Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning

The Sounds of the Bazaar summer series of LIVE Internet radio shows continues. This week we will be broadcasting three live shows from the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) in Helsiniki.

The shows will be broadcast form 1200 – 1230 Central European Time on Wednesday 25 August and Thursday 26 August and from 1100 – 1130 Central European Time on Friday 27 August (Don’t forget, if you are listening form the UK it is one hour earlier).

ECER is Europe’s largest education conference with some 2000 delegates from every area of educational research. It is organised through a series of networks. We will be talking to some of the network chairs as well as to conference delegates.

You can ‘drop into the conference’ by tuning into Sounds of the Bazaar. Just go to

http://radio.jiscemerge.org.uk:80/Emerge.m3u

This will open the LIVE radio stream in your MP3 player of choice.

A couple of weeks ago I followed a link from Pat Parslow’s twitter to a clipping he had posted on Amplify. I hadn’t seen the site before and was well impressed. Amplify, the site blurb says, “is the place to spark conversation about news, thoughts, ideas, photos or anything else that’s on your mind. And whilst the offer of a microblog, blog or email entry are pretty standard, what caught my eye was the clippings tool.  “Add Amplify to your browser to clip and share your take on articles, blog posts,  videos or anything else you find on the web.”

Neat and ideal for those things which you don’t have time to blog about but warrant more that 140 characters with a tiny url on twitter.

The only thing was that I didn’t really want to set up yet another web space – we have plenty of those already – but wanted to post my clippings directly to the Pontydysgu site. And I found there is a way to do that. Clipmarks, who are the people behind Amplify, produce a Firefox plug in to let you clip and annotate directly from a web page.

It works very well. The only problem is that it does not support categories. In the end we have got round that by allocating the ‘uncategorised’ category to our clippings. Anyway to see the results just click on the clippings tab on the main menu bar. And if you have any ideas for how we can improve this feature please get in touch.

The Barcelona PLE conference was a lot of fun. A great atmosphere, a fine venue and at last the chance to meet face to face with many of the people who have contributed comments on our web site over the years. We tried to break with traditional confernce presentatio0n formats to encourage more interaction between participants. And on the whole I think the change in formats worked – though as with anything there is room for improvement.

Next years PLE conference will be at the University of Southampton – watch this space for more details.But in the meantime there is plenty of work to be done. We had over 60 papers submitted to the conference. Many of them are very good. And whilst of course we have published them all (or are in the course of doing so) on the PLE conference web site, we are working on three special journal editions featuring papers from the conference. We will be in touch with many of the authors in the coming weeks and hope to include as many papers as we are able.

We are also thinking about launching a number of events in autumn and spring including hopefully, a number of online seminars. Just watch this space or the PLE2010 conference site for more details.

The Sounds of the Bazaar LIVE internet radio show is coming to the PLE2010 Conference. There will be two special conference shows, broadcast from the social event area from 1930 – 2000 on Wednesday 7 July and Thursday 8 July. Would you like to be on the radio? Just make yourself known to our presenters. Or would you like to help in producing the show? Find Graham Attwell, Dirk Stieglitz or Joanna Turner Attwell and volunteer.
Or, if you can’t get to the conference but want to stay in touch, you can tune in to the live show. Point your browser at http://radio.jiscemerge.org.uk:80/Emerge.m3u and this will open the LIVE radio stream in your MP3 player of choice. You can also send us your questions and comments by Twitter using the #PLE_BCN hashtag.  And to follow Sounds of the Bazaar LIVE events throughout the summer join the SoB Facebook group.

Congratulations to Pontydysgu researcher Angela Rees and her husband Gareth. Angela gave birth to a daughter, Elin Alys Rees (we think), at 2.18 this morning. Our information says the baby weighs 6lb 11oz. More details later.

Update on name – baby is called Elin Arianrhod.

So many schools are in the process of buying in Moodle from a service provider we thought it might be useful to provide some guidelines for the sort of questions you should be asking the host organization before you sign up to a service level agreement. Whether you are a head teacher, school governor or the teacher with special responsibilities for IT, you need to find out EXACTLY what you are getting for your money. We are already hearing horror stories about providers that are either providing very little in the way of service or conversely where they are so prescriptive and controlling that users are prevented from using a lot of features that make Moodle so powerful. For the full article, see Chalkface.

The summer series of Sounds of the Bazaar LIVE internet radio gets underway tomorrow 9th June. For those of you who have seen our previous notice, the time has for the broadcast has changed. We will now be broadcasting live from the Joint Technology Enhanced Summer School (JTEL) in Ohrid, Macedonia from 1500 Central European Summer Time (1400 UK) to 1545 CET. What will be on the programme? That I can’t tell you as the whole programme will made and produced by students taking part in a workshop on Internet radio at the summer school. But I can promise you a lot of fun. To listen to the programme just click on http://radio.jiscemerge.org.uk:80/Emerge.m3u and the stream will open in your MP3 player of choice (e.g. iTunes)/

Its all change at Pontydysgu. Our intern student, Jo, has departed a two month trip to Cambodia and Vietnam. And despite limited connectivity Jo has told us it is hot, the food and culture is very different and that she is enjoying herself. Jo will be blogging about her trip form next week on this site. We are also pleased to welcome  Anuraj Dadhich from Assam in India who is spending a summer internship with the University of Bremen and Pontydysgu. Anuraj is a student in Interaction Design (and a heavy metal fan). His web site can be found here. And by the way check out his video featured on our front page.

Pontydysgu has added its name to the 12589 other organisations from across Europe who have signed the Trust Researchers online petition.

The web site says: “The funding of European research should be based on trust and responsible partnering. Today researchers in Europe face a lot of red tape and cumbersome financial regulations. We are not against rules. But we need to simplify.

Those who have signed this declaration ask the European Council of Ministers and the Parliament to simplify the administrative procedures and the financial provisions of European research funding.”

Whilst we understand the need for financial transparency and accountability, too much of our time is presently spent filling in forms and returns which would seem to add little to research, to accountability or to the public use of our research. And, if research is to contribute to societal development, we need better dialogue betwen funders, researchers and practitioners, people who use our work. Personally I would also like to see more discussion over the purpose and ethics of publicly funded research.

I have talked with many of the European civil servants responsible for managing and developing European research and development programmes and know they share our frustrations about the endless layers of bureaucracy that envelope programmes and initiatives. There seems to be a number of different causes – the demands of elected (and non elected) politicians, the adoption of inappropriate measures for monitoring particular programmes, the requirement to collect data for reporting purposes and a lack of understanding of the process and outcomes of research. Hopefully the petition could begin a dialogue around some of these issues.

The Pontydysgu Polish language Paradygmat blog has undergone a facelift. Two young researchers – Ilona Buchem and Joanna Wild have launched Paradygmat 2.0. Ilona and Joanna got to know each other through the first incarnation of Paradygmat! Joanna commented on Ilona’s blogposts and they soon discovered that there is much they have in common. Ilona works as a researcher in Berlin (research project Mediencommunity 2.0)  in the area of e-learning 2.0 and learning with social media in online communities. She is interested in how Web 2.0 tools can be used to enable more learner-driven, personalized, socially connected, work embedded and sustainable learning. Joanna works at the Centre for Social Innovation – ZSI in Vienna. Her scientific focus is on pedagogical issues of technology-enhanced learning for education and training, especially on aspects related to systematic planning for learning, use of Personal Learning Environments in formal and informal learning settings, and support planning for the acquisition of rich professional competences and literacies including abilities for self-regulation, collaboration, and networked learning.

Their collaboration is a good example of how Social Media can bring people together! Ilona & Joanna have started their first series of blogposts in Polish with the topic of Personal Learning Environments. They have introduced this topic with definitions of theories and best practice discussions about applications in education and experiment with new formats of blogging in duet, such as interviews, dialogs and collaborative writing. They then want to go on and discover other interesting issues about how Social Media changes education. Their goal is to connect with the Polish-speaking research community and sparkle some innovative ideas about the future of education.