Category Archives: Mature

A day of internet radio goodness

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This Thursday features a day of LIVE internet radio to support the Jisc Institutional Innovation programme online conference on Institutional Impact.

We will be broadcasting four programmes during the day.

The Morning Programme

The morning programme starts at 10.00 CET (9.00 UK Summer Time) and will run until 1215 CET. The will feature music and chat. At around 11.00 CET we will brodacst Professor John Cook’s keynote speech on “Scaffolding the Mobile Wave”

  • How can learning activities that take place outside formal  institutions, on platform of the learners choice, be brought  into institutional learning? New digital media can be regarded as cultural resources that can  enable the bringing together of the informal learning contexts in  the world outside the institution with those processes and contexts  that are valued inside the intuitions. The big problem is that reports show that Social Software and Google  are not enabling the critical, creative and reflective learning that  we value in formal education.

The Lunch Time Show
The lunch time broadcast will be from 1400 – 1430 CET (1300 – 1330 UK Summer Time. The show will feature interviews with Ruth Drysdale from Jisc and David Morris plus more music.

The Afternoon Show
The mid afternoon show from 1600 – 1630 CET (1500 – 1530 UK Summer Time)  will feature guest slots from Howard Noble from the Low Carbon ICT project and from Luis Francisco Pedro form Portugal on introducing PLEs throughout the institution.

The Evening Show
The evening show kicks off at 1930 CET 18.30 UK summer Time. Besides providing a chance for quick reflections on the conference, it will also be featuring interviews with leading researchers and practitioners on institutional innovation from all over Europe (we have some great gusts lined up – I will try to provide you with a trailer for them tomorrow). From 2000 CET (1900 UK Summer Time) onwards it will also be streamed into Second Life for participants in the Institutional Innovation conference social event. The show ends at 2030 CET (19.30 UK Summer Time).

How to listen to the programme.
You can access the internet radio feed by going to http://radio.jiscemerge.org.uk:80/Emerge.m3u in your browser. This will open the stream in your MP3 programme of choice (e.g, iTunes).

Please feel free to just sit back and enjor the show. But if you would like to come on the show live to provide your reflections and ideas about the issues being discussed then please skype or email Graham Attwell – graham10 [at] mac [dot] com or GrahamAttwell on skype.

Portlets and Widgets

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June is the month of meetings and i seem to have been in meetinsg for ever. Just a short few hours break before the next ones start so time for a quick bog entry.

This morning I received an email from Effie Law from the University of Leicester, UK/ ETH Zürich, Switzerland.

“Dear Graham,” she said, “I am now working … to develop an evaluation framework on widgets. In the meantime, we have identified several conceptual issues that your rich expertise and experience in widgets can help us resolve them.

May we ask you to kindly complete the following mini-survey for us.”

I love a flattering email as much as anyone else but I am afraid Effie seriously over rates my expertise. But she did conclude her email by saying “Please forward this message to those whom you think should respond to this survey as well”. So I am forwarding it to you, my blogreaders, in ther hope some of you can shine light on the questions Effie asks. Please just reply below and I will pass all answers on.

Here are the questions:

Q1. Questions about Portlets
1a) Please give your definition of portlets

1b) Please list specific characteristics (=attributes, properties) of portlets

1c) Please list specific features (=functionalities) of portlets

Q2. Questions about Widgets
2a) Please give your definition of widgets

2b) Please list specific characteristics (=attributes, properties) of widgets

2c) Please list specific features (=functionalities) of widgets

Q3. Please tell us, what do YOU consider as the major differentiator(s) between:
3a) Portlets and Widgets? (cf. Wikipedia on Web widget)

3b) Widgets and Java Applets? (cf. W3C Widget requirements)

Q4. Please share with us YOUR ideas how to evaluate:
4a) Portlets?

4b) Widgets?

More on the summer school – how could it be organised?

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There has been a lot of discussion regarding my post on the TEL summer school held two weeks ago in Terchova in Slovakia. Many of the respondents have replied at some length. Most were at pains to stress the positive sides to the event, whilst pointing to how it could be improved in future. It was a desire to see a public debate with participants in order to think how the Summer School could be improved that motivated my initial post.

Two main themes emerge, I think, from the different comments. One is the format of the summer school, with a desire expressed to move beyond a traditional lecture style of delivery to more active means of shared participation in knowledge sharing and development. The second is to question the divide between teachers and learners.

Ambjorn Naeve concludes  his contribution to the discussion by saying “Let me end this comment with a constructive suggestion for the future. Next year, let us have the lectures recorded in advance (e.g. in Flashmeeting), and the powerpoints (or other documentation) made available to the students at least one month in advance. Let us then require of the students that they watch these presentations and come up with (and post) at least three (non-trivial) questions for each of them. And let us then devote the lecturing time together to discussing the questions that have come up?”

Here would be my contribution based on the extremely successful recent Educamp in Germany.

The summer school traditionally runs for five days, from Monday to Friday. I would run the first two days as a barcamp event. All participants, teachers and students would be free to propose workshop or lecture sessions. Thsi would allow everyone to present their ongoing projects and work.

After the first two days, a new agenda would be drawn up based on the major themes emerging from the presentations and concerns of participants. These themes would be the basis for the following two days of intensive workshop activities. The workshops would develop their own aims, with one being to practically advance knowledge and ideas around the theme they were discussing.

The final day would be devoted to an exhibition where each thematic group presented their work to others, incorporating, if they wished, multi media presentations.To add a competitive edge, there could be a (small) prize for the best exhibition.

Given that the summer school is residential, the times for workshop activities could be moved around, to allow for activities, not juts sport, but active learning activities, to take place in the day, with more workshop being scheduled for the evenings. Participants would themselves be encouraged to organise the social programme, with a premium on social and learning activities.

Of course, this raises the issue of the role of the ‘professors’ at the summer school. Instead of presenting lectures, they would have the task of guiding and mentoring the thematic groups and of supporting individual and group learning.

None of this contradicts the ideas put forward by Ambjorn. But rather than just providing lectures in advance of the school, why not stage a series of online interactive seminars in the run up to the event. And lets use a social networking platform to aggregate and discuss our work, both in advance of the summer school and throughout the event, linking up with other researchers not fortunate enough to be able to attend., Indeed, the thematic groups could draw on the wisdom of the distributed community to help in their work and discussions.

In other words, let us develop a pedagogy for the summer school which reflects our own emergent uses of TEL for teaching and learning.

I would welcome futher suggestions of rhow next years summer school might be organised. I have agreed to pass on all comments on the blog to the Stellar network who will be responsible for organising the 2010 event.

Issues in PLE development

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I go through periods of having little new to say about Personal Learning Environments and times with many new ideas. I am at the moment in one of the latter periods – inspired by so many interesting talks at the European Technology Enhanced Summer School last week and at over the weekend at a meeting of the Mature-IP project partnership.

Here are a few of the things I have been thinking about (and will write about over the next two weeks):

  • the emergence of some consensus about a mash up (Mupples) approach to PLE development based on widgets
  • the relationship between (informal) learning and knowledge development and maturing within organisations
  • The relationship between individual learning through a PLE and organisational learning
  • the idea of bricolage as the basis of an emerging pedagogic theory of learning outside the institutions
  • the potential for a mobile device based PLE (code named a WOMBLE – Work and Mobile Learning Environments)
  • The digital identity of learners expressed through a PLE
  • the idea of appropriation (linked to bricolage) of software and applications for use for learning
  • the potential of Google Wave as a platform for a PLE

Anyone care to add to this list?

Crowd sourcing my presentations

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Much as I enjoy doing presentations at conferences it does seem oh some Web 1.0 ish. So i am working on how to make such events a little more interactive. Twitter is great – if conference organisers can make available a second screen at events. At least then people can ask questions during the presentation (I always tell people they are free to interrupt me but they seldom do). I have messed with buzz groups during the presentation but this always seems a little artificial.

I like the presentation Dave Cormier did at the WIAOC conference last weekend. I wasn’t at it, neither have I watched the video but his community crowd sourced slides both provide a wealth of shared learning and give the impression the event was a lot of fun. For explanation of the idea behind it see his blog.

I am going to try doing something like that next week at the ProLearn Summer School in Zilina.

I have just been writing a long overdue abstract for my keynote presentation at the DFG Research Training Group E-Learning conference on Interdisciplinary approaches to technology-enhanced learning (IATEL) in Darmstadt in June.

I was not quite sure what to talk about – the overall theme I was given is Learning in Networks – from learning in the Network to the learning Network and back.

So I am crowdsourcing the abstract to blog readers. What have I missed out? What other ideas should I include? All contributors will get a citation on the final slide!

Abstract

Graham Attwell will look at the evolution of learning networks.

The presentation will also look at the development of educations systems and the spread of mass education through an industrial model with curriculum based on expert knowledge. He will go on to examine key issues including control at the level of content, institutions and curriculum.

The presentation will look at the changing ways people are learning and developing and sharing knowledge using Web 2.0 and social software tools. Such practice is facilitating the development of personal learning pathways and integration within dispersed communities if practice.

The presentation will examine recent ideas and theory about learning in networks including the idea of rhizomatic curricula and connectivism.

As learning networks become more important, the issue of digital identities is attracting more attention. How do individuals interact in learning networks and whet is the role of tools such as Twitter? How important is the idea of place within learning networks?

The presentation will consider how learning takes place in Personal Learning Environments drawing on the work of Levi Stauss on bricolage and Goffman’s dramatulurgical perspective.

Finally the presentation will consider the implication of ideas of learning in networks and Pe