The Wales-Wide Web

I found it hard to believe this email which arrived this afternoon. I've always rated Innovate as one of the best of the on line educational technology mags. And I've got no problems with seeking sponsorship (anyone want to sponsor Sounds of the Bazaar?). But some sort of independence is critical. And inviting the submission of "manuscripts describing uses of Microsoft technology (e.g., Office, SharePoint, WL@EDU) that enhance, extend, or in some cases replace traditional pedagogical or research methods" is just ...I am lost for words.

Just so you know I am not making this up see text below from editor James Morrison:

"We are delighted to announce that Microsoft is the first charter sponsor of Innovate under a new program designed to build alliances with corporate participants in the educational technology community. The sponsorship program will widen Innovate’s scope while ensuring that Innovate will continue to be available as an open access e-journal......

The sponsorship program affords technology providers the opportunity to partner with Innovate to help spread the word about creative new uses of technology that will enhance educational effectiveness. In concert with this effort, we are offering sponsors a voice on our Web site via a new section, "From Our Sponsors." As described in the "About this Journal" link, we will publish articles in this section that focus on (1) how educators use our sponsors’ products to enhance teaching, learning, and administration, (2) the services our sponsors have provided or intend to provide to enhance educational effectiveness, and (3) how our sponsors view the future of education and the role information technology tools will play in addressing educational problems and issues. These articles will
meet Innovates high editorial standards; they will be rigorously reviewed and edited to enhance their value to the global community.

As part of the sponsorship arrangement with Microsoft, we invite you to submit manuscripts describing uses of Microsoft technology (e.g., Office, SharePoint, WL@EDU) that enhance, extend, or in some cases replace traditional pedagogical or research methods. Interested authors should contact me with a brief description of the proposed article and an approximate date of submission. "

Oh my - whatever next - project placement, dog-food adverts?

Technorati Tags: corporate sponsorship

At the UK ALT-C conference for last two days.

Great fun meeting everyone, drinking too much, talking lots etc.

Not overimpressed with many of the sessions though. To my mind far too many of the papers are not sufficiently challenging - and too much is being accepted at face value. (If this sounds too negative, Josie has just pointed out to me teh food is better than last year).

But this morning I did go to a great session run by Josie, Helen and Frances. The session was a Web 2.0 slam. After a brief and entertaining introduction to Web 2.0 tools and their uses pairs participants were asked to make a short (two minute) performance about some aspect of Web 2.0.

And very good the contributions were too. Great fun, lots of participation, lots of getting to know people - hi Sabina and Nicola - and we got to learn things too.

Anyway - if you missed the session or weren't at the conference here is the session wiki - and links to videos of each presentation should be available in the next couple of hours.

Technorati Tags: ALTC2007, social software

At the UK ALT-C conference for last two days.

Great fun meeting everyone, drinking too much, talking lots etc.

Not overimpressed with many of the sessions though. To my mind far too many of the papers are not sufficiently challenging - and too much is being accepted at face value. (If this sounds too negative, Josie has just pointed out to me teh food is better than last year).

But this morning I did go to a great session run by Josie, Helen and Frances. The session was a Web 2.0 slam. After a brief and entertaining introduction to Web 2.0 tools and their uses pairs participants were asked to make a short (two minute) performance about some aspect of Web 2.0.

And very good the contributions were too. Great fun, lots of participation, lots of getting to know people - hi Sabina and Nicola - and we got to learn things too.

Anyway - if you missed the session or weren't at the conference here is the session wiki - and links to videos of each presentation should be available in the next couple of hours.

Technorati Tags: ALTC2007, social software

In the last four years the longest I have been off line is three days. And boy, that seemed strange. Now in the interests of science I am going off line for nine days. Yes - you read that right - no internet, no emails, no web, no skype for ten days.

In order to cope with the inevitable withdrawal effects, I will be investing in a quantity of red wine to overcome sensory deprivation.

I did think about turning the mobile off to but that seemed a step to far. Be back on line Monday 20th.

I'm mot sure whether this is true. But it is a great story in the dead news space of August when it is even hard to find much to say about educational technology. From the International Herald Tribune

"Germany's national railway wasn't about to risk sending a trainload of soccer fans to a German Cup match without beer.

Federal police said Monday that the beer tap failed aboard a special train carrying Bayer Leverkusen fans to Hamburg on Saturday. The fault was discovered half an hour into the journey.

"In order not to endanger the good mood" of the passengers, railway officials halted the train in Wuppertal for 25 minutes and had a replacement part delivered by taxi, a police statement said. It added that there was no trouble among the fans."

Great gig last week at the danish Knowledge Laboratory. Thanks to Niels Henrik Helms for inviting me - thanks to everyone else for interesting discussions. It really is good to be in the Nordic countries - the understanding of links between knowledge development and learning in communities of practice is stunning. I think it is in these countries that we will start to see more generalised movements away for Learning management Systems towards Personal Learning Environments. I can remember six years ago being in Tampere University in Finland and be stunned to see the students accessing their email on open access computers using the Unix command line!

And whilst it is no longer trendy to talk about Action Research, that tradition still exists albeit in rarified forms.

The one thing I left out of my presentation was licenses. talking to people at lunch time, they were concerned about the licensing mess but had not heard of Creative Commons. Its a mistake to assume that just because the people on the Ed Tech speaking and conference all use CC licenses the rest of the world knows about them too,. We need to continue to show and explain how Creative Commons works.

Anyway - for any of you reading this blog who were at the conference last week - here - as promised - is the link to Creative Commons.

Technorati Tags: Copyright

The Wales Wide Web - first with all the news that matters.

We are happy to be able to inform readers that Sara Zondergeld is expecting a child. The baby is due in May. Sara says she does not mind whether it is a boy or a girl.

Best wishes to Sara and Ray.

On Wednesday I told you I was in Estonia for a meeting of the new European funded b-learning project. Well the meeting is slowly coming to an end. How did it go. I had only met one of the partners before the meeting. Well, we all got on pretty well and I liked all the partners.

But...we certainly didn't share a common understanding of what the project is about - I think am beginning to get it but I am not quite sure.

But more importantly we do not share the same concepts of e-learning. Most of the partners are from SMEs and at least some of them are viewing e-learning - or more importantly the development of e-learning materials as a commercial enterprise. furthermore whilst some of us come form a (vaguely) constructivist view of learning, others are coming from a system engineering and instructional design position.

So we agree about nothing!

The organisers dragged us out at 8.30 a.m. this morning to go to the university here in Tallin to meet with the director of Estonian e-Vet consortium. Half asleep that I was, I soon woke up. this is truly an inspired and impressive project. No time to write more now - should at lest appear to be paying attention to this meeting but I will write more about this on Sunday.

Technorati Tags: e-learning, European_projects

I am taking part at the moment in an on-line conference organised by the UNESCO IIEP Community of Interest in Open Educational Resources. Although I don't really like the format of these email conferences, it is lively with a lot of cultural interchange. And I just received this wonderful post from K. C. Sabu from Bhopal, India. He or she says in one short story more than I have ever managed to say in long convoluted papers!

"Women Hand Pump Care Takers
In one of the Water and Sanitation Projects in South India, during the 90s women were to be trained to be hand pump care takers. Due to some reason the training was delayed - and the authorities distributed the tool kits to the suggested women in the remote rural areas.

Surprisingly after about 6 months when we visited the areas, we found that the women were actually functioning as Hand Pump care takers though they were not trained to be. Through trial and error they learned the ‘Engineering’ of hand pump. The factors behind the learning include access to the tools, the need - for water - and the natural determination? Learning is mostly demand driven, self organized and self paced. Opportunity and access are important factors in the process of learning.

It is very much true that the children find schooling to be boring. A more active involvement of the user – students - in specifying the content and curriculum may make a difference in this scenario. Teachers need to recognize that there cannot be any teaching if there is no learning. There is need for teachers to realise the fact that the learners are able to construct knowledge. Once this is realized, the teachers will naturally grow above their level of delivering the content, to higher levels like that of becoming partners and facilitators in the process of constructing knowledge."

Technorati Tags: creativity, open content, storytelling

A new feature on this blog - a series on aircraft food. Please feel free to send photos of your experiences.

Jen Hughes kicks off with an email"

"Stop press news .... KLM have got new sandwiches which are about 3 times more inedible than the old ones. After triangles in plastic came oblongs in bloated wax paper bags and now we are moving into a new paradigm of round ones in boxes. The new ones are circular sweet brioche things with salty cheese in them, melted in the microwave and then allowed to go cold. And along with the toothpick, coffee stirrer, napkin and plastic cutlery you also get a small wooden pencil. Uh?

I am increasingly concerned at the new moral outrage over plagiarism.

On September 12, the Observer said: "One of Britain's newest universities has found more than 200 students guilty of cheating after it launched a crackdown on what university officials admit is one of the biggest problems they face.

Using a computer program to catch students trying to pass off others' work as their own - often simply 'cut-and-pasted' from the internet - Coventry University discovered that 237 students had broken the rules. As a result, seven were expelled from the university, while another 12 cases are pending."

Are all these people really cheating.

On 12 September the Guardian reported: "The National Union of Students (NUS), vice-president, Wes Streeting, is becoming familiar with the problem. "We are coming across an increasing number of cases where students have been accused of plagiarism when it's not obvious that the accusation is justified," he says.

"A big problem is that students are not being told what plagiarism is, or how to avoid it. Students may be referencing an author in the bibliography, but not in footnotes. We are also being told of huge differences in the way that departments within the same university are dealing with the issue."

Ian Beak (not his real name) has just graduated from Birmingham University. He was accused of plagiarism in his second year. Two diagrams in an essay had not been footnoted in the text.

"They were referenced in the bibliography, but not on the page. I was accused of plagiarism, which I wasn't very happy about. I wasn't given the opportunity to discuss it; the accusation was made and I had marks deducted, which caused me to fail the module," explains Beak."

Many years ago when I was at university we did not have computers. Library searches were done through card index systems (although the new technical wonder of microfiches was just being introduced. If we had an essay to do, we were given a booklist by the lecturer. This nearly always included the lecturers own writings on the subject. We read or skim read the books - or those of us saving time to spend on other things (drinking, politics) read the introduction and conclusion. And then we paraphrased the contents to linked them together in our essays. This was not only tolerated but was the expected way for us to learn.

We did not reference our essays - rather we put a reading list at the end - and if you were clever you made it impressive whether or not you had read the books (which half the time ere unobtainable anyway because the library did not have enough copies.

Today the standard is much higher. My daughter - who is doing an undergraduate course in history in Aberystwyth University college is expected to fully reference her texts. It seems to me the standard of research for undergraduate essays is much higher (and she is doing history - the same subject I studied at university. students are using the internet in just the same way we paraphrased books. Yet the moral panic has taken over yet again - and it just isn't needed.

Yes - there is a problem with sites writing essays on demand for poor little rich kids whop do not want to learn. This comes from yet another Guardian article on August 1: "Calls from teachers and lecturers for a plethora of internet sites to be investigated have been rejected by the government's exam watchdog, although officials are said to be concerned. More than 15,000 students are estimated to have signed up to one website alone, which charges £9.99 for access to tens of thousands of assignments.

Another, Academic Answers Ltd, based in Nottingham, runs five websites and receives 800 requests a week for tailor-made essays. Barclay Littlewood, director of AAL, said that demand was so great that his firm could only meet around half of these orders. The newly formed company made £400,000 in its first year's trading, with Littlewood expecting this to double by next year. 'We're expecting 50 per cent of last year's customer to return, on top of new ones,' he said.

Of the company's websites, ukessays.com is the biggest, receiving 240,000 hits a year. The company charges £50 for a pre-written essay, and anywhere between £200 and £5,000 for an original piece. "

Even this is not new. We often shared essays to help each other out. And you could always commission an essay off another student. But the answer to this seems easy. Don't chase the students - just ban the sites - or make the 'service' they offer illegal. These people are parasites.

Then lets end the moral panic

Technorati Tags: plagiarism

Time to eat some humble pie (for non native English speaker see Wikipedia entry).

In a post on Friday I doubted the value of live conference blogging. Rod replied on the Bazaar site: "Nice to meet you at ALT-C & I look forward to your reflections - as we discussed at the conference our quick & dirty posts (see Informaticopia on http://www.rodspace.co.uk/blog/blogger.html and HI-Blogs http://www.hi-blogs.info/ may not provide depth of reflection but we (& quite a few users) do feel they have value."

And of course he is right. The posts on Alt-C are of much use - I was quickly following up his links and downloading worksheets to use next week.

I think the truth is that I am no good at live conference blogging. For one thing my typing is just too poor. Fort a second I loose track. And it just doesn't suit the way I write. So it's horses for courses. Thanks Rod. Keep up the great service.

Technorati Tags: Alt-C2006

Tonia emails: "Hi Graham

That John Steinbeck that you read on your podcast, Brilliant. Do you have the text for that in a digital form?"

Here you go, Tonia. Its on pages 52-53 of the Penguin edition of East of Eden.

"Meanwhile Samuel got no richer. He developed a very bad patent habit, a disease many men suffer from. He invented a part of a threshing machine, better, cheaper, and more efficient than any in existence. The patent attorney ate up his little profit for the year. Samuel sent his models to a manufacturer, who promptly rejected the pans and used the method. The next few years were kept lean by the suing, and the drain stopped only when he lost the suit. It was his first sharp experience with the rule that without money you cannot fight money. But he had caught the patent fever, and year after year the money made by threshing and by smithing was drained off in patents. The Hamilton children went barefoot, and their overalls were patched and food was sometimes scarce, to pay for the crisp blueprints with cogs and planes and elevations."

Tonia also points me to the brilliant Cast on - podcast for knitters site. Its very cool - check it out.

Technorati Tags: blackboard patent, patents

As promised here is the newly formed ELGG boyband - featuring, left to right, nurdy ELGG, scruffy ELGG and smarty ELGG.

Photo: Josie Fraser.

Back from the the ALT-C conference in Edinburgh. I always go to these events convinced I am going to blog through the confernce and never do. In reality I suspect that post-confernce reflection may be of more value than 'news coverage' as it happens. Lets face it - academic confernces have little that requires up to the munute reporting.

I have come away with about ten headings for future posts - so I must have learnt something. HopEfully these will roll out over the next couple of weeks.

My overall impressions? Well thIs was the year of social software. Presentations about blogging in education were the topic of the conference. Wikis were also popular though less so. Interestingly there was little or no reference to tagging (might that be next years trend?).

About the blogging - as far as I can see there were two main issues. First was whether blogs should form a structured part of the curriculum or be an additional - add-on - space for students - or both. The second issue was whether blogs should be open to the whole world or be used in a closed system - and who should decide?

There was little talk about VLEs - apart from the by now customary slagging off of Blackboard. Indeed there was even public doubting of the future need for VLEs in a services led world. there was plenty of angst about the future role teaching and of institutions. And plenty of what seemed largely ungrounded discussions about the 'net generation'. More research and less talk would seem to be useful.

I organised a symposium (which we turned into a workshop) on Personal Learning Environments. I enjoyed it greatly and the audience seemed to too. I will post a video of my contribution on this blog tomorrow. And the ever gorgeous Joise Fraser is working on a Flicker stream of the results of the workshop.

It is good to see (at last) the take up of social software. I just worry a little that this is this years fad - and as it proofs hard to get students involved and develop appropriate pedagogy people will move on to the next technology - video?

had a great time night out drinking with the ELGG boy band (photo pending). And met many old and new friends. Thanks to all of you who told me you read the blog regularly - I never new so many people cared. And thanks to all who helped with the workshop especially Ray, Terry, Josie and Lawrie,

Technorati Tags: Alt-C2006, social software

Creativity seems to be rearing its head in one way or another lately.

First a bit of practical creativity. I made a presentation on e-Portfolios in a Beer Keller in Salzburg. OK - so the beer keeler wasn't so well adapted for teaching and learning. But upside down beer crates do a fine job as a stand for the data projector.

I raised the ability to create as a key facet of digital competence for developing e-Portfolios. I was challenged by a person - whose name I did not get - who asked what role creativity plays in e-Portfolios. Now I can see the role of creativity with the full use of multi media for [presentations - but am not sure how creativity is manifested in the more humdrum everyday activities of recording and reflection. I think the question warrants further thought.

Anyway, I had forgotten all about this until yesterday - traveling home after another five days on the road and reading John Steinbeck's East of Eden. Steinbeck says: "our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Noething was ever created by two men. there are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, thre group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything."

Ignoring Steinbeck's use of the word man to describe men and women - his point is interesting.

Technorati Tags: creativity

I got an email form Jacqueline Hall earlier this week.

"Dear Graham", she said, "I am currently undertaking a piece of research examining the supply and demand side of competency (frameworks, mapping, assessment services and associated technology platforms.)

"It struck me that you mentioned this German word 'beruf ' at the Steering group, which was more a synthesis between knowledge and skills, rather than the UK perspective, where we make a clear division, evidenced within for example our NVQ frameworks and other vocational qualifications. I am aiming to try to provide a definition of competency and how it might be interpreted differently across countries such as France, Netherlands, Ireland, UK, Germany, Scandinavia and wonder if you have any links/information/papers which might make useful reading and attempt to provide some clarity. My colleague in the US is attempting to do the same for the States but are further behind us in terms of using competency frameworks or aligning them to business strategy."

What a good question. And there has been very limited work in this area. It would seem that the European Commission, in their obsession with producing common qualification frameworks, have, like national research organisations, failed to consider the different cultural ways in which we view skills and qualification.

there has been some limited work on the subject. I wrote a paper a few years ago on the cultural meaning of VET. I think it was published by the Portuguese curriculum research organisation but has no doubt long time subsided into obscurity. Over the week-end I will try to produce a couple of excerpts for this blog.

My great friend Pekka Kamarienen has produced some excellent work on the subject which was published in a book entitled "Transformation of learning in education and training Key qualifications revisited", which, along with Pekka and Alan Brown, I edited. Whilst this still appears to be available for purchase (25 Euros) from Cedefop.

Sadly Cedefop have not chosen to make the book available for download. I have a copy on my computer of course and if you would like to read any of it (you can find a list of the contents here) email me and I will send you the chapters as a file attachment (hope that doesn't upset Cedefop too much - knowledge being freely available- whatever next?).

By coincidence, Pekka pointed me today to a new wiki launched by the Institut Technik und Bildung at the University of Bremen.

The aim of the wiki is " to create a support-space for intercultural understanding of terms and concepts of technical and vocational education and training (TVET)."

The main page goes on to say: "In international co-operation - when using different languages - it is often hard to communicate concepts, which are specific to certain countries. Those concepts were developed using the individual country's language, and the development also affected the language by either creating new terms or assigning new meanings to existing terms. Thus it is usually hard to find equivalent terms in a language, which was not the native language of the concept.

This wiki intends to develop translations of such terms of TVET. In order to tackle the problem of environment- and development-related meanings of terms complex cross-cultural and inter-lingual webs will have to be created, comprising explanations of and references to the backgrounds and their processes that led to the existance of the terms.

Everybody with knowledge on TVET is invited to contribute to the development of this encyclopaedia of TVET terms. "

Sadly the front page appears to be locked at the moment but I am hopeful such teething problems are sorted out soon. Looks a good initiative and at least it is in the public domain. I

Technorati Tags: education and training research, knowledge development

Blackboard becomes USA Technologies' reseller to expand distribution of e-Suds : CR80 News:

OK, we know by now that Blackboard is a ruthless, money grabbing, nasty capitalist company that is more focused on revenues than learning.

But this seems a curious sideline

"Blackboard becomes USA Technologies' reseller to expand distribution of e-Suds
Wednesday, May 24 2006

Campus card solutions provider Blackboard is getting into the laundry business. It has added the eSuds online laundry service to its product line, giving USA Technologies access to hundreds of Blackboard's colleges and universities.

High Tech Laundry and Leading-edge Payment System Combine to Improve Laundry Experience

MALVERN, Pa--Blackboard Inc., the nation's leading provider of software and services to the education industry, has become a reseller of USA Technologies' e-Suds online laundry service.

USA Technologies announced that Blackboard had added e-Suds to its product line and would offer it to hundreds of academic institutions that use the Blackboard Transaction System.

e-Suds is the leading Internet connected laundry system that was recently featured on Fox National News for its innovativeness."

I think it is time to return e-learning to the education sector - not a company which washes its dirty washing in public.

Technorati Tags: blackboard

A very short post because I am too tired to write more.

I have been speaking about the use of ICt for (mainly) informal learning in Small and Medium Enterprises. The meeting was in York. travel has been a nightmare - I missed my flight due to a cancelled train last night and seem to have been traveling ever since.

Anyway - more about the York meeting next week - to any of you who were at the meeting, thanks for the invitation and especially for some very interesting questions which came up after my presentation.

I am especially interested in the issue of learning (and learner) driven occupational profiles and in the contradiction between institution supporting increasing productivity through better performance, whilst generating new competences which do not fit their own accreditation programmes.

Finally many thanks to whoever organized the excellent Zulu singers prior to my presentation (I kid you not readers- if I had bluetooth on this computer I would show you the pictures). Hope to get a copy of their e-learning song for the next Sound of the Bazaar Podcast.

And now I ma off to the Cambridge folk festival for a couple of days holiday. And I am sending this live from the train over a wireless network. It is free -a t least for a trial period. Ubiquitous computing moves a tiny step nearer.

Technorati Tags: non formal learning, Small and Medium Enterprises

Just happened to have a few minutes whilst the software is processing things and noticed this in my inbox. I get messages like this every other day - this one at least comes on a list server I have subscribed to - most are academic spam. But the real question is who do they think they are kidding. The only reason deadlines get extended is because there are not enough applications and we all know it.

"Due to the surge of applications for places under The e-Learning Foundations subsidised delegate scheme for this years Handheld Learning 2006 conference they have decided to extend the deadline for applications until the 30th July."