Pontydysgu - Bridge to Learning Pontydysgu.org

Cristina took this photo whilst we were chatting this morning. Started me thinking - when I set out as a researcher our media was esentially print. Working in Germany, I used to visit the University of Surrey library twice or three times a year to photocopy vast numbers of journal articles. In 1995 we were still sending project documents by snail mail. Telephones were the main mean of ‘chatting’. How things have changed. Skype is always on, Tweets twitter in and out, people are always ‘present’ in my office. The challenge I feel is how to manage the flows of information and how to reflect the richness of such communciation on this web site. The web site itself is increasingly a mashup and i guess we will further develop that. But I wonder if we are not still over-reliant on a text media - at least for reflection - as our society moves more and more to using visual images.

Great picture by Alec Courosa

What is Edupunk? Stephen Downes offers a definition: “edupunk is student-centered, resourceful, teacher- or community-created rather than corporate-sourced, and underwritten by a progressive political stance.”

And an anonymous commentator on his post says: “I can’t think of anything more punk than education.

For the student, learning gives power to the individual. A society full of mindless drones trained to each do a single task doesn’t really have the mental ability to rebel in meaningful ways.

For the teacher, every day is an exercise in punk. You’re almost completely under the control of your coordinator, your principals, your superintendents, your school board, the media. Often, “the man” passes down restrictive rules and decisions that don’t seem to align with what’s best for you or your students. Often, you’re only equipped with sparse resources you’re able to scrap together here and there.”

Are you into edupuank. Or is this just a ludicrous social construction by white males the wrong side of 40.

The next Emerging Monday Sounds of the Bazaar LIVE radio programme on Monday 7 July will explore the edupunk phenomonon. With interviews, music, opinion, poetry and more. LIVE. And hopefully we will be welcoming resident edupunk granny Leila back to the programme. Make sure the show is in your diary. We will be broadcasting LIVE from 1900 - 2000 UK Summer Time, 2000 - 2100 Central European Summer Time. To access the programme just click on this link and it should open in your favourite MP3 player. And please tell your friends.

Tune in tomorrow (Wednesday) for another LIVE Sounds of the Bazaar internet radio broadcast. The programme will go out LIVE at 14.15 Central European Summer Time (13.15 BST). Interviews, features, music, poetry and more. Guests include John Pallister from Wolsingham School, Gunter Beham from the EU APOSLE project, the kids from Cwmglas primary school in Swansea and Nicola Witton and Scott Wilson from the Emerge ARGOSI project. For full details of how to access the programme click here.

Next Friday - June 20th sees the next in our regular series of Evolve Open on-line Seminars. The topic of the seminar is Mentoring and 21st Century Skills. Anne Fox will lead us on this topic with her Keynote Presentation (further information here: http://tinyurl.com/4oetve ). The event promises Interesting conversations and discussions.

The event will take place at 1300 BST, 1400 CEST or other time zones check here.

The Venue for the presentation is in Elluminate - http://tinyurl.com/4tcmxh (no password required)

There is also a challenge based on a activity around the June topic. See how to get involved here.

Finally please do get yourself an account on the  Evolve platform. There is lots going on (more news next week).

Don’t forget tomorrows (Monday) LIVE internet radio edition of Sounds of the Bazaar. The programme will go out at 2000 Central European summer time (1900 UK summer time). To listen to the programme just click on this link. This should open in your default MP3 player (e.g. i Tunes).

The programme is the first in a series called Emerging Mondays. The theme for the programme will is “Social software - finding value? The right tools but the wrong approach?

The show features Steve Wheeler from Plymouth College talking about social software, Jay Cross from Internet Times on informal learning, Hank Horkoff from China Pod in Shanghai on personal Learning Environments and language teaching and learning and of course our culture spot with the Last Poet in Oxford.. We will be holding a regular ‘phone in’ slot over skype and would love to welcome you live on the show. Make sure I have your skype address – mine is GrahamAttwell and we will be happy to chat to you on Monday evening.

It is another week of hectic fun here at Pontydysgu Towers. Tomorrow morning (Monday) I am off at the crack of dawn to the EduMedia conference in Salzburg. I’m doing two presntations - one on the MOSEP e-Portfolio project and another on podacsting and blogging in self directed adult education. Best of all - lots of my favourite peopel are going and I’m looking forward to a pint or tow with you tomorrow evening.

I will post the presentations on SldeShare when I get five minutes. And I am messing with memes - or rather twemes. What are twemes? Twemes are a mash-up of twitterm delicious and flickr. You can see the edumedia tweme here. And if you are using any of these services to add things about the conference please tag them with #edumedia08.

Click advance notice. Sounds of th Bazaar LIVE is launching a new monthly series sponsored by the JISC Emerge programme. And each of the monthly broadcasts will be followed by a social event in Second Life. Cool or what? The first of the series of Emerging Mondays takes place on Monday June 9 at 1900 UK summer time, 2000 Central European Summer Time. I will post the url for the programme laler this week - together with our guest list. But put it in your diary now - don’t forget - Emerging Monday’s Sounds of the Bazaar LIVE Monday 9 June.

It is hecti8c here at the Pontydysgu office. We are lining up a great summer of activities, radio broadcast and events. And here is the first. Announcing the the launch of the Evolve Community.

The Evolve project is organising a series of international on-line events and seminars.

The objectives are:
• To provide a space for participant driven discussion and debate
• To promote critical inquiry and discourse
• To allow for the presentation of ideas in progress
• To share expertise, ideas and future thinking around common research agendas

The first event will take place this Fraiday May 30 at 1700 GMT (For other time zones please check here: http://tinyurl.com/5gzysk.

The Venue for the presentation is in Elluminate - http://tinyurl.com/6emm9f (no Password required)

Barbara Dieu has agreed to be the Keynote speaker for our first event, which is organized around the following theme: Social software in Schools and Institutions. Barbara’s presentation is entitled Social Media in Engiahs Langauge Teaching.

We will also be hosting a topical activity around the monthly themes. See how to get involved here: .

And don’t forget to get your own freefolio spot. You just need to create an account! Go to http://www.evolvecommunity.org

We hope you join us. This is will be a great chance to network, to get to know what other people are doing, and also to share your work and ideas.

I have become a big fan of Twitter. I can’t really say why but I do like the feeling of presence - even if half the time its hard to know what people are twittering on about.
And so in our latest mash-up we have installed a twitter widget on the right hand bar of this page.
If you have any ideas of new widgets or feeds we might add do get in touch.

Things are busy here at the Pontydysgu HQ. I am off to ST Gallen in Switzerland for the SCIL Congress on ‘The Changing face of Learning - Creating the Right Balance’. I am doing a Keynote presentation on PLEs, introducing a paper on Open Educational Resources and running a workshop on PLEs - all in one day! Its going to be a lot of fun - I hope. Meanwhile we are busy fighting bugs in Freefolio and developing a social network version of the WordPress based software. This is for a new network on research into the training of trainers. We hope to launch the site next week - keep watching here for announcements.

Talking of bugs, we cannot get the new Wordpress 2.5.1 version - which this site now uses - to display photographs - anyone any good ideas?