The Wales-Wide Web

In my writing I am increasingly finding myself referring to on-line sources - and more lately to multimedia sources. This afternoon I had an email form a colleague who is laboriously sub-edicting a book on e-Portfolios. "Hey Graham", Martin asks, "again I need a reference. You wrote in the docs.google document, about Jenny Hughes and Graham Attwell (2006) but it isnt listed in the references. Now I found the copied text in a study I have to have look through until today evening.

So can you send me the complete reference, please. Or is the text "Pedagogical Process" alredy published? If yes, where? Hope for your help."

Hm, I thought, and had to search in the draft for the reference. There it was - it was a video on Teacher Styles.

But then the problem - how to reference videos. I did a quick Google search and came up with the excellent Columbia Guide to Online Style.

The guide provides a comprehensive list of different on-line sources and the way to reference them. Well worth a look.

Great Bazaar seminar - 'Hey Dude, Where's my Data' in Barcelona yesterday. No time now to write a longer piece as I am at an OECD 'expert meeting' on Open Educational Resources (ironically invite only). I will try to write up my first thoughts at the weekend and of course will write a fuller account on the Bazaar project wiki. In the meantime you can read blog posts from the meeting by Ismael Pena Lopez on his ICTlogy blog.

Now live from the OECD meeting. Shigagawa Miyagawa from MIT talked about the MIT Open Courseware initiative as a social initiative to counter the "huge social cost if we let the dot coms take over'. He acknowledged the need to develop sustainability models. He talked about access and that in many African Universities despite poor internet access, there were excellent Local Area Networks. Therefore the is copying open courseware onto external hard drives for physical installation of university LANs.

Patrick McAndrew from the UK Open University presented the OpenLearn initiative, launched by the University yesterday. Looks extremely interesting, especially as through their OpenLab they are trying to make it easy for users to remix materials. We are going to hear a lot more about this in the future. Patrick presented OpenLearn as an experiment, saying the OU is not as brave as MIT. However he feels it impossible for the OU to reverse the direction they have taken, although he is still concerned at the costs of development.

The materials are available in XML and he feels the experience of this is of value to the university as a whole.

There is a continuing debate (which also came up at the Bazaar meeting) running over quality and whether universities should have a role in accrediting materials.

Patrick feels we are looking at futures - University 2.0 - and said there are many unknowns. We do even know if people learn using open content.

Technorati Tags: open_content, OER, social software

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