Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning

Its September. Its conference season. Its ALT C. Can’t afford the fees? Paper rejected? Tied up in pre-term preparations? Never mind – Sounds of the Bazaar is going out on the road to bring you the highlights of what is happening in ed tech, teaching and learning. And we start off with our first LIVE broadcast next Tuesday 9 Septemeber LIVE from the AltC conference in Leeds, UK.

Not quite sure of the format yet but it will be fun. Jisc Emerge is having a social and rumours say they are laying on free beer and wine. We will be broadcasting live from the social, talking to leading researchers and practitioners from the educational technology world. Plus some of our regular slots and a few surprises.

How can you join in? Well if you just want to sit back and relax (perhaps with a glass of wine yourself) that is absoltuetly fine. Just point your browser to http://radio.jiscemerge.org.uk/Emerge.m3u

This should open in your MP3 player of choice and after a few seconds delay start streamin. We will be going live at 17.25 UK Summer time, 18.25 Central European time.

But if you’d like to join in the fun you can come on our conference special chat room and share oyur opinions with others,. You can also ask questions to the people being interviewed. We’ve asked Jisc for iPhones to keep us in touch with your questions but in case this doesn’t happen then Cristina Costa who will be moderating the chat LIVE at Leeds will pass the questions on. I will post up the chat room address in the next 24 hours.

OK – look forward to hearing from you next Tuesday.

Yesterdays Sounds of the Bazaar LIVE was pretty popular. According to the stats we had 97 listeners. The problem is that the stats also show that we had quite a few people who were unable to connect becuase we had run out of bandwith (we also had a bandwidth problem from our studio which I will come on to in a bit).

How does the bandwidth work. We broadcast from Bremen in Germany using a DSL connection. We feed to the Community Media Association in Sheffield, UK. They have a commercial operation who sell us bandwidth. Bandwidth for streaming is not cheap. We presently have enough bandwidth for up to 100 listeners at 56kps. We would like to increase this to 200 but can’t really justify the expenditure at present. But we actually buy the bandwidth on a 24/7 basis. And we only use it for 2 hours a month. There is a pretty strong case for bandwidth sharing here. So – if you would like to use our spare badwidth for broadcasting something to do with learning please get in touch. It is a crying shame to see it there unused. And if anyone woudl be interested in coming in with some money we could all benefit from a better service. Just email me on graham10 [at] mac [dot] com. Whilst on the subject if anyone needs help in how to do live streaming radio do drop us a line. However, we use Macs – we do not know the setup for PCs or Linux.

Now for the dedicated techy reader here was our local bandwidth problem. Our present upload capacity is 24kps. This is enough for our stream and for a skype connection. But for yesterdays feature on Cwmglas School I was trying to bring in my colleague Jenny Hughes via a skype to skype line and the school through skype to telephone. And that was just too much. The result is that the stream kept rebuffering. After the show we got on to our ISP website and found we could treble our bandwidth with a package which costs less than we are paying at the moment. The ISP had upgraded their service but not told us and we had to apply on line for the new package. It may be worth you checking whether you can do this – I dare say ISPs are the smae the world over.

Been away from the blog for a few days – too much travel. But we are back with another LIVE Sounds of the Bazaar internet radio broadcast. The programme will go out LIVE tomorrow (Wednesday) at 1415 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.

Please try and join us for some summer fun. You can listen to the programme by going to http://icecast.commedia.org.uk:8000/emerge.mp3.m3u in your browser. The programme should stream form your MP3 player of choice.

We will have a chat room operating alongside the programme – go to http://client11.addonchat.com/sc.php?id=302479. The chat will be hosted by Cristina Costa.

And if you would like to come on the programme just drop me an email – graham10 [at] mac [dot] com or skype me. Look forward to talking to you all tomorrow.

Great fun on Emerging Mondays radio show last night. Ignoring risk assessments we broadcast live from across Europe, with Mark Kramer talking live over a public wifi link to skype on a mobile phone from the football fanzone in Salzburg. Many thanks too to Steve Wheeler and George Roberts for their contributions. And of course to our listeners – without you there would not be much of a show.

Icecast server statistics are a little difficult to read. At a minimum we had 69 listeners – although there may have been more. Countries included UK, Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium, Romania and the USA.

For those of you who missed the show – or if you enjoyed it so much you want to listen again – here is the podcast version. We will also announce the next show very soon.

SleaveNotes

In this issue I talk about Dave Cormier’s paper on Rhizomatic learning and the community as curriculum.

Steve Wheeler reflects on the contradictions facing education institutions using social software.

Hank HorKoff from ChinesePod talks about using new technology for language learning.

Mark Kramer talks live from the football fanzone in Salzburg about how we ware using mobile devices.

Neil Oughton from Beaumont College in the UK explains how he is planning to use WordPress in his college.

And poet George Roberts reads another of his poems.

The music is by Ally Valentine from the DD10 8TW album. It is available for free download from the Creative Commons supported Jamendo web site.

Sounds of the Bazaar - Emerging Mondays [ 1:04:25 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (902)

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.

The last in our one week series of live webcasts sponsored by the Jisc Emerge programme.

If you missed the Emerging Sounds of the Bazaar at the Benefits Realisation day of the Emerge Conference, here is your second chance. The one hour live webcast was recorded and is now available as an MP3 podcast.

You can listen in line or download the programme to your MP3 player of choice.

The programme features:

• Steven Warbuton and Paul Bailey on the Emerge Bazaar
• Jai Muhkerjee on the Moose project
• The Sounds of the Bazaar competition
• A live phone in on the future of Technology Enhanced Learning
• Mike Wald on the MacFob project
• George Roberts – the last poet in Oxford.

Music is from the Exotica album by Les Juanitos from the Jamendo Creative Commons supported web site – www.jamendo.com

Thanks to everyone who helped produce the programme and especially to the producer, Dirk Stieglitz.

The Emerging Sounds of the Bazaar Live [ 1:09:56 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1631)

After yesterdays brilliant 24 hour Earthcast, we are happy to invite you to the next LIVE web cast from Sounds of the Bazaar.

We will be broadcasting an hour long programme beginning tomorrow, Thursday 24 April at 1600 UK Summer Time, 1700 Central European Summer Time.

The programme is part of the three day Jisc Emerge on-line conference.

We will be featuring a number of the Emerge projects, launching the new Emerge Bazaar and hosting a phone in on the future of technology enhanced learning. And, as ever, spinning a few tunes from the Creative Commons supported Jamendo web site.

We extend an invitation to all Wales Wide Web readers to join the show. Just go to te following address in oyur browser and a stream shoudl open in your MP3 application:

http://icecast.commedia.org.uk:8000/emerge.mp3.m3u

Look forward to talking with you tomorrow.

I’ve spent most of the day listening to the Earthday 24 hour webcast, Earthcast. The webcast was hosted by the World Bridges Edtechtalk. And it was so cool. I think this account from John Pallister on the e-Portfolios and PLTs list serve summarises perfectly the event.

“A strange thing happened today, ordinary people from around our world collaborated to do the extraordinary. They adopted a philosophy that if they were not breaking the tools and technology, they were not
trying hard enough – they tried pretty hard, for 24 hours! A few things hung up on them, and a few things did not like working with each other, but what an amazing achievement. I listened to children,
of all ages, and teachers from around the world talking to one another and broadcasting to anyone in the world that had an internet connection……….

I found myself listening to eartcast08 this morning, I was rapidly drawn in to what was happening, the enthusiasm of the students from around the world was addictive and energising. I soon had a Year 12
student contributing, asking some of the presenters why they were flying around the world to attend so many conferences, he was answering questions from people somewhere the USA and was being listened to by people all over the world. He went on to initiate a quite a heated discussion about national energy policies. He was a
student who 5 minutes earlier was simply having a conversation with friends in the common room – then he found himself talking to the world! From an ordinary class room in County Durham, at no cost.

What is in this type of activity for our learners – well, just about everything that you would need to develop learners as ‘Effective participators ‘ — “Young people actively engage with issues that affect them and those around them. They play a full part in the life of their school, college, workplace or wider community by taking
responsible action to bring improvements for others as well as themselves.” AND a bucket-full of communication and citizenship skills.

Life long learning, I learnt from a 6 Year old that by using www.Blackle.com rather that using Google I would save energy because the screen is black!

Eartfcast08 involved students from around the world talking about the Health of our planet and what they were doing to make a difference – I will make sure that we integrate earthcast09 in to our curriculum.”

I agree with John. It was a truly remarkable event. If you missed it the archives can be found here.

The broadcasting fest of the weekend was a little stressful but lots of fun. And whilst podcasting is now pretty simple – and video is not a big problem – live radio is something else. Firstly presenting a live show is a completely different experience to podcasting. There is no chance to remix – it is going out live. You have to think on your feet. And it has a buzz to it which isn’t there in the podcast.

The tech mix is still a little tricky. Saturday went pretty well. A few glitches but on the whole not a bad programme. Sunday was a disaster. Twenty minutes before we were due to broadcast something went wrong with our settings. I have a few ideas but am still not quite sure what it was. We reset our machine to overcome problems with the skype feed. And in so doing we totally messed up the feeds. Something was looping in one of the two machines we use to broadcast the programme. The result – dreadful sound quality. And whilst Pekka and John gallantly talked on through an near impossible echo, Dirk and me scrambled round trying to work out where the fault lay. Sadly it was to no avail. We ended the show disconecting the Mac Pro from he feed and with me taking into a Powerbook in built Microphone. After the show we tore apart the whole system and worked out a new set up. And yesterday it all worked.

Thanks to everyone for their feedback. And thanks to all our guests. You can listen to the recording of the show here. I need to add a lot of links. No time now. However do check out the live Earthcast 24 horu show which is presently underway. Matt Montagne explains what it is all about in the first guest spot in this edition of Sounds of the Bazaar. You can access the Earthday web cast on http://edtechtalk.com/earthcast08. And check out Cristina’s blog on her work in the project.
Many thanks are also due to Dirk Stieglitz who has bravely struggled with the technology. We are working on a how-to publication for those wanting to learn more about live webcasting.

Emerging Sounds of the Bazaar LIVE [ 57:36 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1088)

Don’t forget todays LIVE edition of the Sounds of the Bazaar show. We will be broadcasting at 2000 Central European Summer Time, 1900 UK summer time. For other time zones just check the tiny urls in the news item below. Todays show features interviews with John Pallister form Wolsingham School on e-Portfolios and with Annika Matilda Bergstroem from Sweden. Our special guest is Matt Montgane who is going to be telling us about the forthcoming 24 hour Earthcast.
And for todays show we will also have a chatroom running in parallel. Just click on this link to enter the chat.
Don’t forget – you can listen to the programme by clicking here. This should open as a stream in your default MP3 player.
And if you missed yesterdays broadcast, an archive version is now on line..