradigm is enlarged and frontiers of knowledge and methods are pushed forward. In this sense paradigm shift refers to a major change in certain thought-patterns. So the idea is write and discuss about changes and trends in educational sciences and education research with the focus on ICT-based learning and Social Media.

I would like to focus on how educational sciences are shifting towards so-called “post-normal science” with more openness, interdisciplinarity, exchange, debating, incorporating multiple viewpoints, stronger interactions with practice etc.”

We hope you will enjoy reading and engaging with Ilona’s ideas. Whilst many of you may not read Polish, we have provided a link to Google translate on the blog page.

The best technology and most useful technology I have come across whilst working at Pontydysgu is probably the use of porgrammes such as skype and flashmeeting to support online meetings of more than one or two people. It was not until my Mum called me to ask good programmes to use that I realised the real value of this technology. She was having issues as some of small companies she worked with were required to attend meetings that they couldn’t afford, as travel costs were too high. Using a programme such as flashmeeting meant that these companies big and small could be involved without huge cost. This led me to more questions however of whether this could really replace physical meetings and whether online meetings were really the same. With so many advantages, low cost, time saved, making more regular meetings possible they certainly seem to solve a lot of problems. However it seems to me that online communication can prevent a proper working relationship being formed as all of the informal conversation and time spent getting to know each other is lost, and it is often that it is only when people meet in person that they get a real idea of who they are working with.
I think this is something that could become in important question in the future as more people work from home and international connections become even more common.

Last night @m_a_s_c , @krajagopal and I were talking about education. In General! It all started with talking about doing a PhD and not feeling we have the same kind of ‘endurance’ we had when we first went to University. The three of us, although in different countries, have experienced similar educational structures, which basically [...]

Nareszcie mam chwilę na mój pierwszy … ojej, jak to sie nazywa po polsku … aha, znalazłam, wpis na blogu! Eureka! Ja się przez tego bloga nauczę przynajmniej nowej wersji polskiego – polskiego 2.0  Bardzo Was z góry przepraszam, za moje ewentalne potyczki językowe, ale mieszkam poza Polską od jakiś 10 lat i od tego czasu trochę się w języku zmieniło…

No, ale to inny temat.

Dzisiaj chcę się z Wami podzielić moimi spostrzeżeniami na temat nowych możliwości, jakie daje prowadzenie “na żywo” lub udostępnianie wcześniej zarejestrowanych wykładów przez Internet.

Coraz więcej uniwersytetów, uczelni i innych placówek oświatowych udostępnia swoje wykłady w Internecie, przełamując w ten sposób m.in. bariery czasowe i przestrzenne. Każdy może w najbardziej dla siebie dogodnym miejscu i czasie obejrzeć wykład na interesujący go temat. Do tego wielokrotnie i we własnym tempie. Profesorowie, których znamy tylko z imienia na okładce książki, stają się przez to dla nas żywi, prawie “namacalni”. Możemy lepiej poznać tok ich myśli i sposób argumentowania.  Taki cyfrowy wyklad można obejrzeć lub posłuchać sobie na komputerze/laptopie, na iPodzie, mp-trójce albo na innym przenośnym urządzeniu.

Ja na przykład, chętnie słucham nagrań Prof. Gabi Reinmann na iPodzie, kiedy jadę kolejką do pracy. A że mieszkam w Berlinie, jest to dla mnie sposób na konstruktywne spędzanie 100 minut (sic!), które codziennie poświecam na dojazdy …

Znane uniwersystety, jak Yale, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton, oferują takie, bardzo często darmowe, wykłady “na wynos” nie tylko swoim studentom, ale tez i szerokiej publiczności.

Niedawno w Washington Post Bill Gates stwierdził, że takie portale jak Academic Earth zrewolucjonizują edukację. Academic Earth, Lecture2Go lub Learners TV oferują dostęp do wielu wykładów, prezentacji i kursów, umożliwiając nie tylko personalizację nauki, ale też interaktywność i komunikację z innymi osobami o podobnych zainteresowaniach. Na Academic Earth można na przykład dodać nagranie do listy ulubionych lubi polecić ulubiony wykład innym. Na kanale YouTube uniwersytetach Berkeley czy Stanford można oceniać, komentować i dodawać wykłady do własnych “Playlists”, czyli organizować np. na podstawie tematu, profesora lub uczelni. Takie indywidualne organizowanie materiałow edukacyjnych pozwala nam na przejęcie większej odpowiedzialności za własna naukę.

Także Apple ma swój kanał edukacyjny, ktróry daje dosęp do nagrań audio. Ponownie innowacyjne uniwersystety Stanford i Berkeley zapewnią dostęp do wielu cyfrowych nagrań audio na iTunes Store. Są tam zarówno strony publiczne, które obejmują wolnodostępne kursy i wykłady oraz strony dostępne tylko dla uczelnianej społeczności.

Ale podczas gdy kilka znanych uczelni udostęnia darmowe wykłady, wciaz istnieje bariera kosztów i bariera kompetencji związana z dostępem i rozpowszechnianiem takich materiałów na wielu innych  uniwersystetach. Wiekszość uczelni działa nadal w tradycyjny sposób, pomimo że istnieją już rozwiązania techniczne i dobre przykłady, na których można się wzorować. Jest też problem wyposażenia placówek oświatowych, np. nie wszystkie biblioteki posiadaja komputery z dostepem do Internetu.

Myślę, że w wielu przypadkach przydatna jest taktyka małych kroków. Jeśli znajdzie się ktoś, kto zainspiruje, sporóbuje, zaeksperymentuje, to są szanse, że ta iskierka rozpali ogień.

Jakie są Wasze doświadczenia z nauką “na wynos”? Z jakich kanałów korzystacie? Może są u Was na uczelni pierwsze próby z wykładami online? Bardzo jestem ciekawa. Piszcie!

Chalkface is an area where we are planning to collect together all those posts that deal with stuff to do with classroom practice.

There are several reasons for doing this.  One of them is that I am basically never going to get it together to write a blog.  If I have something to say, I just squat on Graham’s blog whenever I feel like it and so far he seems quite happy with the arrangement. I think it’s pay-back time for all the nights he has squatted on my sofa.  Despite peer encouragement, I just know that the pressure (real or imagined) of having to write regular entries would freak me out. My life is just not that interesting for goodness sake.  So this is a place where I can post stuff occasionally.

Secondly, the reality of Pontydysgu is that we dabble in a lot of areas. As you can see from the rest of the site, sometimes we just play with ideas – blue-skies stuff that may or may not lead anywhere and may or may not be useful. We also do proper grown-up research that people pay us to do and where there are clear outputs in terms of books or papers or conference presentations. Most of this will be behind the tabs on ‘projects’ or ‘publications’.  But, unlike a lot of education research organizations, we are also lucky enough to be involved with sharp-end delivery work.

Like most people in Pontydysgu, I work across all these areas. However, the place I feel most at home is working directly with teachers and kids in the classroom and I thought maybe our web site should be a bit more focused in the way we reported on these activities.

Lastly, I am a bit fed up with all these websites which are purportedly targeted at trainers and teachers but which are actually for researchers talking about trainers and teachers.  Wrong – trainers are totally shallow – I should know, I am one of them. The reason trainers look at a website is to get ideas that they can use in practice.  Preferably with Yr 8 tomorrow morning.

Yes, there are loads of brilliant resource-rich websites out there (would be interested to know which you rate and for what) so why are we establishing another?  Well simply because I’d like practitioners to realize that the PD site is for them as well as for the researchers. The other reason is that despite the sheer number of these swapshops for teachers,  e-technologies is still a bit under represented and good, open content, open access ones are even more thin on the ground.

So – I’m going to post the occasional entry here but if anyone else wants to add a post, please send it to me, jenhughes [at] mac [dot] com or to anyone else on the PD team and we’ll stick it up. Regular contributors can have their own password.

We are interested in actual ideas for ‘Things To Do”, reports on stuff you have tried, what worked and what went pearshaped, your favourite resources, other great websites, personal classroom problems looking for a solution. All these may involve e-technologies and social software or they may not. I am also keen to cross sectors and disciplines as most ideas can be scaled up or down or adapted for different age ranges with a bit of imagination.

Jen Hughes

Much of our work in Pontydysgu involves trying to support the learning and knowledge development needs of others – individuals and organisations. So it was interesting when I was asked what were our learning needs. This is what I wrote:

Pontydysgu is an SME, based in Wales, UK.
It employees one full time worker, one intern student and four part time workers. Pontydysgu is a research and development company, working in the field of information and technology communications for knowledge development and sharing and education and learning.
Staff are distributed, with three of the workers mainly based n Wales and three in Bremen, Germany. Although the organisation has two offices, in Pontypridd and Bremen, most staff work from home and are heavily reliant on computer based technologies for coordination and communication.
Most of the work of the organisation is project based, with projects varying in length between three months and four years. Clients include both the private and public sector, with a number of projects sponsored by the European Commission. The projects involve a considerable amount of traveling and at any one time, half of the staff may be away from the offices.
Pontydysgu is a knowledge based organisation and the work involves continuos learning in multiple disciplinary based fields. Excepting the Intern student all of the staff are qualified to degree level.
Learning is informal and on-the-job and may take as high as 33 per cent of work time. This process is not unproblematic. There are issues as to how to coordinate learning, how to support what is essentially peer based learning and how to develop a shared organisational knowledge base. Whilst staff are highly motivated in self learning, there is an issue as to how best to balance individual learning interests with organisational learning needs.
Formal courses are generally seen as too inflexible to meet learning needs. Accreditation is not required by the company, but the development and use of a portfolio would allow individual learning to become more transparent than it is at present and allow for potential transfer in future employment.
The organisation has invested in mobile devices and all employees have an iPod touch. However the use of such devices is largely  up to individual staff. The organisation is presently looking at the use of advanced smartphones to improve communication and learning.

Interesting results from the latest Pew Internet survey on adults use of social networking sites in the United States (I wish we had a European equivalent). The survey found:

Of adult SNS users:

• 73% have a Facebook account
• 48% have a MySpace profile
• 14% have an account on LinkedIn
• 1% each on Yahoo, YouTube, Tagged, Flickr and Classmates.com

Overall there is nothing particularly surprising in the results. The survey shows just how hegemonic Facebook has become in terms of social networking sites. I am a little surprised at how low the figures are for Flickr and YouTube. However this may be because you do not need an account unless you wish to upload material to these services. I guess it confirms the fact that only a relatively low percentage of social software and social network users are creating content.

It is also interesting to note the increasing numbers with a LinkedIn account. In the longer term I think LinkedIn may prove more sustainable than Facebook, if only because it has a real purpose behind it. And LinkedIn seem to have successfully increased the social networking functionality, whilst not allowing it to overwhelm the site.