Feb

8

Lecture capture and participatory media for education: a talk for eL@B

February 8, 2010 | | Leave a Comment

I suppose there comes a tolerance of living with a degree of chaos. Knowledge is quite loosely coupled, I find.The page I showed with the links came originally from a talk I did at the November eLearning at Brookes (eL@B) meeting on Participatory Media for teaching in Higher Education. The link to the slightly updated mindmap, which I showed in the class is here, where everyone should be able to reach it, should they care (click on “outline view” - lower left - to get the page with the links):

http://www.xmind.net/share/_embed/georgeroberts/xmind-198337/

I’ll put the slides up on the VLE for the class. They are already publicly available on SlideShare:

http://www.slideshare.net/georgeroberts

The talk is on the Brookes Wiki, links are on the page (but it is behind an annoying wall):
https://wiki.brookes.ac.uk/display/elab/current+UK+projects+on+lecture+capture

There is a link to a video of the talk, here (still behind a wall):
https://wiki.brookes.ac.uk/display/elab/eLaB+20+November+2009

Maybe we’ll get some of these walls lowered.

Posted via email from George’s posterous

Feb

6

I turned off my mail client

February 6, 2010 | | Leave a Comment

It may not seem like a big thing. I have generally preferred clients (apps and RIAs) to browser-based Internet tools. But, yesterday after years of Outlook, Eudora, Mozillamail, Thunderbird and MacMail I closed my mail client and am using the Gmail interface in FireFox. Partly this is a self-enforced discipline to see how well the Google@Brookes mail, contacts,  calendar, tasks and chat integration work. I am particularly interested to see, after going off-line, as I often am, whether the offline mail app stands up. So far you can only view, not update calendar entries offline (a weakness, in Google's offering). But, having said it is not a big thing, I feel a sense of excitement (why?!) maybe born of renewal. In doing this I tided up my browser, killed off Diigo, Amplify and Twine, and went back (almost) wholeheartedly to Delicious (well they are owned by Yahoo). I made a new set of tabs for start-up: mail, calendar, Wave, Reader, and JISC Institutional Innovation. It is as if my computer is new again.

Posted via email from George’s posterous

Feb

4

Social media at Brookes?

February 4, 2010 | | Leave a Comment

Who is using social media at Brookes? Twitter? Facebook?
We are going Google now
http://www.brookes.ac.uk/services/cs/google/
Ever wanted a blog. We have a blogging platform. Easy to set up. Just go to:
http://brookesblogs.net
We are upgrading this to WordPress mu 2.8.9.1
There is the wiki at:
https://wiki.brookes.ac.uk/
What will the impact of all this be?
I will be writing about it here… and there

Posted via email from George’s posterous

Jan

26

Is anyone Waving anymore?

January 26, 2010 | | Leave a Comment

After an enthusiastic introduction it seems the frost has melted on this pumpkin. Google has not stopped rolling out the developments, with new features such as “Read only participants”, and “Restore from playback” (http://googlewave.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-features-read-only-and-restore.html) and “Waving with groups” (http://googlewave.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-features-read-only-and-restore.html); though it is not clear what happens if some of your group are not Wave users.

But, it is interesting that the Wave team do not appear to replicate the Wave blog (http://googlewave.blogspot.com/) in a wave. These features seem to make Wave more like a blog (read only participation) and a wiki (version control and groups). Why not make a public wave that anyone can sign on to but not edit? Allow them to comment but not create new slugs? Well, lots of reasons I can think of, but the point is that blogs and wikis do their jobs well. As Wave converges on these applications will it do itself out of a role?

The injunction to “Be bold!” (http://googlewave.blogspot.com/2010/01/be-bold.html) suggests that people aren’t, or rather, where does Wave afford boldness?

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Jan

16

Been working on new one-day @ocsld online (Elluminate) course on Online Identity happening on 20 Jan #digident

January 16, 2010 | | Leave a Comment

I am reminded of an old (and kind of grim) Country Joe and the Fish song, Who am I, (thank you YouTube, when Spotify Fails and LastFM gives you an annoying 30 sec preview). I have been doing a lot of work on identity, community and third-spaces while working with a group of adult learners at a community IT centre on life stories around the use of the internet for learning and all sorts of other things. In this workshop I am trying to draw on some parts of that work to explore the question of digital identity in the first of a series of one-day on-line OCSLD events using the Elluminate web conferencing environment. It isn't right to push the first person singular personal pronoun quite so hard here. As well as the participants, Steven Warburton and Josie Fraser will join us for a panel discussion. Steve and Josie probably know as much about online identity, identity play and identity projects as anyone. We will be exploring identity together, on line, and asking questions about the nature of identity, inevitably impinging on our own. If you are interested, the site is being developed here: http://digident.brookesblogs.net/ I think we are going to treat this first one as a pilot. But, as ever the question of sustainability is raised. We would like to charge £100 for the one day online seminar. There is no doubt that it is worth it. But is asking people to pay for a webinar like they would buy a theatre ticket the right business model?  It's West-End prices. But, then, this is no jukebox musical. This is the stuff of life. A hundred quid to NOT get any escapism: there's a bargain!

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Dec

22

A week with an Android - well worth it.

December 22, 2009 |  Tagged , | Leave a Comment

I got an HTC “Hero” on 3 Mobile a week ago (early Christmas pressie from my beloved) and I am very pleased. There have been a few teething glitches and a few things I might do differently, but - well - wow!

I have had Ericssons for more than 10 years so switching to a different platform was a small concern. I wanted a smart phone but not an iPhone (http://bit.ly/6qMlcA and http://bit.ly/5I7uQV )

The biggest problem has been the need to adopt fully the Google contacts and calendar back end. And, these are not straight forward.

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Dec

7

Maintaining “dignified difference” in multiple SNs

December 7, 2009 | | Leave a Comment

If we were all the same this wouldn’t be an issue.

My social networking practice has diverged. I use Twitter for work and professional commentary with the occasional policy-related excursion into fields beyond learning technology. I use Facebook for personal, mostly local, Oxford-based social and political activity. Although I have a LinkedIn account I don’t much use it; I have found some old college classmates there. I have posted recordings of poems on mySpace and follow a few local bands.

I follow Twitter and Facebook (and now LinkedIn and mySpace) using TweetDeck. I use TweetDeck to post to Twitter, but I usually post to Facebook on the Facebook site. I rarely update mySpace. I accept and occasionally offer LinkedIn connections but rarely update my status there.

Now, I am wondering how to manage these networks?

My question arises for three reasons.

1) Many of my contacts blanket cover three of these services: Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn with the same message. They update their status once and splash it to all three. Since I follow all three networks there are a lot of duplicated messages.

2) Other friends do what I do only in reverse. They use Facebook for professional contacts and Twitter for personal stuff. So, I find my personal Facebook space getting hit with work stuff. But if I want my work-related updates to reach those people who use Facebook for work, I have to post work stuff to my social stream. This leads some people to post - well let’s just say queries, like what’s all this “rubbish”.

3) TweetDeck enables all four networks to be monitored, and you can post to one or all. I could easily update all with the same messages.

As I said at the beginning, if everyone just did what I do there would be no problem ;-)

I am thinking of culling people from Facebook who just duplicate their Twitter postings. I have “hidden” their posts on Facebook, now. I want to see if hiding also hides them from the TweetDeck column.

I won’t duplicate posts - except rarely - to multiple networks. I will try to dignify the difference between my networks

Twitter will remain my professional social networking outlet with the occasional political rant. Facebook will be for personal, social and political stuff - I mean heck, it is wired into the CIA, why make it hard for them?

I will monitor all the streams so I will see posts from those work colleagues who use Facebook. I can comment and respond. But they may miss my invaluable opinions on Twitter. I suspect, somehow, they will survive.

Posted via email from George’s posterous

Nov

30

Is this a signal about the direction of Foundation Degrees in the UK?

November 30, 2009 | | Leave a Comment

“The best and brightest take a detour” Enrollment in honors programs at community colleges seems to be growing faster than overall enrollment at the [colleges], which surged by about 10 percent this year in the Washington region, as students of various age groups and socioeconomic levels sought affordable higher education.

via Daniel de Vise washingtonpost.com

Many highly able and high scoring US students are opting for public community colleges for the first two years of their four year undergraduate programmes: live at home and pay less than a quarter of the tuition fees demanded by top universities, and then transfer into the final two years at one of those top “schools”.

At present, in the UK, foundation degrees are only seen as a “widening participation” channel. Could we see the development of Foundation Scholars programmes or other FDs for top performers at top FE colleges?

Posted via web from George’s posterous

Nov

25

Google hypocricy? Racism OK in the west; Tibetan politics a reserved right requested individually by China?

November 25, 2009 | | Leave a Comment

“Individual citizens and public interest groups do periodically urge us to remove particular links or otherwise adjust search results. Although Google reserves the right to address such requests individually, Google views the integrity of our search results as an extremely important priority.

“Sometimes Google search results from the internet can include disturbing content, even from innocuous queries. We assure you that the views expressed by such sites are not in any way endorsed by Google.”

via Mark Sweeny, 25/11/2009 guardian.co.uk

It is a hard call, but Google appealing to higher values in one sphere when not matched in all spheres is annoying. What about the mapping of disputed territories favouring occupying powers? Are there no laws that forbid propagation of racist material? It is an interesting ethical conundrum, but it goes to the heart of several contemporary debates. ISPs handling improper music downloads are asked to sanction the downoaders. Should ISPs be forced to act against the transmission of other material that is forbidden in other spheres? What about Pirate Bay’s claim that they are only a search engine?

Posted via web from George’s posterous

Nov

22

It’s nothing personal: Identity, learning environments and covert curricula

November 22, 2009 | | Leave a Comment

Dave Cormier appears to be arguing for a particularly strong form of cultural determinism in his post, “Does the PLE make sense in a connectivist context?” and in his reply to comments. He is troubled by the use of the word “personal”:

… why call it personal? That’s the thing that i keep coming back to… in what sense is it [a PLE] personal? It tends to sound more like a desperate attempt to keep our enlightenment sense of the individual and not open ourselves to the fact that the things that we know are indelibly connected to everything else and are not, in fact, personal at all. In the sense that there are ‘no new ideas’ what we think of as personal are in fact just brand choices.

I couldn’t agree more that most assertions of my-personal-whatever do amount to “brand choices”, or rather, non choices. We are largely unsure of what our positions are in respect to most issues of the day. Positions most strongly held are often the least “personal”: the most influenced by ideologies, for example climate change denial, immigration, one’s position with respect to the European Union, sex roles in society and so on.

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