Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning

Last year Pontydysgu helped organise the first Perosnal Learning environment’s Conference, PLE2010, held in Barcelona. And, to our delight, it was a huge sucess, as much for teh open format and exchanget of ideas as the subject, I suspect.

And although, we had envisaged the conference being a one off, we have been encouraged by the feedback to organise a second conference this year. Our good friends Hugh Davis, Lisa Harris and Su White at the University of Southampton in the UK have kindly offered to host the conference. And here is the call for contributions. As last year, we particularly welcome interactive and participative formats for sessions. The conference web site can be accessed here.

Call for Papers: The PLE Conference 2011

Following the highly successful inaugural event in Barcelona (#PLE_BCN), the next PLE Conference will be held at the University of Southampton, UK (#PLE_SOU) from July 11th  to 13th 2011, and will have a lively social  programme as well as a highly interactive and innovative technical programme.

The Personal Learning Environment (PLE) Conference is intended to produce a space for researchers and practitioners to exchange ideas, experience and research around the development and implementation of PLEs – including the design of environments and the sociological and educational issues that they raise. Whilst the conference includes a traditional research paper strand, we also encourage proposals for sessions in different formats including workshops, posters, debates, cafe sessions and demonstrations aiming to sustain the dynamic and interactive discussion environment established by the opening event in Barcelona in 2010.

A Personal Learning Environment (PLE) includes the tools, communities, and services that constitute individual educational platforms learners use to direct their own learning and pursue educational goals. This represents a shift away from the traditional model of learning, and towards a model where students draw connections from a growing matrix of online and offline resources that they select and organise. To gain something of the flavour of last year¹s conference search for #PLE_BCN and see http://pleconference.citilab.eu/

CALL FOR PAPERS

Deadline Saturday 26th March

The conference organisers welcome 500-800 word abstracts for full or short research papers. Submissions for other types of presentation, such as workshops, symposia, demonstrations and installations are also encouraged. These can be submitted electronically via ConfTool http://pleconf.cs.uni-paderborn.de/ . The full guidelines for submissions can be downloaded here.

Conference themes

Conference themes include (but are not limited to):

• Theories and frameworks for Personal Learning Environments
• Technologies and software for developing Personal Learning Environments
• PLEs in Practice (case studies, approaches to using PLEs)
• Educational institutions, change and PLEs
• Pedagogical approaches to managing personal learning
• The development and management of Personal Learning Networks
• Mobile PLEs and augmented reality
• Supporting informal and contextual learning
• Using PLEs in organisations
• Using PLEs for Work Based Learning
• Mash-up PLEs
• Presentation formats
• Future visions:  Quo vadis PLE?

The PLE conference is especially looking for originality and relevancy of ideas and for creative proposals, in both form and content. Formats for publication and communication of research are two different things! Independently of the publication format you decide to contribute, full research paper, workshop etc., the organising committee encourages interactive and creative ways of communicating research.

Hence, we invite you to submit your contribution in the publication format you prefer and select your preference regarding the type of presentation  you wish to make (e.g.: round table discussion, bring your own laptop, cafe session, etc.) in the submission form. Once the review of papers is concluded, presentations will be organised by topics and session chairs will start liaising with participants regarding the organisation of their session. Our goal is to create spaces for meaningful discussions. In short, the purpose is to create opportunities for delegates to interact with each other and achieve real communication. We aim to promote dialogue and interactivity throughout the conference.

We welcome submissions and ideas for videos, photo collages, podcasts,  cartoons, posters – or any other kind of artifacts you can think of. In celebration of User Generated Content we will have a Mediacast Contest during the PLE Conference 2011 with awards for the best three mediacast productions on Personal Learning Environments.

A separate call for pechakucha sessions will be released shortly.

Review Process

All proposals will be subject to a peer review process and all proposals accepted will be published electronically with an ISSN number. In addition to the proceedings, we intend to publish selected conference papers in special editions of the journals that support the conference.
Please note that all submissions should be licensed under a Creative Commons licence.

Each registered participant may submit one full or short paper contribution to the conference, although further proposals in different formats are welcome.

Deadlines

The deadline for proposals is March 26th, 2011.
You will be notified if your submission has been accepted by April 30th.
For those submitting proceedings papers, the deadline for the receipt of the full paper is May 28th.

Final Submission Information

Full Papers
If your abstract is accepted, the full paper should be between 3000 and 5000 words. words (including references, tables and figures).

Short Papers/ Extended Abstracts
The short paper proposals are especially designed to encourage the presentation of work in progress. Short papers should be between 1500 words and 2500 words.

Workshops, Posters, Symposia, Demonstration, Installations, BringYourOwnLaptop sessions and other Formats.
Please submit your proposal indicating that you intend to make a contribution in one of these alternative formats.

The Guardian newspaper points to a so called ‘backlash’ against social networking, expressed in a number of recent academic studies and books. And to an extent, I agree. I suspect the novelty factor has worn off. That does not mean social networking is dead, far from it. But it does mean we are slowly evolving an ecosystem of social networking and I am not sure that the Facebook model, driven by the desire to monetarise a huge user base will survive in the long term.

Instead I see two trends. With applications like Facebook, or whatever succeeds it, friends will return to being friends. People we know, people we want to socialise with, be it family and friends we see regularly face to face or friends in distributed networks.

The second will be the growth of social networks based on shared interests and shared practice. Of course this is nothing new. The early days of the web spawned many wonderful bulletin boards with graphics being based on the imaginative use of different text and fonts. Ning led to the explosion of community sites whilst it remained free. But now we are seeing the evolution of free and open source software providing powerful tools for supporting interest and practice based communities.

Cloudworks, developed by the UK Open University has now released an installable version of their platform. Buddypress seems to have developed a vibrant open source community of developers.And I am greatly impressed by QSDA, the Open Source Question and Answer System. Quora is all the hype now. But like so many of these systems, it will be overrun not so much by machine driven spam, but by the lack of a  shared community and purpose.

According to Ettiene Wenger, a community of practice defines itself along three dimensions:

• What it is about – its joint enterprise as understood and continually renegotiated by its members.
• How it functions – mutual engagement that bind members together into a social entity.
• What capability it has produced – the shared repertoire of communal resources (routines, sensibilities, artefacts, vocabulary, styles, etc.) that members have developed over time.

Open Source networking tools can allow us to support that shared repertoire of communal resources. I am working on the development of open and linked data for careers guidance and counselling. it is a fairly steep learning curve for me in terms of understanding data. And one of the bests sites I have found is Tony Hirst’s Get the Data site, only launched a week ago and based on the QSDA software, but already providing a wealth if freely contributed ideas and knowledge.

it is this sort of development that seems to me to be the future for social networking.

I am not sure if I have published this before! But never mind, it is well worth another view. Wonderful 1988 interview with Isaac Asminov where he talks about the potential of computers for opening learning to everyone. I especially like his understanding of the intrinsic motivation to learn, based on people’s interest and desire for knowledge. Thanks to Tobias Nelkner for sending the link.

I(n the concluding session of the PLE conference last year in Barcelona I made a rash promise. We would go through all the papers submitted to the conference, I said, and for those authors that wished, we would seek to publish the papers in a series of special editions of journal. We had no shortage of journals, with four editions offering us space. then the problems started. it is much, much more work than I had anticipated to select appropriate papers for journals with differing foci, to organise peer reviews, to contact authors and get them to undertake the revisions requested and to finally edit and format the different contributions.

I still am not sure how I feel about the academic publishing industry (for that is what it is). I am much happier with publishing in online and open journals. But I wonder if the traditional journal format best serves knowledge development. However I recognise the i9mportasnce for individual researchers in publishing their work. And although laborious, most of the reviews we received were thoughtful and helpful, although there still remain widespread discrepancies over perceptions of academic quality.

Anyway, here is the first of our edited journals, published by the online and open journal, the Digital Education Review (the second will be in International Journal of Virtual and Personal Learning Environments – to be published this Spring.

The papers in this edition are all from authors working in Spain and the journal was edited by Ricardo Torres and myself

Strategy approach for eLearning 2.0 deployment in Universities

Oskar Casquero, Javier Portillo, Ramón Ovelar, Jesús Romo, Manuel Benito



Ostanio dużo uwagi z perspektywy pedagogiczno-technologicznej poświęcałam tak zwanym grom poważnym (ang. Serious Games). Szczególnie zainteresowały mnie nowsze formy gier poważnych, tzw. gry społecznościowym (ang. Social Games), takie jak CityVille, FarmVille czy FrontierVille firmy Zynga.

W związku z tym, że to mój pierwszy wpis na Paradygmacie 2.0 w nowym roku, pokuszę się o małą prognozę na rok 2011. Zacznę od gier społecznościowych produkowanych przez Zynga, jako dobry przykład na to, jak można wciągnąć  do zabawy miliony ludzi.  Zynga to firma, która stała się popularna przede wszystkim przez gry na Facebooka. Hitem stały się jej gry FarmVille, potem CityVille i FrontierVille. Gra FarmVille Druga polega na prowadzeniu gospodarstwa rolnego wraz z innymi graczami. Aby uzyskać dochody gracze wspólnie uprawiają pola, hodują zwierząta i zbierają plony. CityVille polega na planistycznym i biznesowym budowaniu miasta. Najważniejszym “surowcem” jakiego potrzebują gracze są znajomi – im więcej współgraczy, tym szybciej można rozwinąć miasto. W styczniu 2011 w grze CityVille bierze udział ponad 100 milionów graczy z całgo Świata! Czym tłumaczy się tak wielki sukces tych gier? Chociaż gry takie jak CityVille czy FarmVille przypominają m.in. Sim City, są one o wiele łatwiejsze i nastawione przede wszystkim na społeczność. Gry te nie polegają na interakcji człowiek-komputer, ale na interakcji człowiek-grupa przy pomocy techniki. To znacząca zmiana w dziedzinie gier poważnych.

Innym typem gier społecznościowych to gry z celem edukacyjnym, Gry te nie są ukierunkowane na rozrywkę, co nie oznacza, że nauka nie może być przyjemnością. Wręcz przeciwnie, gry społecznościowe z celem edukacyjnym wykorzystują aspekt rozrywki to przekazywania specyficznych treści, stymulowania podejmowania wyborów i decyzji, rozwiązywanie problemów, zmiany perspektyw lub nastawień.  Do takich gier należą gry ukierunkowane na ważne problemy społeczne takie jak m.in. prawa człowieka, zmiany środowiska, polityka, globalne konflikty czy zdrowie publiczne. Dobrym przykładem producentów takich gier jest organizacja non-profit “Games for Change” . Fundacja ta zaprojektowała nie tylko serię gier (np. 3rd World Farmer, At-Risk czy The Cost of Life, ale też i publiczny zestaw narzędzi (toolkit) do wspierania tworzenia własnych gier.  Również te gry grane są w grupie. O „Games for Change“ pisano ostatnio w Mashable.

Innym ciekawym przykładem jest gra EVOKE, wystartowana przez organizację World Bank, której celem jest walka z biedą, szczególnie w krajach rozwijających się. Gra EVOKE została zaprojektowana z myślą o tym, aby zachęcić młodych ludzi, szczególnie w Afryce, do wspólnego rozwiązywania kluczowych problemów, takich jak głód, bieda, choroby, konflikty, opieka medyczna, szkolnictwo i prawa człowieka. W grze wzięło udział około 20 tysięcy osób z około 150 krajów. Gracze stworzyli  ponad 23 tysiące wpisów na blogi, około 5 tys. zdjęć i ponad 1,500 filmów video.

Te fenomenalne wyniki skłaniają mnie do prognozy na 2011: W grach społecznościowych tkwi potencjał edukacyjny. Gry społecznościowe mogą stać się jednym z najciekawszych trendów w tym roku.

Co o tym sądzicie?

The Facebook privacy arguments won’t go away. In part this is because as a society we are having to rethink what we mean by personal privacy and how much we are prepared to live our lives openly on the net.

And it is also in part because Facebook are keepi9ng the pressure on for ever more disclosure of data. last weekend Facebook announced that it had expanded the information users are able to share with external websites and applications, to include home addresses and mobile phone numbers. True, this had to be authorised but as is often the case the interfaces for doing this were less than clear. In the event Facebook backed off and on Monday announced they were rethinking this feature. But they will be back.

In one of a series of articles she has written on Facebook in the Guardian newspaper, Jemina Kiss explains Facebook’s motivation:

Facebook’s future – if it is to meet the increasingly inflated aspirations of its “incentivised” investors – is to use a combination of its scale and the acres of intimate information it holds about all of us to find the real money in targeted advertising. The strategy is to gradually open our personal data more and more, making open information the norm, desensitising us to any uncomfortable feelings we might have had about our personal data being released into the wild.

And in turn Facebook’s incentivised investors are driven by the aspirations of Facebook to control the social web and eat into Google’s search driven advertising revenue.

This raises a big question. If ‘social’ is indeed the future of the web, do we necessarily have to give over control to a bunch of investors. Is the web just to become one big shopping mall. Or indeed, is that what it is becoming already?

I am ultra impressed by the idea behind the Declare-It web app. The site says

Declare-It is a tool that assists you in creating, tracking and being held accountable to your goals. For every declaration you make, Declare-It requires you to add supporters. Supporters are notified of your declaration and receive progress reports along your journey. If you start to fall off track, your supporters are sent an ALERT message. They can send you comments and even add incentives to help you stay motivated.

Sadly, Declare-It is a commercial site. Although it allows a ten day free trial, it then costs $9.99 per month. And I don’t honestly see enough people being prepared to pay that money for the site to gain critical mass. But the idea is simple enough and could easily be adopted or extended to other web tools.

Essentially all it is saying is that we set our own learning goals and targets and use our Personal Learning Networks for support. Then rather than just selecting friends to monitor our progress and receive alerts when we slip behind, as in the Declare-It app, we could select friends from our Personal Learning Network to support our learning and receive alerts when we achieve something or need collaboration.

Of course many of this will do that already using all kinds of different tools. My learning is work based, and most of this work is undertaken in collaboration with others – using email, forums or very often skype. Having said that I have  never really got on with any of the myriad task setting (lists) and tracking tools and astikll  tend to write my lists on the back of envelopes.

But rather than a separate web site like Declare-IT (which admittedly does have some Twitter and Facebook integration), I need some way of integrating Declare-It type functionality with my everyday workflow. A WordPress plug-in could be wonderful, particularly for project work.