An anthropological introduction to YouTube

Michael Wesch, the man who brought us A Vision of Students Today and Web 2.0 The World is Watching Us, delivers this talk at the Library of Congress. It is an interesting watch, but at 55 minutes long, make sure you have enough time. I watched it over two days, dipping in and out.



You can find out more about Michael Wesch's Digital Ethnography group at Kansas State University over on his blog.

RTÉ: Special Series on Technology in the Developing World

All this week RTÉ are presenting a special news series, Global Classroom, on technology in the developing world, in particular Kenya, India, and Rwanda.

Three approaches to educating young members of these communities are reported on:

• the charity Camara who hold a computer skills workshop in Kenya,
  
• the Hole in the Wall project in India which believes collective learning using a village computer can close the education gap for children around the world,
  
• and finally the One Laptop Per Child initiative which a school in Rwanda hopes to implement.

Clips, blogs, and reports can be accessed from the RTÉ website, here.

London Pedagogy Planner

A recent article in this month's eLearn magazine describes an event at which Diana Laurillard (London Knowledge Lab) describes a tool she has been involved in developing, called the "London Pedagogy Planner (LPP)". This is essentially a java application - a version of which is freely downloadable here - that prompts one to articulate lots of information about one's course, including learning objectives, assessment methods, etc.

The creators claim "It focuses on the critical aspects of learning designs, and makes the pedagogical design explicit, capturing it for testing, redesign, reuse and adaptation by the originator, or by others. "

The utility of the application is a little unclear to me, unless this information can be in turn communicated to students or others involved in the course design, and be easily exportable into a VLE, or printable format. Without such opportunities for dissemination, it seems like a considerable effort merely to gain a means of making practices and objectives explict for one's self alone. I've just downloaded the application, and hope to give it a second look.

The LPP project has been funded by the JISC's Design for Learning programme, and has been developed by the Institute of Education, University of London and Institute of Education, London Metropolitan University in partnership with LAMS International Pty Ltd led by Diana Laurillard and Tom Boyle.

How 'Cuil' is this?

A new internet search engine has just been launched by some former Google employees. Named Cuil after the Irish word. It uses the context of words on web pages to facilitate more effective searching. You can find out a little more about it in this report from the BBC or go straight to the company themselves where you'll learn about the Irish connection!

knol vs wikipedia

Google's 'rival to wikipedia,' known as Knol is now being made more widely available. Edits to articles can only be approved by the page authors and the aim is to have a more authoritative encyclopedia than the ever popular wikipedia. Example articles on display in the home page include those on leukemia and unblocking toilets.

Clickers in the Classroom

Today's Inside Higher Ed reports from the Blackboard World conference in Las Vegas about the use of audience response systems in the classroom, and whether it is a fad or a useful educational tool. It points to an interesting report on a study at Ohio State University, where clickers are used to engage and involve Physics students. It was found that students who used clickers earned exam scores that were 10% higher than students who didn't use them. Moreover, it seems that female students in particular benefited from the anonymity that clickers give, allowing them to actively participate in lecture sessions while keeping their involvement private.

the Hidden power of the GPU

Sometimes the sluggishness of this computer becomes really annoying, particularly when it is doing what is a relatively simple task conceptually but is encumbered by 'bloatware'. Despite a fast processor and lots of RAM there are times when it just trundles along. Interesting then to read that programmers are working on unleashing the often underused power of the graphics card. Bristling with processors that lie largely idle (except in the heat of intense gaming) they represent an untapped power that could supercharge a PC's performance. The Guardian, yesterday, carried the story.

Wordle

I've been having fun with Wordle, a little tool that allows you to create word clouds based on text that you enter. It's very easy to use, with a simple set of options for changing font, colours and format. To save locally, you need to install a pdf writer, if you don't already have one, but this took me all of 5 seconds.

My first creation is based on our recent Teaching Awards scheme, and I'm quite pleased with the result.

The European Award for Languages

Congratulations to the NDLR Modern Languages' Community of Practice, which has won a European Award for Languages 2008 for its blog as a Language Community Building Medium. For more information see the entry on the blog, or contact Michelle Tooher or Paul Gormley, both members of the Learning Technologies Team here at CELT.

A second award went to the Italia in Diretta project run by Laura McLoughlin in the Italian Department at NUI Galway. This encourages students to run a website and blog to promote the Italian language aimed at school children.

intro to second life in education

Educause's latest "7 things you should know..." leaflet is about Second Life and its educational potential. It's available here.

Collection of free educational media

The Openculture blog has an expanding listing of open access university course materials and is a handy way of finding some examples rather than being over-reliant on one provider, such as iTunes, for example.

Live Conference Presentations from Princeton

The NMC (New Media Consortium) annual conference is under way in Princeton with over 600 participants. As you might hope for such a technology organisation, the keynote presentations are being made available as live streams. The events (in Princeton time!) are as below and you can access them here.

• Opening Plenary Keynote Presentation: “Technology and the Global Commons” Diana Oblinger, President, EDUCAUSE
  Thursday June 12, 8:30am-9:45am EDT
• Noontime Plenary Presentation: “Motion and Emotion, Multi-media Storytelling on the Web” Bill Frakes, Sports Illustrated
  Thursday June 12, 12:00pm-12:45pm EDT
• Keynote Presentation: “New Frontiers in Nanotechnology” Wole Soboyejo, Princeton University
  Friday June 13, 12:00pm-12:45pm EDT
• Center of Excellence Awards and Five Minutes of Fame, NMC
  Friday June 13, 2:45pm-5:00pm EDt
• Closing Plenary Keynote Presentation: “What Would Herman Melville Say to Soulja Boy?: Remix Culture and the New Media” Henry Jenkins, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  Saturday June 14, 10:15am-11:45am EDT
• Note that we are also hoping to have Henry Jenkins' session also streamed into Second Life on Princeton's SL version of the actual venue, Alexander Hall