St. Patrick's Day in Second Life.

As reported on the BBC website today, Tourism Ireland is hosting a celebration of St. Patrick's day (albeit happening on Sunday) in Irish spaces in the virtual world that is Second Life. SL's Dublin is a popular venue (mainly for all the shenanigans in "the Blarney Stone" virtual pub) and has a mock up of Trinity College, Bewley's Cafe (see picture!) and other locations in the city centre.

Nicholas Negroponte's TED talk from 1984

Watch 25 minutes of Nicholas Negroponte's 2 hour talk from the very first TED conference in 1984. The full talk will be made available, but needs to be restored.

This is absolutely fascinating, especially if you can remember back to 1984 and the sorts of technology that were available. I had an Apple II at the time and considered myself very sophisticated. We had no idea that this work existed or had even been thought of (outside of Science Fiction novels).



Download the talk and see the comments on the TED page.

Is it cheating if it's on Facebook?

A story was published on Monday in the Montreal Gazette concerning a first year computer engineering student at Ryerson University in Toronto. He was the administrator of a virtual study group on Facebook, where 146 of his classmates discussed solutions to homework problems. The student has been accused of academic misconduct and could be expelled from the University. His hearing was yesterday, as reported in the Global and Mail, and he will be informed of his fate within five days.

The story prompted many commentaries, including one on Stephen Downes' blog and another on Emma Duke-Williams' blog, about whether a virtual study group is any different from the usual collaboration that takes place in the canteen. Was it naive of the lecturer to expect that the homework problems he set (which were individualised for each student in an effort to prevent cheating) would not be discussed?

you're live on air!!

Broadcast live streaming video from your mobile phone? Well, it looks like the technology is now available for those of you with 3G (and unlimited data plans). Two products mentioned by Rory Cellan-Jones of the BBC include Flixwagon and Qik with rumours that YouTube will be launching a similar service at some stage in the near future. Rory interviewed Flixwagon's Chief Executive, Eran Hess at the BBC yesterday on his mobile phone.

On teaching 'ideas'

Alan Kay spoke at TED last year on some aspects of how to approach the teaching of ideas.

from coriander to ginger: putting the spice into RSS feeds!

Netvibes has in the last week released publicly its new 'ginger' version which has a lot of added features and functionality compared to its earlier 'coriander' release. For those not au fait with netvibes, it's a great way of organising information and bringing together all your interests into one simple web-page (but allowing multiple tabs in which you can structure the info). Exploiting RSS feeds from other websites and using a range of 'widgets' to provide links to email, weather, news, maps, etc, I've certainly found it to be a really useful tool over the year or so in which it has been my browser's home page.

One of the key aspects of the new version is the ability to develop a separate page which you can make available publicly - called 'my universe'. Applications in higher education for example could include building a reference site that links to the latest feeds from relevant academic journals providing a handy resource for students and researchers. My first stab at a universe can be seen here and it probably makes more sense to look at an example than try to understand my muddled explanation thus far!

Anyway, its free and, once you get the hang of it, indispensible!

Games & civic engagement

Can computer games really be educational? MIT World this month has a recording of a discussion on games and civic engagement. The panelists are Mario Armstrong and Ian Bogost. You can watch it here.

50 Web 2.0 Ways to tell a story

Alan Levine of the New Media Consortium gave a presentation about digital storytelling at the NMC Regional Conference a few months ago and posted it online. You can view it here and listen to the audio track also using slideshare.

More details are available at http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/50+Ways

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Audio Books Publishers to Drop DRM Sofware

The New York Times published an article yesterday publicising that "Some of the largest book publishers in the world are stripping away the anticopying software on digital downloads of audio books".

This stripping of DRM (Digital Rights Management) software will effectively allow downloaded materials to be transferred between computers, iPods, etc. It is hoped that stripping away the anticopying software will encourage a "renewed growth in the audio book business".

Online seminars

Innovate: the journal of online education (for which this blog has long had an RSS feed - see listing on right hand column) has a new series of papers and accompanying online seminars coming up in March. The journal invites paper authors to use Adobe Connect software to provide live online presentations and these later become available for viewing in their archives. During the event attendees can post questions using a text chat tool or, for a limited number, using headsets/microphones. Whilst Adobe Connect also allows video during the presentations, Innovate's versions are based on audio plus PowerPoint.

Forthcoming events are:

• Wednesday, March 26, 2008, 11:00 AM: Let Me Learn with My Peers Online!: Foreign Language Learning Through Reciprocal Peer Tutoring
• Wednesday, March 26, 2008, 2:00 PM: Learning at a Distance: Engaged or Not?
• Wednesday, March 26, 2008, 3:00 PM: Online Teaching and Classroom Change: The Trans-Classroom Teacher in the Age of the Internet

And previous topics include: Online Course Development; Podcasts for Engineering Education; Games, Avatars and Education, etc. The full listing is available here.

Learning & the Social Web

John Breslin's talk was well received with a jam-packed room of eager listeners. He has popped his slides onto slideshare for anyone to view.

You can see them at http://www.slideshare.net/Cloud/learning-and-the-social-web/

John Breslin and Data Portability

John Breslin's take on data portability:



Of course, John is coming to give a CELT talk tomorrow, 12.30 in AM207. His title is Learning via the Social Web, and he intends to

look at some popular applications from the "Social Web": blogging, wikis, podcasting, social networking, social bookmarking, etc., and examine the usage of these tools in the education domain.