The Wales-Wide Web

In Berlin for the Educa on-lione conference. About 2000 people here - phew its big. Lots of fun - although as always most of the best stuff is happening around the conference rather than in the formal sessions. Will post something about the conference at the weekend - although I am sure there are plenty of conference bloggers here.

I am speaking about the use of ICt for learning in Small and Medium Enterprises this morning. The talk is called 'Searching, Lurking and the the Zone of Proximal Development'. Because of time restrictions I have had to cut about a third of my slides. But, if anyone does want the full version of my presentation, the slides can be found here.

lurkingfin.ppt

Terry Anderson :: Weblog :: Educational Social Overlay Networks:

Very interesting article by Terry Anderson.

"Educational social software can be used effectively to create a type of overlay network to enhance the more formal institutional network consisting of student support , library, tuition, registration and other institutionalized services. An overlay network is a term from computer science that describes a virtual and often semantically based indexing system that rides on top of physical network."

Seems to me this is important. I have been worrying about how we get from here to there. Here is the ubiquitous institutionally controlled VLE. There is the student controlled Personal Learning Environment. How do we persuade institutions to let go of their grip? And, possibly more problematic, how do we persuade learners to take control of their own learning?

The idea of an overlay network may be the social or pedagogic bridge between the two.

Technorati Tags: e-portfolios, Personal_Learning_Environments

Ok - I promised a bit more about On line Educa Berlin and here it is - before I forget.

Overall impressions - it is too bloody big. Nearly 2000 visitors and goodness knows how many trade stands. Mobile devices were needed to find anyone.

I thought the conference programme was only at best average. Perhaps I am being a bit cheeky given I spent most of my time avoiding the sessions and having a great time nattering to people.

So a quick roll call of people (just to make it sound like an A list blog) - great to see Brian from the Commission, Fred from the Dutch OU, Doris from somewhere in germany, Serge from Eiffel, Colin from the OU, Kathy from Crete, Dai from Mallorca, Wilfred, Elmo and Nick form the ICT and SME project, Elaria from Italy and all my friends and colleagues from JISC and Surf. Sorry for those I have left out - there were an awful olot of receptions which just had to be attended and my memory may have suffered.

JISC colleagues win this months prize for self abuse in consuming a ridiculous quantity of the euphemistically named Winter warmer.

back to the conference proper. there seemed to me a big increase in interest in open content - this is a very welcome development which I hope continues and some number of presentations on Open Source. But applications continue to be VLE and VLE type dominated - with Social Software yet to really arrive.

And the keynote sessions were largely dominated by the sponsors - which would have been OK if any of them had anything to say.

So - good fun was had by all - and I'll get down to that pile of emails I have promised to send people.

Technorati Tags: e-learning

Was on an airplane this morning looking at Scott Wilson's presentation on the 'Architecture of Virtual Spaces and the future of VLEs'. Traveling seems to be about the only time I have at the moment for reading things like this (to tell the truth I was idly cleaning up my desktop when I found it). I have long felt that VLEs are both unnecessary and primarily a system for institutional control so was well happy to find someone else basically reiterating such ideas.

I was very struck by Scott's somewhat throw away line: "There is also a conversation about what exactly public education institutions ought to be providing - should they provide e-learning systems, or just provide basic wi-fi network access and expect students to have their own systems?".

I am not so sure that there is such a conversation going on but there certainly ought to be. We assume students will provide their own word processors - be they proprietary or open source. Why then do we persist in providing e-learning systems. Not because of generosity I would suggest but because institutions are desperate to maintain control. Allowing students to provide their own systems would be a big step in encouraging them to take control of their own learning and at the same time focus institutions on implementing standards based support and information systems which support a variety of different pedagogic approaches.

Technorati Tags: e-learning

Not a post of any substance. Just a diary update. I am off to Paris tomorrow for a meeting of the OECD Open Educational resources project. And then on to Cardiff late on Wednesday. I will be around South Wales most of the rest of the week and will be in London Monday and Tuesday for a meeting of the JISC e-Learning programme.

Do give me a ring or email if anyone would like to meet up.

Had a meeting yesterday with Catalina Martinez, an economist from OECD, Susan D'Antoni from Unesco, and Hal Abelson and Paula La Dieu from Creative Commons. The meeting was brought together by Jan Hylen who is coordinating the OECD Education Open Educational Resources project.

The meeting was intended as informal and the discussion was wide ranging.

A number of things came out of the meeting.

One was the need to specifically promote Creative Commons within the educational world. Many of the 'stories' Creative Commons tells as the moment are directed at creative professionals (not to say educationalists cannot be creative but you know what I mean). Linked to this was developing a strategy for gaining acceptance of the Creative Commons License in education. most of us felt that it was like pushing at an open door - many people working in education would be very happy to use Creative Commons but did not know about it.

Any strategy needs to be pursued at a number of levels, including institutions and political. the research councils may be important in this regard.

Hal gave us an interesting update on the development of the Scientific Commons License - which he explained was far more complex than perhaps had first been thought.

For some time I have had a thing about it being too difficult to insert Creative Commons Licenses - particularly into written text. the majority of university research seems to me to be distributed as Word and PDF downloads. We need a plug in for Word and Open Office making it possible to insert a License form the toolbar. Similarly, a widget could be developed for Firefox to create and embed RDF into web pages. Everyone seemed to agree this was a good idea so I will pursue some funding for this.

As at so many meetings about Open Source and Open Content which I have attended in the last few months, the issue of coordinating developments and exchanging experiences on a more on-going basis was raised. There is a growing need and desire for such coordination in Europe. The problem is, no-one knows quite how to do it. On the one had in requires money - though that is not impossible. On the other hand it needs to be representative and inclusive and that is much more difficult.

Technorati Tags: Creative Commons, education policy, open source

I like to add the occasional photo. This one was taken at the SIG Open Source Software in Education in Europe (SIGOSSEE) seminar in Sweden in September.

Technorati Tags: puppy

Since you asked - no I have not finished for the holidays. Cance would be a fine thing. In fact I have just got back from yet another round of meetings - OECD, Jisc and the rest.

The meeting of the JISC e-learning programme team focused on communications and dissemination. JISC Infonet people were invited. I have to admit I did not realize there was a separate JISC Infonet web site.

And it's pretty good. What interests me is the problems in putting together structured ' information packs' on the web. In truth these are little different from any other form of learning materials. And guess what, most e-learning projects are pretty bad at it.

Any way the Infonet folks have developed an 'Info pack' approach which I think works quite well. they have just released a useful resource on e-portfolios (and I am not just saying that because they cite my blog in the introduction!). Interestingly it is not dissimilar to the approaches followed by the excellent National Guidance Research Forum web site. Both use the Plone Content Management System. However NGRF have gone further in attempting to experiment with integrating blogs as discussion systems in the site. Click here to see their shared web logs. they are also integrating bookmarking and citation based systems into their resources. I am convinced this is the right way to go - it is perfectly possible now to build very rich learning resources using a CMS and social software.

Technorati Tags: e-learning, e-portfolios, eportfolio, Open source, plone

Guardian Unlimited Technology | Technology | How the web will link us all:

Nice short article in the Guardian introducing social software. Also gets the point around communities establishing their own rules and hierarchies - which is why social software has so much to offer to the development of communities of practice.

"The communities that emerge from social software create their own norms, hierarchies and rules. They reflect what we know offline and connect people online. Importantly, social software encourages collaboration. It is the social in the software which will bring communities together, building upon the success of its technological predecessors and enhancing, rather than replacing, human interaction."

Technorati Tags: communities of practice, knowledge development, social software