Archive for the ‘communication’ Category

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Work based Personal Learning Environments

July 10th, 2012 by Graham Attwell
Developing Work based Personal Learning Environments in Small and Medium Enterprises
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The Personal Learning Envrinments conference is a flipped conference. Traditional paper sessions are frowned on and presenters are invited to put forward their idea of how to engage participants in teh different sessions. Sessionc hairs are asked to negotiate with presenters. Thus it was that this afternoon I received an email from Linda Castenda who is chairing the session with my paper about Developing work Based Personal Learning Environments.
“Dear authors”, she said, “As you may already now, I’ll be the chair of your session in the PLE Conference in Aveiro. …
We will be together in the A3 session, on the Thursday 11th at 011 O’clock in the room Number 2.

I’m really happy of sharing with you this moment and I hope to have the possibility of trying a different kind of session that help us to find new ways for enriching or work and for find new ways of collaborating together.

I’ve thought on the possibility of organizing a different session, I’m absolutely open to all of your suggestions, but I would like to propose you the following organizing, if you like it:

11:10 to 11:15 Presentation and explanation of the session dynamic  (me).
For it I would love to have a picture of you for including on the presentation.

from 11:15 to 11:45 an “Speed dating” session:
Each paper will be localized in three different “spaces” in the same classroom. The audience will be divided into three groups that will be passing by each paper and  each one of you will have to explain your work in 9 minutes to three different groups of people. After 9 minutes I’ll ring an alarm to change the group.
I know you have to repeat the explanation 3 times, but It would help them to be more close to you and to be more “active” during the explanations. You could use for your presentation a slideshow (in your computer or tablet, a pamphlet, a paper, a trip tic, or whatever you want… BUT taking into account that you are presenting for few people only.
Attendees will have some papers to include questions and comments of the presentations that we will recover after the round of presenting.
If you don’t mind (if you do, please, let it me know)  I will love to record each presentation in video for uploading to the web after the session.

11:50 to 12:05 Panel for answering:
We will try to make a panel with you three and try to answer to questions. I will have also some question for you, only in case you have not any Q from the public

12:05 to 12:30 Conclusions and PLN
After the questions I will ask you for doing a deliverable by paper WITH the attendees… maybe you can think in something to do around your paper (questions, short activity, or whatever) , or maybe we can do something generic… what about a kind of map of relationships between the research presented by you and the attendees research area (including contact details)?

I’m sure it seems a bit complicated, but it would be very active and challenging in order to take advantage of the papers and the groups that are going to be there…”

I am very happy with the idea. But then the problem – I had brought no slides for this session. So in record time I have hacked together a quick presentation and thanks to the speed of teh network here in Aveiro, have got it up on slideshare already.

Posted in communication, Communities of Practice, Competence Development, e-learning 2.0, e-Learning and SMEs, Informal learning, Lifelong learning, Open Educational Resources, Pedagogy, ple, PLEs, PLN, Small and Medium Enterprises, teaching and learning, Wales Wide Web | Comments Off on Work based Personal Learning Environments

The importance of understanding participatory media

November 13th, 2011 by Cristina Costa

For the past 3 1/2 years I have been looking at the impact the web has had on the practices of Academics who are highly engaged in virtual environments. This inevitably takes me to explore the social side of their … Continue reading →

Posted in communication, My Learning Journey, My PhD, networking, open access, social media | Comments Off on The importance of understanding participatory media

Personal Branding, Digital Scholarship, and that thing called PhD

March 27th, 2011 by Cristina Costa

I have been meaning to blog. I actually feel the need, but in the end it’s a bit like sport. The more you do it, the more energy you find to keep doing it. Once you start ‘tricking’ the routine, … Continue reading →

Posted in Collaboration, communication, Digital Literacy, My Learning Journey, My PhD, networking, PhD, social media, twitter, web 2.0 | Comments Off on Personal Branding, Digital Scholarship, and that thing called PhD

the big BUT

December 12th, 2010 by Cristina Costa

There is a question that has been populating my mind lately. It is the one Cameron Neylon posed to the audience in his talk at the Research Information  Network event a month or so ago. It was something like: What … Continue reading →

Posted in communication, My Learning Journey, open access, research, social media | Comments Off on the big BUT

A week of events

October 30th, 2010 by Cristina Costa

It started on Monday and it only stopped on Friday. It was literally a week full of events worth writing home about! And I just wish the days were longer or I could cope without sleeping! Yes, I do sleep, … Continue reading →

Posted in Collaboration, communication, My Learning Journey, My PhD, networking, social media | Comments Off on A week of events

How to live stream events

September 5th, 2010 by Graham Attwell

I talked in previous posts about our work with the European Conference on Educational Research to ‘amplify’ the conference, recently held in Vienna. This involved setting up various social media channels including a Twitter stream and a iTunesU page, producing a series of video interviews with conveners of the different networks which organise ECER and b9radcasting three live radio shows from the conference.

We also undertook to stream four keynote speeches, run in two parallel sessions as well as the opening. Easy, I thought. Like many of you I have live streamed from different events, pointing a camera or even a MacBook at the speaker and linking in to  uStream or Justin.tv or one of the other social video platforms. It turned out not to be so simple.

We were working with a community not generally used to social media. And quite simply, the idea of pointing them to a platform advertising poker, acne treatments didn’t seem a good idea. Plus we had an issue with the reliability and quality of the free services. Livestream looked a better idea especially though their premium accounts. This allows you to have your own channel and remove the adverts.but a single channel on Livestream costs 350 dollars a month, with twelve months billing in advance. And we needed two channels. Back to the drawing board. We discovered that Ustream has set up another service called Watershed and indeed for a time were tempted by this. Watershed offers per view payments, but the prices are relatively high. And the terms and conditions of service for the monthly or annual contracts was impenetrable. No problem, we thought, we will ring them and clarify the conditions. Then we discovered there was no telephone number on their site. All you cold do was ask questions on a bulletin board, largely filled with complaints about the service and the total lack of technical support.

OK – so that didn’t seem such a good idea. Last resort – ask a friend. I twittered out for anyone with ideas of a service we could use. And somewhat to my surprise, no-one could come up with a solution, other than the services we had already looked at.

Back to searching on the Internet. Of course there are many companies offering professional streaming services but they all seem geared towards corporate or media organisations, not towards education or for relatively low numbers of live viewers.

I finally stumbled on a web site from a Canadian company called NetroMedia. Their prices were not clear but they said that for one off events you could fill in a query form. So I did, not with any great hope. To my surprise about half an hour later, I had an email reply asking for more details about the event I wished to stream. And to my even greater surprise, some forty minutes after returning this a person rang me. Yes, a real live person!!!

She calculated how much bandwidth we would need and offered us a service for 100 Canadian dollars, plus 20 dollars for unlimited technical support. (Note that if you buy into this or a similar service, it is important to buy sufficient bandwidth in advance, extra bandwidth per view is relatively expensive). Woo, away we go. Even better some twenty minutes after paying them, Darren, the technical support man rung us. This was very helpful, because although the set up is relatively simple, we required two video streams going out simultaneously, and that required a little fiddling.

NetroMedia do not offer a portal for streams. Instead they provide a streaming service and you embed a Flash video player in your own web site. This suited us just fine. The up stream was encoded through the free Adobe Flash Media Encoder, which worked well on both a PC and a Mac. The only thing I would like is to have more direction control over what we were streaming – e.g to be able to switch between a feed from the data projector and the video but I am sure we can work out how to do that. I am very happy with the quality of the streaming (you can view the recordings by clicking on read more on each of the channels on the ECER video streaming web page) although we were helped in this regard by the kind loan from Helsinki University of two very good video cameras.

Of course, if you are working in a University or large organisation, you may be able to run your own streaming server.But such an investment is beyond Pontydysgu, or I guess many small organisations. Yet video streaming is going to be an important part of Amplifying future events. And we need a reliable and reasonable quality of service.  I would certainly go to Netromedia again. But I also wonder if there is some way we could collectively organise resources for streaming in the educational technology community to both share know-how and expertise and infrastructure.

Posted in communication, ECER 2010, How to do, Library 2.0, technologies, Wales Wide Web | 11 Comments »

Academic publishing

July 24th, 2010 by Cristina Costa

I am finally making sense of the notes I took while in the summer school. Once I fully recover from all the traveling, and provided I survive my interim assessment, I might post something about effective writing, which was what made me apply for that summer school in the first place. Today however, I want […]

Posted in communication, My Learning Journey, open access, research | Comments Off on Academic publishing

Wirtualne warszaty i mapa myśli

July 1st, 2010 by Ilona Buchem

Moi drodzy, już niedługo już za momencik odbędzie się PLE konferencja #PLE_BCN w Barcelonie (8-9 lipca), którą przygotowujemy już od dawna (od dobrych 7 miesięcy). Właśnie dopinam wszystko do końca – przygotowywuję newsletter, prezentację na pecha kucha no i na warsztaty, które poprowadzę wraz z Cristina Costa (UK), Wolfgang Reinhardt (DE) i George Couros (CA) na temat definicji konceptu osobistych środowisk uczenia się. Tutaj możecie zobaczyć początkową kolekcję definicji. Warsztaty te będą miały formę „collaborative mind mapping“, czyli wspólne tworzenie mapy myśli w grupie realne i wirtualnej. W tym celu będziemy posługiwać się programem mindmeister, który daje bardzo wiele możliwści wspólnego tworzenia map myśli w tym samym czasie i asynchronicznie. Zarówno uczestnicy konferencji, jak i wszystkie inne osoby, które mają dostęp do Internetu i konto w minmeister bedą mogły uczestniczyć w tych warsztatach! Także zapraszam Was wszystkich serdecznie do brania udziału i tworzenia wspólnej mapy myśli! Warsztaty te odbędą sie w piątek, 9 lipca 15:45 do 17:00. We wtorek podam na tej stronie linka do początkowej mapy myśli i hasło do zalogowania się w piątek … ciąg dalszy nastąpi …

Posted in Collaboration, communication, e-learning 2.0, Open Learning, paradygmat, ple, PLE2010, social media, socialmedia, web 2.0 | Comments Off on Wirtualne warszaty i mapa myśli

Critical Literacies, Pragmatics and Education

June 17th, 2010 by Graham Attwell
Pragmatics in Education

View more webinars from GrahamAttwell.

Yesterday, together with my colleague Jenny Hughes, I made a presentation to participants in the Critical Literacies course being run by Rita Kop and Stephen Downes as part of their ongoing research project on Personal Learning Environments.

The course blog says: “Technology has brought changes to the way people learn and some “critical literacies” are becoming increasingly important. This course is about these critical literacies. Critical, as the course is not just about finding out how to use the latest technologies for learning, but to look critically at the Web and its underlying structures. Literacies, as it is more about capabilities to be developed than about the acquisition of a set of skills. It is all about learning what is needed to develop confidence and competence, and to feel capable of negotiating an ever changing information and media landscape.”

Our presentation was on pragmatics. Pragmatics, we said is a sub field of linguistics which studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning.

Today we have made a short version of the presentation as a slidecast. In the presentation we explore different ideas about context in education. In the final part of the presentation we look at Personal Learning Environments and how they relate to issues of meaning and context.

The introductory and end music is from an album called Earth by zero-project. it can be downloaded from the excellent Jamendo web site.

Posted in communication, Communities of Practice, e-learning 2.0, Knowledge development, learning 2.0, Mature, networking, networking culture, PLEs, Podcast, Social networking, teaching and learning, Wales Wide Web | 8 Comments »

Writing plain English

June 15th, 2010 by Graham Attwell

For my sins I often am asked to review papers for conferences, books and journals. I think this is fair as a contribution to an emerging community of practice but i can’t say I enjoy the process. I find it very hard to decide what should be the standard and am worried that I am being fair to authors who have obviously invested a lot of time and effort into their research and writing. I struggle even more if the author is writing in a second or third language. How important is the standard of the English? And how much should style count towards the review?

One thing that does annoy me is the throwing around of unreferenced assertions. All these example are taken from papers I have reviewed recently:

“Many researchers say…… ”

“It is unquestionable that…..”

“Most students are…….”

“We have rapidly come to a point where….”

“There is a perception that….”

I like papers with attitude. And papers jammed full of references at the end of every sentence are extremely hard to read. Even so, I think that assertions of this kind need some evidence to back them up. Furthermore what does ‘most’ or ‘many’ mean.

In that respect I like the approach of the Welsh agency, Estyn. The purpose of Estyn is to inspect quality and standards in education and training in Wales. Estyn’s reports follow its guidance for the writing and editing of reports, which is available on the Estyn website (www.estyn.gov.uk). Estyn also publish a table, reproduced below, in the introduction to their reports, showing the terms that Estyn uses and a broad idea of their meaning. Whilst such an approach may seem pedantic, it greatly helps in understanding what they are saying .

Posted in academia, Academic researchers, communication, Wales Wide Web | 1 Comment »

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