It has been silent here for a while, which has to do with the ongoing research and teaching activities related to new projects such as the research project „MediaArt@Edu“ (ACRONYM), which looks at artistic approaches to support media literacy of young people in vocational preparation and vocational orientation programs.
It aims to develop new concepts to enhance digital media skills of young people. The project is co-ordinated by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology’s Institute of Vocational and General Education and realised in collaboration with the Center for Art and Media ZKM’s department of Museum Communication, the German Federal Agency of Employment Karlsruhe as well as the Hardtstiftung e.V. Karlsruhe, a youth welfare service for young women.

The project is funded for 3 years under the German research programme entitled „strengthening media skills for sustainable media education in vocational qualification” of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).
It aims to scrutinize artistic approaches and new mentoring and portfolio concepts to be applied in media technology education with young participants of vocational preparation and vocational orientation programs. In vocational preparation measures outside of vocational schools, young people are prepared for work or to take up a formal vocational training place. They are placed in a transit situation, hoping to get employed in the future.
However, in the project, a new concept to support digital media literacy of young people is developed, tested and evaluated. It brings together concepts of art, technology and vocational education as well as a specific mentoring model including portfolio research books to improve processes of self-reflexion of the learners.

In the project students of pedagogy, vocational education, engineering pedagogy as well as art and technology education accompany the young participants of vocational preparation programs. We intend to realize an education-through-art approach to technology by means of introducing artistic processes with digital media as well as didactic concepts of art education to vocational preparation. By improving media literacy of the young participants, the project aims to motivate them imagining and shaping pathways towards their own vocational biography and a perspective of future employment.

For further information, the (German) Web site can be accessed at http://www.ibp.kit.edu/berufspaedagogik/media-art-edu.php
English information will be available soon as well.

For those of you interested in smart textile and low cost wearables as an artistic context to engage young women in technology and engineering in education, feel free to check the International Journal of Art, Culture and Design Technologies (IJACDT), ISSUE ON CREATIVITY, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGIES CULTURES edited by Gianluca Mura (2011), p. 12-21. You can access the abstract here, or view a sample PDF here. The Guest Editorial Preface by Gianluca Mura, Politecnico di Milano University, Italy can be accessed here. You might as well like to refer the Journal (IJACDT) to a Librarian via this link.

“The International Journal of Art, Culture and Design Technologies (IJACDT) links art, design, science, and culture with emerging technologies. IJACDT provides a forum for exchanging ideas and findings from researchers across the design, arts, and technology disciplines. This journal covers theoretical and practice experiences among industrial design fields, architecture, art, computer science, psychology, cognitive sciences, humanities, cultural heritage, and related fields. IJACDT presents different arguments within project culture from the historical, critical, philosophical, rhetorical, creative, pedagogic, and professional points of view.”

Labour Market Visualisation Tools

We are developing tools and applications for visualising Labour Market Information in order to provide young people with an informed basis for decision making around career directions and to support the careers guidance professionals who advise young people. This work has been undertaken in conjunction with the Institute for Employment Research, University of Warwick and Careers Wales.

RadioActive

RadioActive is a project using internet radio to assist young people, particularly those from a NEETS (Not in Employment, Education, or Training) background in developing decision making and communication skills. This approach focuses on informal learning and the development of communities of practice through the use of new technologies. The approach is being piloted in conjunction with the University of East London, Yoh, a Hackney based youth agency, and Inspire!, the Education Business Partnership for the London Borough of Hackney.

Storiboard

Storiboard is a Web 2.0 tool for storytelling. In the first year of the G8WAY project we found that storytelling is a powerful tool for developing and reflection on careers biographies. Storiboard allows young people to use multimedia including video, audio and graphics to tell their careers stories and aspirations. It is initially being tested  through using the original stories collected in year one of the project and will then be piloted with UK based careers services.

Webquests

We are developing a series of Web 2.0 webquests designed to support professional development for Careers Guidance professionals. The first two are on the use of the internet for Careers Guidance and on careers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM). Along with our technical partners, Raycom, we are developing a lightweight repository which combined with the Storiboard interface, will provide for easy editing and development of Webquests.

• romantic (ecological humanist): concerned with personal development, growth and well-being of individual academics within the organisation
• interpretive-hermeneutic: working towards new shared insights and practice through a dialectic approach of intelligent conversation
• reflective practitioner: fostering a culture of self- or mutually critical reflection on the part of colleagues in order to achieve continuous improvement

Vogel says “good practice in e-learning is context-specific and impossible to define.” She is concerned that professional development practices have been driven by institutional and technological concerns. Instead she would prefer Argyis and Schon’s (1974) approach to overcoming the divide between espoused theories or beliefs and theories in use or practice:
“Educating students under the conditions that we are suggesting requires competent teachers at the forefront of their field – teachers who are secure enough to recognize and not be threatened by the lack of consensus about competent practice.”
Vogel refers to Browne (2008) who undertook a survey of technology enhanced elearning in Higher Education in the UK. They found that where there was “less extensive use of technology-enhanced learning tools than [the] institutional norm”, this was often because of the perceived irrelevance of TEL to the learning and teaching approach.
Interestingly, where there was more extensive use than the norm, this was primarily attributed to the presence of a champion, who could represent the value of TEL to colleagues..
One of the issues related to teachers disposition appears to be that of time. As long ago as 1998,  Conole and Oliver (1998) said that the demands of technology enhanced learning on time had already been recognised for many years.
Another issue may be the way in which technology is introduced into schools and colleges. Often this is through projects. However the Jisc funded Flourish project suggested that a ‘project’ is not necessarily the best method for introducing a change on this scale. “Staff perceptions of a project mean that they are cautious and unwilling to be the test case, especially when they are taking time to document their own development. There have to be tangible and immediate benefits to engaging in this new way of working.”

References to Follow

Its been a week off from the blog. Following the PLE2010 conference in Barcelona I took a short holiday. And since I have been back I have been fighting (unsuccessfully) a power failure in my office. So now I am squatting in a friend’s house and using my laptop.

I have much to say about the PLE2010 conference – I am not quite sure where to start.

Firstly it was a truly social conference – social in the both face to face and distant participants were involved in the different sessions. Social too, in the way the pre-conference discussions ran into the conference proper and then into the discussions at coffee breaks and in the evening. The formal conference was just one part of the whole event. And social in the use of media. Besides the live streaming of many sessions, it woudl appear the conference generated over 5000 tweets on the first day (the tweets are archived here).Indeed, for many of us it was the first chance to meet face to face people we have been collaborating with on line for a long time.

Much of this was down to the design of the conference. the pre-conference publicity and discuxxiosn had been focused on social media and in particualr twitter. And the programme design, from unkeynotes to cafe style sessions, debates amnd workshops, was signed to facilitate social interaction and participation. And it is encouraging that many have said they will relook at how they are organising conferences and draw on our ideas.

But what about the ideas? Firstly it was very heartening to see that we seemed to have moved beyond the stage of defining a PLE by what it is not i.e. not a VLE. Instead participants were looking outwards, at how to support learning. I am not sure how much we shared common understandings and meanings around PLEs (sadly I cannot find a record of the session which tried to arrive at such a common definition) but there seemed sufficient understanding for common debates.

One controversial issue was how far it was possible to provide an institutional PLE. This debate was driven by the folks from SAPO Campus in Portugal who are trying to do just that (and still managing to find time for late night and in depth analysis of the failings of the Portugese football team!). My own take is that I do not mind where the tools for a PLE come from as long as the leaner is in control.

Two ‘discourses’ particularly heartened me. The first was between educational researchers and practitioners and software and technical developers. This is an oft troubled discourse in the ed tech community. It may be that the common understandings around the idea of a PLE are allowing these different groups to work together in new ways. I particularly enjoyed the session on using Google Wave as a PLE and was impressed by the Talkingabout video sharing site. But what charatcterised these ideas – as in others I could not attend but heard from others about – was the innovation in appropriating technologies for pedagogic innovation.

Another – and more problematic but recurrent discourse was the issue of motivation. Participants were trying to develop PLEs with students inside the schooling and university systems. But surveys and anecdotal evidence suggests students are wary being overly focused on what work they need to do to pass exams, rather than exploring ideas and learning. And most students view direct didactic teaching as the best approach to passing their exams. As such they have little time for reflection or indeed little understanding as to why they should engage in such activity. This is problematic. We may consider their longer term learning important and thus view the development of meta-cognition and problem solving a priority. But perhaps inevitably under the present education systems their major concern is just to jump the next hurdle in the education race.

My only personal disappointment was that the major focus for PLE development and implementation for the vast majority of participants was for learners within schools and universities. There was limited interest in work based learning or in learning outside teh existing systems – the very areas where I think PLEs have the greatest potential.

Indeed, I think we have to consider the wider issue of where to locate the PLE debate. Clearly it is not just another instance of educational technology. But neither can it be easily subsumed in considerations of pedagogic approaches to the use of ICT for learning. I increasingly feel that the whole issue of PLEs is closely related to the ongoing discussions around open education. The very promise of PLEs is to understand the use of technology for learning in a new way, in a context where learning becomes part of society and is free and open to all.

But now there is a lot of work to be done. We have over 70 papers and many offers of publications. Most participants seemed to assume that PLE2011 was already on the cards (watch this blog for more news on that). And the bigger question is how we can use the ideas and networks generated by the conference to build a collective community of practice based on networking and sharing. Any thoughts or ideas  very welcome.

But, on Monday, I was luck enough to be invited by my friend Magda Balica to the university who teaches a seminar based course on pedagogy.

This week she was looking at the use of mindmaps and she set the students a groupwork task to draw a mindmap with ‘learning; at the centre. I was extremely impressed with the results, and als0 with the willingness of a number of the groups to produce the maps and report on them in English for my benefit.

It was interesting that most of the groups recognised the diverse sources of learning and the different contexts in which they learnt. Interesting too, and less encouraging, was how separated the different contexts appeared to be. If joined at all, learning from different sources and contexts was seen as mediated, for instance by friends or classmates. The students were in general fairly scathing about the quality of formal education in schools in Romania, although I am doubtful that the response of German or UK students would be much different.

These were some of the comments in their report backs, as recorded in twitter:

• Student in Romania – fame is important as the result of your learning and career – recognition
• Student in Romania – you can live more from life than from school
• Student in Bucharest – we want to leave Romania – we have no education, no health system, just a promise of improvement
• Student in Bucharest – in school we learn as little as we can

Although many of the students had Facebook accounts, none had seen Twitter before and there was general excitement about getting ‘real time’ feedback from people in different countries.

Anyway, I promised to post the mindmaps on this blog (click on any of the photos below for a larger version). Thanks to all who made my stay in Romania so interesting and enjoyable.

The summer school is being organised by the Stellar network and proposals were asked to explain how they contribute to the network’s three Grand Challenges:

• Connecting learners
• Orchestrating learning
• Contextualising learning environments

So here’s my proposal. I enjoyed writing it and if anyone else is interested in us running such a workshop juts get in touch.

Short description

The workshop will focus on the use of internet radio in education.

1) An exploration of the use of media (and particularly internet radio and television) for learning and shared knowledge developmentThis will include looking at issues such as:

a) The appropriation of media

b) The change from passive media to interactive Web 2.0 supported media and the changing distinctions between broadcaster/program planner and listener/consumer.

c) How media such as radio can support the development of online communities

d) The use of media to bridge contexts and provide spaces for exploration and shared meaning making.

2) A practical hands on session on how to plan develop and broadcast live internet media. This will include storyboarding, interviewing, finding Creative Commons licensed music, making jingles, mixing and post processing, directing and producing and using the technology for live broadcasts.

3) The third session is planned to take place in a lunchtime or evening session. This will be a live 45 minute to one hour broadcast “Sounds of the Bazaar – Live from Ohrid”. It is hoped to involve all summer school participants in the broadcast. The broadcast will be publicised in advance through iTunes, Facebook, Twitter and other social software platforms. It is also intended to use the boradcast to link to other researchers in TEL from around the world not able to be at the summer school. The programme will be recorded and made available through the Summer School web site, the Mature project web site, the Pontydysgu web site and through iTunes.

Contribution to the Grand Challenges agenda

The workshop is primarily designed to contribute to the Grand Challenge of Contextualising virtual learning environments and instrumentalising learning contexts.

Live internet radio provides both a shared context and space for learning, with universal reach outside of institutional or national boundaries, whilst at the same time allowing individual to collectively contribute to the development of shared artefacts, which in themselves can become part of the repertoire of a community of practice. Radio also offers a means of actively engaging learners in a community and through appropriation of what was a push (or broadcast) media, through merging with Web 2.0 tools and standards allows community participation and self expression.

The LMLG comprises an international, interdisciplinary group of researchers from the fields of educational, media and cultural studies, social semiotics and educational technology. The aim of the workshop was to augment the work of the LMLG, in particular around its socio-cultural ecology, and to extend the interdisciplinary nature of its work through exposure to perspectives advanced by (TEL) researchers in cognate fields from across Europe and the US, in particular in relation to design-based approaches.

This blog is an edited verion of Norbert’s report on the workshop. The full report will be published as part of proceedings of the workshop will be published as a Special Issue of the International Journal of Mobile and Blended Learning in 2010 guest edited by Norbert Pachler.

For me, one of the most interesting points about the recent debate around Open education is the exploration of the links between theory and practice. I have been long frustrated by the paucity of theory in the area of Technology Enhanced Education. and it is apparent that if we are to develop a convincing body of theory which can properly inform and reflect practice, it is necessary to engage in a multi-disciplinary discourse with researchers and practitioners coming from different fields of study and action.

The workshop in Garmisch comprised of an attempt at developing such a discourse and whilst the findings may represent only our early efforts to understand each other, I valued the opportunity to take part in such a discussion.

Norbert says:

“The LMLG sees learning using mobile devices governed by a triangular relationship between socio-cultural structures, cultural practices and the agency of media users / learners, represented in the three domains. The interrelationship of these three components: agency, the user’s capacity to act on the world, cultural practices, the routines users engage in their everyday lives, and the socio-cultural and technological structures that govern their being in the world, we see as an ecology, which in turn manifests itself in the form of an emerging cultural transformation. Another significant trend, which requires pedagogical responses, is the prevalence of what we call ‘user-generated contexts’. We are currently witnessing a significant shift away from traditional forms of mass communication and editorial push towards user-generated content and individualised communication contexts. These structural changes to mass communication also affect the agency of the user and their relationship with traditional and new media. Indeed, the LMLG argues that users are now actively engaged in shaping their own forms of individualised generation of contexts for learning through individualised communication contexts. New relationships between context and production are emerging in that mobile devices not only enable the production of content but also of contexts. They position the user in new relationships with space, i.e. the outer world, and place, i.e. social space. Mobile devices enable and foster the broadening and breaking up of genres. Citizens become content producers who are part of an explosion of activity in the area of user-generated content. What are the implications for education?

The workshop inter alia sought to explore the following questions and issues:

• Learning as a process of meaning-making for the LMLG occurs through acts of communication, which take place within rapidly changing socio-cultural, mass communication and technological structures. Does the notion of learner-generated cultural resources represent a sustainable paradigm shift for formal education in which learning is viewed in categories of context and not content? What are the issues in terms of ‘text’ production in terms of modes of representation, (re)contextualisation and conceptions of literacy? Who decides/redefines what it means to have coherence in contemporary interaction?
• What synergies are there between the socio-cultural ecological approach to mobile learning, which the LMLG developed (see Pachler, Bachmair and Cook, 2010), with paradigms put forward by different (TEL) research communities in Europe and beyond?
• What relationship is there between user-generated content, user-generated contexts and learning? How can educational institutions cope with the more informal communicative approaches to digital interactions that new generations of learners possess?
• What pedagogical parameters are there in response to the significant transformation of society, culture and education currently taking place alongside technological innovation?

Position papers and questions for discussion were made available in advance of the workshop on Google Groups as well as Cloudworks. During the workshop contributors’ presentations were added and participants in Garmisch and beyond contributed to the discussion on Cloudworks as well as on Twitter.

Key messages from the workshop:

The mixture of theory and practice was felt to have worked well and to have been fruitful particularly in view of a potential chasm developing between the research community and the policy and practitioner communities in the field of mobile learning.

The workshop underlined the importance of definitional clarity around key terminology, particular in the context of interdisciplinary work in an international context.

Mobile learning, the main focus of the workshop, can be seen to deal with complex issues, which benefit from an interdisciplinary approach. Despite interdisciplinarity adding complexity and this complexity needing to be managed sensitively, there exists a need for greater richness in the conceptual foundations of mobile learning; there is arguably a need to challenge the hegemony of education, psychology and computer science as the foundational disciplines of the mobile learning research community.

Some topics, such as sustainability, have proved to be multi-layered and the concurrent discussion of different layers during the workshopprovided fruitful insights into possible different framings of each given topic and issue.

The workshop showed that the key theoretical framework used at the event for illuminating the use of mobile learning – the LMLG’s socio-cultural approach – has provided a useful lens and a shared vocabulary for analysis. At the same time it transpired that, in relation to some topics such as work-based learning, more work is required to align it and its theoretical underpinnings with established discourses in certain areas, such as WBL. Work-based mobile learning has to be embedded in the work-processes and current practices and not be designed as an extra layer. Structure in WBML is not only related to media platforms but also to organisational structures and focusing only on the first issue would be too narrow. Power-relationships are a central construct to be considered in WBML. And, the fact that businesses are orientated towards a productivity paradigm, rather than towards a learning paradigm, poses a particular challenge for WBML. A key question appears to be to what extent practices around mobile devices influence work-life balance.

The discussion around user-generated contexts demonstrated the complexity of the notion of context and how its different understandings are rooted in divers epistemological and ontological traditions.

The discussions around augmented reality brought to the fore a number of issues in particular around retention, perception and coherence as well as filtering and the need for criticality on the part of the user.

With respect to augmented contexts for development, the question arose whether Vygotskyan notions of perception / attention / temporality are a way forward and how these notions link in concrete terms to more academic / traditional views of ‘literacy’. And, what are the implications of for the emerging field of mobile augmented reality? Is it possible to replace the more capable peer in the zone of proximal development?

Synergies with design-based research were generally seen to offer considerable potential for the work of the LMLG and beyond. In particular, there emerged a strong sense of potential around the bringing together of a hermeneutic and critical historical approach to planning and analysis of teaching and learning, i.e. critical didactic, with the experimental, empirical evaluative approach offered by design research.

In terms of sustainability, the workshop concluded that much more still needs to be done in terms of understanding the complexity of the notion of sustainability. The discussion showed that there exists an important, and currently under-explored, ethical context to mobile learning, that is the context in which we connect with learners, composed in part of challenges such as sustainability, scalability (or transferability or replication), equity, inclusion, opportunity, embedding. It relates to a concern for the role of mobile learning for addressing forms of deprivation and disadvantage and informing the relevant policy environment.

Overall it can be noted that the discussions during the two days reiterated the need for a paradigm change in education to enable young people to deal with the implications of ongoing transformations.”

References:

Pachler, N., Bachmair, B. and Cook, J. (2010) Mobile learning: structures, agency, practices. New York: Springer

And with that discussion, comes concerns over users control of their own data, of data security, of privacy and safety – and of course issues related to digital identities.

In this respect, it is very good to see Jerry Zuckerberg’s open letter on the future of Facebook, pledging to provide greater and more fine grained control for users over who can access their data.

However Zuckermann’s letter, or rather the responses to it illustrate one of the big problems facing Facebook. At the time I looked at it, it had 33858 comments. And, as far as I can see, the vast majority were spam (see selection above). If Facebook cannot provide Jerry with user controls to prevent spam, what hope is there for teh rest of us?

Here are my live blogging notes on her presentation. Her slides can be found here and their is a longer discussion around the workshop on the workshop Cloudworks site.

Part 1

“L.iteracy has extended meaning – but only in English! Literacy as fruit of power relationships. Literacy same meanings as competence in Italian.

Confused and diverse semiotic practices used for communication in different countries. Some practices become institutionalised if approved by elite and then become genres with conventions.

Descriptions are important in a genre as proscribed and prescribed practices – this is what is taught in schools as literacies e.g. CVs, academic articles, newspaper articles but also dance, architecture etc. Vertical power relationships – texts policed by limited number contributors or elite. Standards change but always is a standard. Literacy is to know the established conventions. schools teach the norms of a society.

Power relations in new media more horizontal – developing wide variety of types of text which do not have established conventions – eg podcasts, text.

Shift from competence to given norms to creative ad hoc agency.

If schools are to teach new literacies what norms can they teach to and what generalisations are possible? If was to be possible is it desirable to keep cycle of institutionalisation going?”

Part 2

“More from Elizabetta – media have affordances for new shared social practices. Many devices enable us to produce great variety multi modal artefacts and distribute in social spaces – all share copy and past – ability to select, represent and  recontextualise. Changes in mechanism for representation have led to changes in mechanisms for communication. Leading to individualised participation in networks / chains of semiosis according to participants wishes. But shared understanding becomes less important than usability. Leads to scattering of coherence patterns. Cooperating becomes less important than using according to ones interest. Browsing is not coherent – but related to our interests in links we encounter whilst browsing.

Collecetd (and often incoherent) artefacts define online identity.

Questions – moving from coherence in contents to forms in contexts. Does this lead to a lack of wholeness. What capabilities are developed most and least. Is coherence still useful and where is it needed?

1. What is gained and what is lost?

2. Where are we headed to?

- do we teach the most required abilities

- or do we teach the lost-in-transition abilities

3. Is the description – pre/proscription cycle avoidable”

Following on from 25 ways of using mobile phones for learning, I thought I might blogsquat on Graham’s blog and look at some of my favourite mobile apps.

Today I am being excited about Wiffiti.  You can get yourself a free account (just Google it) then create a screen, load a picture, publish it and (subject to the permissions you have created) anyone can text a message or load an image (from phone or lap top which will appear on your screen.  It’s a bit like Twittering in Cinemascope…

You can go to http://wiffiti.com/screens/12568 and add your own message to the screen above in real time through your browser or just Text @wif12568 + your message to 87884.

I like….

• The non linear format – no more threaded conversations, just synchronous comment
• The anonymity (if you want)
• The shared visibility
• The “Lean Back” experience of viewing user-generated content from a distance (in a class, a public location or a conference) as well as the “Lean Forward” experience online or via text messaging.
• Interactivity is multi-modal – it can happen at the location via mobile phones, or online via embeddable website widgets
• New Wiffiti messages are instantly displayed centre screen and are easily viewable from a distance. Older messages then fade back and move as an animated cloud, providing enough ambient activity to continually stimulate audience attention and encourage engagement.’ (wiffiti)

20 things you could use Wiffys for….

• Unconferencing
• Taking questions during a plenary

(is good because you have permanent record, and you can take questions in any order or group questions together to reply)

• Allowing students to ask for explanations, clarifications without feeling stupid
• Getting messages to ‘strangers’ –

“will the person who put that great poster up on m-learning come and find Jen Hughes cos she’s really interested in a chat”

• Finding people at events

“Jen Hughes is outside the main door having a cigarette – will Graham come and find me”

• Asking for help

“Jen Hughes is desperate to borrow a Mac adaptor for the projector”

• Conducting straw polls on the fly and giving everyone a voice

“How many of you agree that….”

• Running a ‘background debate’ on a topic

It’s anonymous so can increase confidence in contributing

• Brainstorming

You can run a brainstorm over an extended period not just for 10 mins in the classroom.

• Feedback and evaluation

“one thing you liked about today’s lesson and one thing you didn’t”

• Big screen Twittering

It’s just like big screen public Twittering so wiffys are like tweets with attitude

• Photo competitions

“Post a photo by the end of the day representing ‘learning’ and vote on the best ones”

• Communal storytelling

Tell a story, get kids to write their own endings….or build up a story from scratch. I’m currently loving the idea of non-sequential narrative ie synchronous rather than linear stories. Wiffiti is excellent as the posts fade in and out and are backgrounded and foregrounded constantly. Also helps kids get used to writing for web pages rater than ‘essays’.

• Reflection and revision

“One key point from today’s lesson
“Post up an emoticon that tells me how you felt about school today”

• Oral history / collective reminiscence

“Tell me one thing you remember from the 60s or your favourite sporting moment”
(it has to be the Scott Gibbs try at Wembley when Wales beat England 32-31 in injury time)

• Making collections

“We are going to make a collection of screens on shapes / colours etc. This week use your phones to take pics of things which have 4 sides /red things etc”

• In class research

“Use your computers to find some images of food that gives you energy and post them up”

• Museums

On any subject under the sun – text anecdotes / memories, pictures – how about something easy like ‘our village’ to start off.

• Sentence completion / cloze exercises

“If I were prime minister I would….”

• Posting back messages from a visit or field trip about what they are doing to other classes

Oops – almost forgot Graham’s contribution, which I really liked

• Would be good to run along side Sounds of the Bazaar radio so that comments could come in live.

She is interested in the idea of comparing e-learning environments with regard to hidden cultural differences. In terms of evidence for such cultural differences she suggests:

1. “There are cultures that heavily depend on oral traditions for learning (the whole Orient, first nation people all over the world). It is still unclear how to deal with this difference, but it seems that the Western idea of libraries are not efficient for this. There is an article from South Africa describing that a certain disadvantage for African people is manifested even in the digital divide due to a focus on written information within library and e-learning systems. It is still unclear how to adapt Western e-learning concepts to this.
2. This adds to differences in hierarchy and differences in the concept of teachers. Discourse approaches like in Western class rooms often fail because expectations towards the role of teachers are different. There is also comparative research investigating the different online behaviour of Norwegian, American, and Korean students. Norwegian students tend to be more discourse oriented than American students. If discourse is a main educative goal I would assume that this is mirrored in the e-learning environments used or in how e-learning environments are used.
3. An additional interesting aspect is the design. There are some studies which investigate the design of websites. Especially interesting is a study of the use of American and Chinese users of websites constructed by native and non-native programmers. It turned out that even with the same content Americans find the information faster on websites with American origin and vice versa. “

Such cultural factors may interact with pedagogic approaches to learning using technology. In an article in First Monday Lisa Lane suggests that different Content Management Systems “may not only influence, but control instructional approaches. She says that Blackboard “forces the instructor to think in terms of content types instead, breaking the natural structure of the semester, or of a list of topics.” Lane compares the design of Moodle to Blackboard, proposing that the ‘opt in’ structure of the Moodle CMS allows  the instructor to make “choices about context on a macro level, and choices about features and tools on a micro level. This makes it possible to explore pedagogical options more freely.”

I will meet Eileen Leubcke next week to discuss designing a research project around these issues. If you are interested and have ideas around this, please get in touch.

Please find below the press information (in German) about the upcoming media art workshops offered for kids and young people by the foundation SK Stiftung Kultur der Sparkasse KölnBonn to take place in Cologne. The Web site can be accessed at: www.sk-kultur.de/medienkunst.
Further information about SK Stiftung Kultur in English is available online here as well as here.

1. Gang: Kopf einschalten… 2. Gang: do it yourself!

Neue Medienkunst-Workshops im Herbst zum Mitmachen für 10- bis 16-jährige

In dem Projekt „1. Gang: Kopf einschalten… 2. Gang: do it yourself!“ bietet die SK Stiftung Kultur in Kooperation mit der sk stiftung jugend und medien Mitmach-Workshops für Kinder und Jugendliche von 10 bis 16 Jahren an. Die Kurse finden am Wochenende oder ganztags in den Herbstferien im Mediapark und in der Moltkerei Werkstatt statt. Sie werden von jungen, renommierten Medienkünstlern geleitet.

Jugendliche zwischen 13 bis 16 Jahren spricht der Workshop Musikvideo revisited: Experimentelle Formen von Bewegtbild und Klang (25.-27.9.) an. Mit professionellem Equipment und angeleitet von den beiden mehrfach ausgezeichneten Medienkünstlern Daniel Burkhardt und Gerriet K. Sharma – unter anderem Preisträger der Deutschen Video-Kunst- und Klang-Kunst-Preise und des Chargesheimer Stipendiums der Stadt Köln – können sie selber ihre eigenen bewegten Bilder, Töne und Klänge aufzeichnen und am Computer neue Formen des Zusammenspiels für Auge und Ohr kreieren! An die gleiche Zielgruppe wendet sich Wer will ich sein, Wie will ich wirken? Selbstdarstellung und Inszenierung – und was dahinter steckt (2.-4.10.). Internetplattformen wie YouTube, Facebook oder SchülerVZ bieten heute unzählige Möglichkeiten, sich visuell in Szene zu setzen. Martin Brand, der selbst zum Thema Jugendkultur und Identitätssuche arbeitet, leitet zu kreativen Experimenten mit Foto- und Videokamera an. Es wird ausprobiert, welche Möglichkeiten es gibt, sich mit und in den Medien zu inszenieren und zu präsentieren.

In dem Workshop Kino selbst gedacht, Kino selbst gemacht (13.-16.10.) werden Kinder von 10 bis 13 Jahren zusammen mit vier NRW-Künstlern aus unterschiedlichen Sparten wie Klangkunst, Videokunst und Performance ihr eigenes Wunsch-Kino bauen und dabei alles neu erfinden und selbst gestalten. An die gleiche Altersgruppe richtet sich das Angebot Roboter bauen, Roboter sein (20.-23.10.): Was sind Roboter? Wie funktionieren sie und wie nehmen sie ihre Umwelt wahr? Die Kinder erlernen Grundlagen der Robotik, bauen und gestalten eigene Roboter und erfahren in Rollen- und Theaterspiel, wie diese sich im Raum bewegen und orientieren.
Die Ausschreibung als PDF befindet sich hier.

Die Kurse sind auf 10-14 Teilnehmer begrenzt – also schnell anmelden und einen Platz sichern! (In allen Workshops gibt es noch freie Plätze!) Die Teilnahmegebühr beträgt pro Workshop 10 Euro.
Infos und Anmeldung: Birgit Hauska, Tel: +49-(0)221 -226 2906, E-Mail: hauska [atnospam) sk-kultur dot de und auf unseren Webseiten: www.sk-kultur.de/medienkunst

Via Birgit Hauska,
Kulturelle Bildung / Vermittlung
Medienkunst und Film
SK Stiftung Kultur
der Sparkasse KölnBonn
Im Mediapark 7
50670 Köln

Following the event I was asked to produce a short piece for the Jisc SSBR Create project newsletter, which is sent to all the programme projects. I hammered something short and sweet into an email and forgot about it. Anyway a week or two later, Goerge Roberts got back to me asking for “something a little more reflective and analytical about the intention, effect and outcome of the radio, not just what happened.”

That I have done and emailed off to George and to Emma Anderson who edits the newsletter. But I thought the ‘reflection’ might be of interest to a wider audience. So here you go….

“The radio show was seen as an experiment and had a number of objectives. One aim was to experiment with mixing different media in an online conference. Different media provide different affordances, and a mix of media can provide a richer online learning environment. However, anecdotal evidence would suggest that participants can be confused by multiple platforms especially when each requires a separate login. The radio programme was streamed through Elluminate allowing easy access, despite offering lower quality than the online internet stream. Although other conferences and events – notably those organised by Webheads – have used internet radio as part of the ‘mix’, as far as we are aware this was the first time internet radio had been streamed through an online platform in this way.

A second issue with online conferences is continuity. Experience of previous events suggests that the concentration involved in participating in such events is tiring and that frequent breaks are desirable between sessions. However, with the lack of proximately of co-participants in a shared physical environment, the continuity of the event is lost. The radio programme provided continuity by ensuring there was always something happening, whilst at the same time allowing for less intensive concentration and participation than the regular conference sessions. At the same time the radio was able to offer both a continuity link in terms of the themes of the conference and an opportunity to extend, explore and reflect on those themes through pre-recorded and live interviews with those involved in similar or related projects and initiatives.

Whilst parts of the radio broadcasts were streamed into the Elluminate portal, the broadcast also allowed those not registered for the conference (for which registration was limited to Jisc programme participants) to listen to the keynote presentation by John Cook. Although the radio was announced in advance, we suspect that most listeners learnt about the broadcast from Twitter.

Although our statistics are limited, it is interesting to note that a considerable number of listeners appear to be from outside the UK and particularly from continental Europe. This could be of potential importance in dissemination or ‘benefits realisation’ for Jisc projects.

All the radio broadcasts have been made available after the conference as MP3 podcasts. The podcasts of previous live radio programmes have been relatively popular, usually attracting at least 500 downloads over a six month period. The podcast of last year’s Jisc emerge project live broadcast form Alt C in Leeds has had over 2500 downloads!

Getting the feel and atmosphere right for the broadcasts is an ongoing issue. We had a slightly different approach to the different programmes broadcast through the day. The morning programme, prior to the conference was mainly music, with some preview of the days activities. The morning and afternoon coffee break programmes featured Jisc projects and initiatives, whilst the lunch time programme featured interviews with Jisc programme managers. Finally the evening programme was seen as a magazine style ‘wrap-up’ to the day, featuring live interviews with organisers of other UK and European projects as well as providing an opportunity for reflection by the conference organisers. Our broadcasting of music in the radio programmes has proved highly popular, However, it is difficult to choose a mix of music which suits everyone’s tastes. All the music is from the Creative Commons Jamendo web site, meaning that we remain legal whilst at the same time promoting open content. However, this does mean we are unable to play music which is familiar to people and this may be challenging, especially early in the morning! Next time we will try to provide a wider mix of music.

In conclusion, we feel the radio was successful, enhancing the conference, providing a showcase for multi channel and multi platform connections and allowing for reflection and continuity in the overall event.

The shows were presented by Graham Attwell and Dirk Stieglitz selected the music, produced the programme and undertook the post processing.”

Google was yesterday, as they say, the new generation of future search engines which aims to contextualize terms and meanings, is on its way. I am currently playing around with EyePlorer, which is a graphical knowledge engine. “It provides an easy to use interface for exploring and interacting with a database of structured knowledge that contains more than 160 million facts.” EyePlorer (beta) is available at: http://www.eyeplorer.com

In the context of media literacy Nik Peachey wrote a blog post on “Note Taking Tool for Digital Literacy” and produced the video
BTW I recommend the De:bug magazine’s current special issue on search engines such as Wolfram Alpha and Eyeplorer. I am looking forward to seeing the De:bug magazine being embraced by the German media and art education research communities.

Here is the video:

graphic via Twitter/eyeplorer

But I do agree with the spirit of this report from the Guardian newspaper.

“Children of all ages should study philosophy in school to develop their critical thinking skills, education experts said today….

The book Philosophy in Schools, edited by Dr Michael Hand of the Institute of Education and Dr Carrie Winstanley of Roehampton University, puts forward several arguments for including philosophy in the school curriculum.

“Critical thinkers are people who reason well, and who judge and act on the basis of their reasoning,” Hand says.

“To become critical thinkers, children must learn what constitutes good reasoning and why it’s important – and these are philosophical matters.

“Exposure to philosophy should be part of the basic educational entitlement of all children.”

In philosophy, the quality of arguments and the meanings of words are under constant scrutiny.

Winstanley said teachers could use popular books to initiate philosophical discussions. For example, Where the Wild Things Are could lead into debates on the existence of monsters, and why the main character’s mother sends him to his room without supper.

Winstanley said: “Better than any other subject, philosophy teaches children how to assess reasons, defend positions, define terms, evaluate sources of information and judge the value of arguments and evidence.”

Philosophy also allows younger children to engage in discussion and argument even before they know very much.”

Some funny ideas in the artcile. Children know a lot – even whan they are young. But yes, learninga bout ideas would be a usful start to education!

“Well here I am again in Bremen, squatting on Graham’s blog. He’s abandoned me on a key board while he has gone out for a pizza and, much as I dislike blogging, I dislike pizza even more – always reminds me of a picture of food on a plate.

This is the second time this week I have swapped identities with Graham. I think. On Thursday evening he was invited to a fashion show and disco. Fortunately for all those of you have seen him dance or noticed his taste in clothes, this all took place in Second Life. So there we were, sitting in a bar, laptop, fags and beer at the ready and Graham hands over the keyboard on the grounds that I’m better at talking rubbish and faster at typing drivel than he is.

Now whose identity am I taking over? And come to think of it, who am I? His 2L ID is Graham Lightfoot (in his dreams), a superhero lookalike who for the occasion was dressed in gimpy black leathers with definite shoulder pads (the embarrassment of it!). So I played at being Jenny Hughes being Graham Attwell being Graham Lightfoot for a while then I thought it would be more fun being my own SL identity being Graham Lightfoot being the first life Graham Attwell who was, at that moment, Jenny Hughes. Keep up. I also have another first life identity (for particular writing purposes) and she has a second life ID as well. And I am a virtual student who I teach and she is someone else in SL. Maybe I should have invited them all along, just to see what dialogue my fingers wrote.

Do I have an identity crisis? Well I guess it depends on which one of me you are asking.

So all this gets us into late-night, beer-fuelled conversations about identities – justified as ‘research’ for a forthcoming project on ‘Identities’. Now my job at Pontydysgu is to generate ideas on demand and turn up occasionally for which I get paid in beer. It’s a good system, 1 idea = 1 beer, or, if pushed, 1000 words = 1 beer. (I’m thinking about having a word with my union rep to see if I can get on to a fixed rate of 1 hour = 1 beer.) My starting point when Graham says I want 2 ideas by tomorrow is always to grope around my brain to see if I can recycle anything still alive in there. I think it’s called re-purposing. Unfortunately my brain is a bit like my handbag – filled with all sorts of junk I carry around just in case it comes in useful. And there, like the toffee in the bottom of my handbag-brain, I unearthed a rather squashed memory about Erving Goffman’s “dramaturgical approach”. It took me a while to get pick the fluff off – it was, after all, 1959 when he wrote his blockbuster “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life’ and I had read it as a student back in the 60’s.

(Why should novelists have blockbusters and academics have to make do with Seminal Works, I ask??)

One of the things I like about the dramaturgical approach is that it looks at context rather than behaviour. I like the Wikipaedia explanation

“In this sense, dramaturgy is a process which is determined by consensus between individuals. Because of this dependence on consensus to define social situations, the perspective argues that there is no concrete meaning to any interaction that could not be redefined.”

The core of Goffman’s thinking was that a person’s identity is not a stable and independent psychological entity; it is constantly remade as the person interacts with others.

Sweet. And seems to me as good a starting point for looking at identities as any.

Now a great many of you sociologist-types will be very familiar with all his stuff, given that Goffman was one of the most influential sociologists of the 20th century, but for the rest of you and Graham, here are some sound bites.

Goffman had lots of ‘bits’ in his theory, some bits are more applicable to identities issues than others.

He makes heavy use of metaphors and looks at communication and social interaction as if it was a theatrical performance. He argues that there are 7 elements to a performance. So, in no particular order:

The front or ‘the mask’ is a standardized, generalizable and transferable way for the performer to control the manner in which the audience perceives him. I would say this could be an avatar, a login name or whatever. Just go to the chat rooms to look at some of the more off the wall names, especially when you just know that Hunkybeast and Lionking are 5 foot nothing, scrawny little men who wear string vests.

Mystification refers to the concealment of certain information from the audience and why this is done. So Hunkybeast is often a bit economical with the truth about his wife and 5 kids.

Dramatic realization is the selection of aspects of the performer that he wants the audience to know. For instance, when projects, as a matter of course, set up communication platforms on their web sites I remember being outraged that they even suggested I put up a photograph or told people who my friends were. Even now, I tend to select out more aspects of myself than maybe Graham. Though of course it depends on the context and certainly changes with my identities – on Facebook I’m happy to fill in every quiz going to find out and share with the world ‘What sort of Drunk Am I?’.

Idealization. A performance often presents an idealized view of the situation to avoid confusion (misrepresentation) and strengthen other elements. So the way I write this blog is different from the way I write an academic paper, partly because the style reaffirms it is a blog but also suggests that there is actually a human being behind the performance who is ….(I was going to say warm, funny, witty, interesting, gorgeous but Graham said …..) a small grumpy troll.

Maintenance of expressive control is about the extent to which people stay in character. I am truly ace at this. I have complete on-line alter ego who not only has a complete identity but he or she (giving nothing away) also has an identity in SL, makes spelling mistakes and typos I don’t make, uses a different vocabulary and different sentence construction and different abbreviations (yeah, I was a linguist in a previous life. That’s without the detail of their ‘life’.

Finally, the needs to be a level of belief by those playing the part in the parts they are playing. This may be high or low, total or partial, cynical or authentic etc. I sometimes have a sneaky suspicion that Graham believes he really is a broad shouldered super-hero lookalike in first life as well as second.

Please, all you purists, don’t write and tell me that this is not at all what Goffman meant. I am only borrowing some ideas with a view to a bit of ‘re-purposing.’ There are lots more bits I think are useful in Goffman’s ideas but this blog entry is getting way too long and I’m getting hungry.

In particular I’d like to have look at what he said about ‘stages’ – back stage, front stage and off-stage, about ‘roles’ and about ‘secrets’ and how this connects with stuff I am playing with on learning ‘narrative’ (watch this space). At the moment I’m not sure if I can do anything useful with these ideas but I’d love to know whether anyone else sees any potential in them in providing a framework for exploring ‘identities’.

PS I’ve just counted Goffman’s elements and I’ve only talked about 6 because I can’t remember the seventh. Anyone who can fill the blank?”

“I write this from a teacher’s perspective. I may write the story from a learner’s perspective later. It is a response to Graham’s piece of Nov 9th about the death of VLE’s.

This is a heresy in some circles – repositories of learning materials are not what the world needs. The idea that a teacher needs a mound of other people’s worksheets or powerpointlesses or yet –SCORM/IMS Learning Design structured learning objects is a figment of the imagination of deranged computer scientists and people who need tidy desks to remember where they put things.

I will say that having good access to some neat stuff (like a well drawn diagram of  Fleming’s Left Hand Rule which I found in seconds on Wikipedia) and sharing that knowledge with others is incredibly useful.

What was true in 1994 – when I first wrote a successful grant proposal for social media in education – is true now. Sharing and borrowing is what we need to facilitate. Sharing and borrowing are social actions. They involve reciprocity and interaction between the people who share and borrow. It comes with knowledge that the people are the source and people are the receivers of this stuff and that is quite a different mindset to the notion of a repository. They are verbs associated with communities. They come with conversations.

It is increasingly easy to find stuff and publish stuff in ways they can be found. The repository is the internet and search engines are pretty dam powerful. They both become much more powerful when people are trading ideas around what is there.

My first attempt at a “virtual learning platform” was an open access room in my University that was open ‘til late. It had 12 networked MacPlus with some networked hard drives (G. Sidhu is the unsung hero of modern computing for developing AppleTalk) with the best peripherals and software tools I could afford (Scanners etc). People met, people talked, people traded, people created together. My second attempt added FirstClass to this – which coupled with putting 56 computers into the schools where my pre-service trainee teachers were learning to teach. I learned from this.

One thing I learned is that teaching and sharing on line is not straight-forward. People who were starting using the internet for learning just then where doing things like putting up some text and the telling students to “discuss and respond” in some associated forum. The kid who was going to do well usually wrote a convincing response and the best the rest could do would be to say “me-too” or “flame”. Instruction to students needed to be structured in ways that allowed multiple responses and required students to think about how they would involve others in their learning. It needed to be like the open access room where there was borrowing, sharing and mutual support. I have some  historic advice on this.

The online environment we started to build as a European Framework 4 Telematics project REM was about a multi-media learning network (we were not building platforms or repositories- we were building tools for a learning network – a different mind-set). It had means to share and discuss resources and to build collaborative learning in a virtual resource rich environment. As with all too many projects the files now rest on an old hard disk with files dated December 2000 – the end of funding.

There was a tension in the development I am only just fully coming to understand. There was some feeling amongst the project workers that there was “a” workflow through which we would drive people. We adopted a model from a paper by Lehrer et  et al . This was constructivist in its intent – however I do not think that the authors intended it to be as hard wired as a workflow as our designs might have made it.  I think design and learning are not one-way flows or on a single track. Human activity is capable of managing multiple tracks – and prefers it that way – that is to say learning is managed by the learner – learning management is not imposed or assumed by the system. As an aside, my colleagues who promoted this system initially (with my full agreement) went on to be leading proponents of IMS Learning Design. I think at a micro level it is clearly the job of a tutor to direct attention to what is salient and more importantly provide formative feedback to students on their learning. I am far from convinced that there is a set of recipes, templates or algorithms that are the formula for teaching and learning success. I appreciate that has been a holy grail for learning technology. My 36 year career in learning technology has been littered with such visions from   Skinner  onwards. I think humans are much too good at learning to be constrained by such tracks.  I even proposed an   educational modeling language  based on conversations and meaning making (as per  Nonaka) myself.

I   do think that some of the ideas expressed about the teaching of creativity in design by  Richard Kimbell at London Goldsmiths – who proposes phases like having ideas, developing ides and testing ideas without suggesting that students might not be doing all three in some sense at any time – although design will tend to go in a general direction if it is to be completed.

But getting back to the main thread of thought. In our second phase of development of this learning network tools we engaged with a BIG international bank. What was learned from talking to their training management was that they had  profound understanding of learning in their company, that development of staff was multi-dimensional: company process knowledge; knowledge of the industry’s facts and concepts (legal frameworks, economics etc) ; generic knowledge (IT skills) and interpersonal skills and so on. Using a standardised controlled vocabulary to describe their resources or most of the wrappings of systems like SCORM did not begin to address the richness of training they needed to deliver. However they were very systematic in profiling employees, their employees career trajectories, and equally profiling the needs and skills that the company required to function as a business. They recognized they needed systems of mentoring, instruction, community building, reward-giving, need-identification, ambition fulfilling . They had their own dynamic mappings of conversations, resources and learning pathways. The pathways were never straight.

Here is a simple case example. An employee was newly charged with writing a quarterly report that demanded skills in spreadsheets and charts he had not previously had. Normal processes would have had them identify and external course provider and sent the employee out for a day at some high-cost and loss of his labour for that day. A modern trend might have been the provision of one of the many dull online courses there are in the subject. However the company had tagged or profiled one of its employees with “Excel expert” and “mentoring” attributes. The company demonstrated that having someone show you the ropes to get going and being there to help when you get stuck is quite and efficient way of learning to use software – and in the process two people were having their career developed and a community of practice was being augmented.

When Graham Attwell writes about social media tools connected together to make learning are   better than VLEs  we should think about that social process of learning and teaching. Sure we can probably do them better with loosely coupled tools but I can still make cock-ups. The way we plumb things together is significant and needs to map onto the activity system or be part of the transformation of an activity system. That is a new skill – however we are fortunate in that the tool-bag is fairly bulging with opportunity and we can add, remove, augment or find scope for new invention. We can build many tailored systems for sharing and reciprocity that are true to the context in which they work. One size, one platform, one standard does not fit all.

Wikipedia  provides a definition of an unconference: “An unconference is a conference where the content of the sessions is driven and created by the participants, generally day-by-day during the course of the event, rather than by a single organizer, or small group of organizers, in advance.“

So my co-facilitator, Brian Kelly (I have ‘borrowed some of his report for this blog entry) and I had to prepare for an event driven by the participants and not by ourselves. The approach we took was to prepare for a number of ways of stimulating discussion, if this was needed. However on the day it turned out that this was not needed as two interesting discussions took place in our two sessions: one on transliteracy and one on the ethical aspects of use of social networks.

Professor Sue Thomas of De Montford University introduced the ‘transliteracy’ topic. Again looking at Wikipedia I find the definition of Transliteracy given as “The ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks.“. (This has been taken from the PART (Production and Research in Transliteracy) Group Web site).

Whilst we were downstairs having an ongoing and evolving discussion around these issues, upstairs  a series of round table discussions (once more participant driven) were being held. Participants in the JISC Emerge community are preparing a series of bids for project under the JISCX Users and Innovation programme.  Most of these nascent projects focus on the use of Web 2.0 technologies for learning – including simulations, games and tagging.

But it seemed to me that many of the issues we were discussing – social practices in the use of technologies, skills and competencies required by users – both learners and teachers, ethical issues and  issues of ownership and control – are the real issues which  underpin the use of Web 2.0 and social  software.

Here is a list of key words I jotted down during the discussion:

• Ethics
  
  privacy
  
  permissions
  
  acceptable use
  
  accessibility
  
  socialbility
  
  usability

Cool apps are great – but it is the social environment and practices which will define their use and their usefulness in practice. So it may be that if we want to start developing some great (social) learning applications we need to think through all these issues at the same time.

I got an email from my mate Jenny in Pontypridd.

“Thought you might like to know what the e-generation (of about Owen’s age funnily enough!!) call the people of your generation  (puddings) who they grudgingly accept as nearly ICT literate (and therefore worth talking to occasionally) and are geeky about widgets and gizmos and boys toys (could even have been talking about you) (well, ok was actually talking about you)….

= Blackberry and Apple crumblies.

You’ve been called a lot of things in your time, thought this was one of the better ones – maybe you should admit to it in your blog at some point – or use it elsewhere.

I, on the other hand, don’t qualify. I am apparently an Apple tart – as is everyone with a white Barbie Mac, irrespective of gender.

Jen

PS There are more ….

    Dull but posey or posh bastards with the latest go faster gadgets they don’t understand are Toff E-puddings.

    Those wot pontificate at length about computers,  especially those avant garde types who shout from the rooftops about what the technology of the future is etc are I-screamers.

  Â

Gooseberries (as in gooseberry fool) are those that have cheap tacky versions of Blackberries and think they are the real thing. By extension, anyone who has an MP3 player not an i-pod)

  Â

A chocolate is someone who lives on his phone but has never progressed past texting and phone games and thinks technology stops there. Its also someone who is obsessed with updating to the latest model. (chocolate orange – keep up)

  Â

The also-rans, wedded to Windows, are just Cakes. (PC’s-a-cake if you really want to know!!)

  Â

Noisy anti-apple Windows champions, on the other hand, are ‘Eckles (cakes)

So I ‘spose you are a blackberry and apple crumbly with a dollop of i-scream who hangs around with a past-the-sell-by-date apple tart and hates cakes.