Great graphics from Ken Robinson on the changing face of education
Loved this video – especially the stop motion animation. Content remarkably similar to a few Pontydysgu presentations. Ah well! Great minds ….
Here is the podacst of our second programme from the PLE-Conference in Southampton.
You can find the music we played here on Jamendo. It is the album “Dresses & dreams” by the artist On returning from Tranås, Sweden.
Like in the last year at the 1. PLE-Conference in Barcelona we broadcasted again from this years’ PLE-Conference in Southampton, UK. We made two 30 minutes programmes and tried to catch the vivid spirit and most important content of this great conference. Here now the show of day 1 as podcast.
It is conference season. Today marks the start of the PLE2011 conference in London. Together with Andrew Ravenscroft, Dirk Stieglitz and David Blagborough, I am presenting a paper with the snappy name ‘‘Jam Hot!’ Personalised radio ciphers through augmented social media for the transformational learning of disadvantaged young people.’
Although the paper is very much a work in progress, there are a series of ideas here which I find interesting and will return to on this blog in the future. In the meantime any feedback very welcome.
Here at Pontydysgu HQ, we cannot pretend to be that sorry over the demise of News of the World newspaper. But I can’t help thinking the issues run wider than corrupt journalists from one newpaper group hacking into phone and email accounts. This video shows the issues about concentration of media ownership. But what kind of media do we want for the future.? How (if at all) should the media be regulated? And by whom and in whose interests? This debate is just starting.
The full schedule for the Sounds of the Bazaar LIVE internet Radio broadcasts has been released.
Personal Learning Environments Conference, Southampton, England
Tuesday 12 July 1330 – 1400 UK, 1430 – 1500 CET
Wednesday 13 July, 1330 – 1400 UK, 1430 – 1500 CET
RadioActive, Hackney, London
Friday 15 July 1530 – 1600 UK, 1630 – 1700 CET
Gary Chapman International School, Porto, Portugal
Week beginning 18 July (times to be announced)
SMIAF – the San Marino Arts Festival
Saturday 6 August (time ot be announced)
Sunday 7 August (time to be announced)
To listen to any of the programmes just go to http://cp2.internet-radio.org.uk/start/ravenscroft/
You can listen direct from this web page or open the stream in the music player of your choice.
For more details click here.
It is becoming a bit of a tradition that every summer the Sounds of the Bazaar Internet Radio show goes on tour. This year is no exception. And we have lined up a brilliant schedule over the next month including live coverage from conferences, workshops, summer schools and festivals spanning four countries.
To listen to any of the programmes just go to http://cp2.internet-radio.org.uk/start/ravenscroft/
You can listen direct from this web page or open the stream in the music player of your choice.
We kick off next week from the Personal Learning Environments Conference in Southampton, England (#PLE_SOU) with two lunch time shows. We wil be broadcasting live interveiws, vox pops and bringing you the best of the conference live from Southampton. The shows run from from 1330 – 1400 UK Summer Time (1430 – 1500 Central European Time) on Tuesday 12 and Wednesday 13 July.
On Friday 15 July, we have a special broadcast being produced as part of a workshop with Inspire! the Education Business Partnership for Hackney, the Yo youth agency and the University of East London and sponsored by the RadioActive and G8WAY projects. More on this soon but it promises to be great fun. The programme goes out from 1530 – 1600 UK Summer Time (1630 – 1700 Central European Summer Time).
The following week we will be broadcasting LIVE from the Gary Chapman International School on Digital Transformation in Porto, an event jointly organised between the University of Porto and the University of Texas.
The summer school themes are
Details of the radio show are still being finalised but we can promise you some surprise guests along with great interveiws and content for anyone intersted in digital media.
And the last stage of our summer tour takes us to SMIAF – the San Marino Arts Festival where we will be running workshops and broadcasting live from one of the city squares. If you are interested in getting involved here are more details:
Graham Attwell (UK) & Dirk Stieglitz (DE) di “Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning” e della web radio: “Sounds of the Bazaar” condurranno il workshop in occasione dello SMIAF 2011.
Insieme a loro si capirà come costruire una web radio, come produrre il materiale per il broadcasting e tutto quello che serve per trasmettere.
Il workshop prevede due incontri:
Venerdì pomeriggio a partire dalle ore 15
Sabato mattina alle ore 10,30.***Si richiede ai partecipanti un pc, mac, laptop…personale.
Lo SMIAF non fornisce computer ma solo la connessione WIFI, gentilmente concessa da PRIMA s.r.l.Dopo il workshop..anche broadcasting in diretta:
Sabato 6 e domenica 7 agosto in occasione dello SMIAF si potrà dare vita alla prima SMIAF web radio e trasmettere in diretta da P.zza S.Agata durante il Festival.
I partecipanti al workshop e anche al festival sono liberi di trasmettere musica, interviste, e tutto quello che ritengono bello ed interessante per quei giorni.Per iscrizioni al workshop, invia una email a: smiaf.giovanisaperi@gmail.com
Don’t miss these shows – there will be lots of room for participation and we are looking forward to a great summer radio tour.
The story on innovation cultures in Greece, based on research undertaken in 2001 and published last week on the WalesWideWeb, has received favorable feedback. But of course this research does not just refer to Greece, it is directly relevant to what is happening today in England.
Government policies to cut education expenditure and effectively privatise universities have great repercussions for the future of innovation and innovation cultures for years to come. There is little evidence that similar moves in the USA have stimulated innovation indeed quite the reverse. More effective in policy terms is the reaction of Germany to the crisis, who, even with a conservative government, have increased the number of university places and boosted research funding as a move to stimulate the economy and secure future employment.
The UK government actions are not just because of a spending deficit. They are born out of an ideological attachment to the private for profit sector. It seems unlikely that handing over swathes of the education sector to the private sector will do anything for quality. Of course it will reduce access to education for those less well off. But ultimately it threatens to damage the contribution that research makes to economic and social innovation. Where Greece goes today, will the UK go tomorrow? Or will the UK just become a nation of stockbrokers?
Like many of you I guess, I have been playing around with Google+ this weekend. And, unlike the clunky experience when Wave first came out, it is fun. Google seem to have got it more or less right in judging when to make a new app at least partly open to the world. Too soon, it doesn’t work and puts people off. Too late, not enough user feedback to be able to judge whether you are going in the right direction.
Google+ has four main ‘areas’. Like most social software interfaces it provides an activity stream but with the ability to switch between different ‘group’ views. These groups are set up through Circles which provides a visual interface to grouping your social network. the interface is pretty intuitive, although it looks far better on my large screen iMac than on my notebook. Working out how to group different contacts is another questions though. I guess I would like the ability to set up subcircles, so I could put all my project colleagues in a circle called projects, and then sub circles for each different project (although you can add people into as many circles as you like already.
Sparks is a little underwhelming, providing essentially access to saved searches, but with little functionality, for instance the features of advanced search, or the ability to add RSS feeds.
Hangout is cool, providing audio and video as well as text conferencing based on a circle or individual members of a circle. I have only tried it with one person so far and the interface and quality was stunning. Be interesting what it looks like with more people. It needs more functionality such as the ability to share files and to share urls and well as just Youtube video but i guess that will be added to in the next few days.
The interface is very clean free of all the usual Facebook clutter. And at the moment it is advert free, though I can’t see that surviving long term. At the moment it is rather sealed off but rumour says Google have develop a full API for + which will be rolled out at some point. Picasso is also built in with a free 7MB storage area for photos.
Perhaps most refreshing is that Google seem to have learned the lesson from Facebook about ownership and privacy. Content is owned by the user and you can get your content out of the application. That is vital for use in education.
And Google+ provides fine grained privacy with the ability to decide who you share with on an action by action basis.
The only thing I have struggled with is the Android App. The reviews say it is very good but I can’t persuade it to conect with my .mac account, rather than my gmail account, which I only use occasionally.
Who is it for? The press reviews tend to think Google is taking on Facebook directly. I am not so sure. Only last week I speculated that the real target for many new social networking apps is the enterprise market, previously the preserve of smaller social networking companies such as Yammer. And linked to Google docs and other cloud services (I assume there will be some levels of integration int he near future) Google+ looks a good contender. Whilst Facebook is a good market place for advertising and publicity, be it for enterprises or education, its shortcomings in terms of ownership and privacy really make it a non starter as far as serious social networking goes. Will people trust Google? I guess it largely depends how they behave. But so far they seem to have learned the lesson from previous less successful ventures into the social networking jungle, and are playing up the privacy aspects of +.
Next week Facebook are expected to hit back with a release of Skype for Facebook. But Skype is now owned by Microsoft and I can’t help thinking Google have timed this well in terms of offering a simple to use free service for video and audio conferencing. Certainly I am going to give it a go for project meetings. The world of social networking is certainly not dull at the moment!
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Free digital content
From a Jisc press release:
Over 14,000 items of archived TV footage from 17 European countries are now available via the EUscreen online portal for teaching, research and general interest.
EUscreen – the result of a collaboration between 36 partners across Europe – provides a rich insight into Europe’s television heritage with content dating from the 1920s to the present day.
The portal includes rare footage and commentary on key events in history, including a 1962 interview with Martin Luther King about racial discrimination in the US.
John Ellis, Professor of Media Arts at Royal Holloway and principal investigator on the EUscreen project, said: “This is a valuable resource for anyone interested in social history or indeed TV history, as it brings together tens of thousands of clips from across Europe. The portal is available to anyone (not only academics) and it is very easy to get absorbed and spend hours browsing all of the footage.”
The expansive footage has also proved popular as a learning aid for foreign language students, with clips available in 14 languages.
By the end of September 2012, there will be around 30,000 items of digital content freely available on the portal as the European providers continue to add carefully selected material.
Open online seminar
Jisc are hosting an open, online seminar on ‘Making Assessment Count (MAC)’ on Friday 3rd Feb – 1-2pm. The presenters are Professor Peter Chatterton (Daedalus e-World Ltd) and Professor Gunter Saunders (University of Westminster).
The mailing for the seminar says” “The objective of Making Assessment Count is primarily to help students engage more closely with the assessment process, either at the stage where they are addressing an assignment or at the stage when they receive feedback on a completed assignment. In addition an underlying theme of MAC is to use technology to help connect student reflections on their assessment with their tutors. To facilitate the reflection aspect of MAC a web based tool called e-Reflect is often used. This tool enables the authoring of self-review questionnaires by tutors for students. On completion of an e-Reflect questionnaire a report is generated for the student containing responses that are linked to the options the student selected on the questionnaire.”
You can find out more ans sign up for the seminar at http://jiscmac.eventbrite.co.uk/
EC-TEL 2012
The EC-TEL 2012: Seventh European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning 21st Century Learning for 21st Century Skills takes place on 18-21 September 2012 at Saarbrücken in Germany.
The focus for the conference includes:
- How can schools prepare young people for the technology-rich workplace of the future?
- How can we use technology to promote informal and independent learning outside traditional educational settings?
- How can we use next generation social and mobile technologies to promote informal and responsive learning?
The deadline for proposals is April 2.
Visitors and Residents
David White (University of Oxford) and Dr. Lynn Silipigni Connaway (OCLC) have been attracting quite a stir with their JISC-funded work on Visitors and Residents: What Motivates Engagement with the Digital Information Environment?, being undertaken as part of the Developing Digital Literacies programme webinar series.
Slides, audio and a recording of the Blackboard Collaborate session where they presented some of the findings of their work can be found at http://bit.ly/jiscdiglitvr.
The keynotes, videos, radio shows and interviews from the ECER 2010 Conference in Helsinki:
Here you find the Taccle handbook for teachers order form.
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Our next programmes will be live from the German Moodlemoot in Emsden. Full details coming soon
