Twemes and Lifestream learning

June 5th, 2008 by Graham Attwell

I greatly enjoyed the Edumedia conference in Salzburg. Regardless of the formal sessions, what makes the conference is the people and the settings.
ON tuesday we organised an unconference session on the terrace of the conference centre. Or rather we did not organise it. In the best tradition of unconferencing it emerged or just happened. Anyway, the outcome was that Steve ‘Wiki’ wheeler, mobile Mark Kramer. Andreas the podcast Auswarter and a bunch of friends spent two and a half hours discussing the future of technology enhanced learning. The discussion embraced the meaning of mobility and mobile learning, motivation, informal learning, the future of education institutions, deschooling society, web 3.0, MUVEs, emotional learning and more. And thanks to a veritable plethora of recording devices edited highlights of our conversations will be released soon, I am sure.
Much of the discussion centred on mobile learning and, in particular, mico blogging. We were all intrigued by the success of our tweme at the Edumedia conference. The tweme (the word tweme is a mashup of twitter meme) was not an official conference initiative and all that had been done to publicise or explain it was a quick announcement prior to my keynote presentation on the first afternoon of the conference. Yet, despite the very limited bandwidth, a lively community and discourse emerged – see www.twemes.com/edublog08
I am increasingly intrigued by microblogging formats as a way of capturing the incidental learning which happens all the time. Incidental learning is heavily context specific and os based on social interactions.
Incidental learning is episodic but rapid and frequent. Our learning and knowledge base is constantly redrawn, challenged ro adjusted to take account of an on-going stream of incidental learning episodes. This might best be called Lifestream Learning. And twitter and other such microblogging formats offer a compelling way of both capturing and representing such a learning Lifestream. Even more, twitter allows us to express the emotions which as so intrinsically involved in incidental learning in social contexts.
Of course there is a danger of being overwhelmed by a river of data. We need further tools and approaches to filter, search and aggregate our learning life streams. Still more we need tools to assist us in representing such learning, of visualising our knowledge and of combining our own knowledge representations with those of others.
We do not have such tools at the moment (I sort of feel it should be something like the matrix). But being able to capture and represent a community shared lifestream such as Edumedia – even if it was just for two days and we will never experience the precise context again.

More summer fun – twemes and Emerging Mondays

June 1st, 2008 by Graham Attwell

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.

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