Sputnic & Venus

Who comes up with these acronyms? I remember the Dilbert cartoon where the project team meets up and is told that all "the good words" have been used up in previous project titles and the only two acronyms left for them are "phlegm" and "placenta"!!

Seriously, though, the discussions today, as part of the Sputnic forum were interesting. Gilly Salmon kicked things off with some more of her visions of the future of learning and she described her work at Leicester with her "Media Zoo" approach to encouraging academics to play with technologies. As is the norm in this conference, her university also has a presence on Second Life and part of the presentation was a video of an interview with her avatar.

After this, the Venus project presented their experiences of using videoconferencing to host a series of international seminars on the theme of 'Global issues for European Citizens". Issues such as the linguistic challenges and the promotion of discussion in local venues as well as across the 6 or 7 sites were raised. It reminded me very much of the joint videoconferenced lectures project that I was involved in years ago in Scottish universities and some of our other seminar programmes in other projects since. Good to see more people realising the potential of this technology, particularly now that it is well-established, stable and of high quality. The biggest issue in projects such as these is the administrative aspect of booking rooms in other institutions, rather than the technology!!

I spoke with Kamakshi Rajagopal about the project for a forthcoming podcast.

Tomorrow, Online Educa starts in earnest with about 78 parallel sessions! I'll try to get to as many as possible, but it could be tricky!

Berlin update

A busy day today at the Kaleidoscope meeting in which the various project representatives and 'stakeholder' groups met to help formulate a new 'vision statement' for the collaboration's research strategy.

Now the Online Educa event itself is beginning to kick into action and many of the corporate/trade stands are being assembled this evening. Tomorrow marks the pre-conference workshops and I'll be busy at the Sputnic and Venus sessions on videostreaming and videoconferencing in HE.

More news as it happens ....!

BlogTalk 2008

BlogTalk 2008, the fifth international conference on Social Software, is to be held in Cork on 3-4 March 2008. The closing date for proposals is Friday 7th December, 2007. There are three submission categories: Academic, Developer and Practitioner.

John Breslin, from DERI in Galway, is one of the conference chairs and he talks about the conference on his blog.

From the conference website:

The international conference BlogTalk 2008 will bring together different groups of people using and advancing the Internet and its usage: technical and conceptual developers, researchers with interdisciplinary backgrounds, and practitioners alike. It is designed to initiate a dialog between users, developers, researchers and others who share, analyse and enjoy the benefits of social software. The focus is on social software as an expression of a culture that is based on the exchange of information, ideas and knowledge, and moreover we understand social software as a new way of relating people to people and to machines and vice versa. In the spirit of the free exchange of opinions, links and thoughts, we wish to engage a wide range of participants in this discourse.

Co-located with BlogTalk is the Social Network Portability Webcamp, which takes place on the day before the main event.

Willkommen in Berlin! Just arrived

Over here in Berlin for Kaliedoscope-Sputnic-OnlineEduca plus other meetings. A whirlwind of a week in the dark depths of winter. As Christmas markets fill the square, e-learning geeks from across the world swarm towards the Hotel Intercontinental. I'm here myself with a room that overlooks the zoo giving a slightly surreal flavour to the whole experience. Anyway, the minidisc recorder is charging up and the microphone is ready and hopefully I'll manage to grab a couple of interviews for our podcasts. Links will be posted here when available. In the meantime it's Gute Nacht from me!

Echo360 UK and Ireland User Conference

On Monday I attended the first Echo360 (formerly Apreso) user conference at Coventry University. It was a very successful event, with about 40 people who are either using or thinking about using the Echo360 lecture capture system. We have just begun testing our system at NUI Galway and intend to begin a pilot evaluation project in the next few weeks.

For some insight into how the system works, take a look at this short video produced by the Multimedia Team at the Centre for Excellence in Interdisciplinary Mental Health at the University of Birmingham.

I haven't got round to writing up my notes of the event, but in the meantime I came across this blog entry from the London School of Economics, who have been using Apreso for 3 or so years and are currently evaluating a beta version of the much anticipated course caster.

Participants of the Installfest, Galway, 17th Nov 2007

Participants of the Installfest, Galway, 17th Nov 2007
Originally uploaded by CELT NUI Galway

Much is spoken about communities of practice and their importance in enabling us to develop and learn. However, frequently the term is misused and abused to describe groups of individuals who have no real community basis or desire to share knowledge. On the other end of the spectrum, there are genuine communities, such as the Galway Linux User Group (GLUG). Formed after the recent BarCamp meeting earlier this month, the group met again this Saturday morning, patiently showing newbies how to get to grips with various flavours of linux distributions. Armed with their laptops and desktop computers, more than 20 people gathered to test out various installations. I didn't get to meet everyone there, but a huge thanks goes to- Andrew, James, and Ina from Deri and Stephen from Applepie- for their help and organisation, and to the GLUG group as a whole. I'm particularly indebted to Toms who persevered against the odds in configuring my laptop to dual boot, with Ubuntu and Vista! It is mindblowing to see people give so freely of their time and expertise!

Galway Linux Installfest, Sat 17th Nov

Are you interested in all things possible with Linux? If so, there is an installfest coming up this Saturday, in DERI from 10am until lunchtime, where there'll be plenty of opportunity to find out all about what Open Source Software can do for you!

For more info, check out Andrew's blog ... or join the Google Galway Linux Users' Group

New Web address

Note that we have now changed the URL for this blog to http://learntechgalway.blogspot.com so please change any links or RSS feeds that you may have set up. Sorry for any inconvenience, but this is in preparation for a slight redesign. The blog has proven popular and rather than continuing to be associated with the Galway Conference we are aiming to give it wider scope and a longer life.

How creativity is being strangled by the law

Larry Lessig, founder of Creative Commons, has an excellent presentation on TED talks this week. Watch it here.

VizThink - Are you a Visual Thinker

The website for the VizThink Conference '08 asks Who are Visual Thinkers anyway? The answer is

Visual thinkers are people who use any form of the visual arts such as graphic design, illustration, photos, video, animations, sketches, 3D, etc. for communications and learning.

The conference topics sound very interesting, including:

• Moving beyond bullet points...using storytelling for presentations
• Aligning individuals using visualization
• Visualization in 3D? When does it matter
• Facilitation using photographs
• Designing compelling and effective information graphics
• Virtual worlds: future or fad
• Creating a global visual language
• Organizing your world with visuals
• Using visuals for powerful presentations
• Storytelling through comics and graphic novels
• Visual techniques for analyzing data
• Visualization principles for software design
• Facilitation through live sketching
• Can there be a true language with grammar and structure that uses visuals?
• Visualization as a brainstorming tool

Unfortunately, for a conference site which states Who should not attend?

• Those who think bullets are best

the site contains an awful lot of bullet-pointed lists!

The conference site links to a blog, where one of the challenges is to picture the visual thinkers community, resulting in some beautiful images and not a bullet point in sight! There is also a conference wiki which includes lots of pre-conference information.

Unfortunately, the conference is in San Francisco at the end of January! Might be worth keeping an eye on the wiki though!

separate lives

The Guardian today has an article which summarises some of the findings of a recent report from JISC in the UK on student attitudes to Web 2.0 technologies. Entitled "Get out of My Space" the story explains that whilst universities and academics are desperately keen to have a presence in social networking sites (such as MySpace and Facebook), students themselves like to keep their space on such sites for personal activity and not study. Pretty obvious if you've ever surfed such sites. The notion that your tutor is eavesdropping on your chat, your hobbies and worst of all your personal photos and videos is a bit disconcerting for many no doubt. Still, the report does make the point that the provision of such tools can be very useful for distance learning (and presumably also, part-time) students in terms of creating a social space to replace the 'student bar'.

The World Digital Library

The Independent (UK), The Washington Post and The New York Times all report on the World Digital Library project, a prototype of which was unveiled in Paris on October 17th. The project involves the US Library of Congress, Unesco and libraries in Egypt, Brazil and Russia, as well as financial support from google and technical support from Apple.

The project is to digitise and make available, for free, in multiligual format, primary resources from around the globe, including maps, rare books, manuscripts, photographs, film and music. While the prototype is not currently available, there is a nice little video Experience the Vision.