We think

Steve Wheeler's Web 2.0 Wonderland

Any Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass fans out there (and I'll admit that I'm one), you definitely will enjoy this take on Jabberwocky by Steve Wheeler on his blog, Learning with 'e's.

Atmosphere

Whilst OEB are producing their own videos of the content of the presentations, here's a rough cut of some random scenes that capture some of the atmosphere of the event and the host city.

Podcasts, interviews, etc

Now that OEB do their own podcasts and interviews, and given how busy it is in the sessions, as with last year, I deferred to their work rather than stringing together a series of my own as I did in the early days. Here is the main link to the interviews plus recordings from last year - a really useful resource.

(photo: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Germany License.
Photographs by David Ausserhofer. All copyrights by ICWE GmbH.)

Stroll

Cold but clear day in Berlin, left just enough time to walk along the Tiergarten, past the Soviet Memorial, to the Brandenburg Gate, on past the American, French and British Embassies, down to Potsdamer Platz then along past the diplomatic area (filled with all the new embassies) back along the park, through to Wittenbergplatz, quick sneak into KaDeWe to see the Christmas displays before back to the hotel on Budapester Str. Great walk, probably a little too fast, but always love doing this. Normally, when I have more time, I go on along Unter den Linden all the way past Humboldt University, Museum Island and into Alexanderplatz, turning at Karl Marx Allee, but not enough time this year.

Berlin is a fascinating city and well worth a visit anytime.

Danger - if you're reading this online your brain is at risk

Well I'll admit to having been much worse at updating the blog this year at the event, but that's because I've been so engrossed in conversation and busy twittering away...quite apart from the outrageous socialising with all these nice people at one time or other associated with Humboldt University!

Anyway, today was a mixed experience, as with all conferences. Many folk twittering about sales pitch type talks, I didnt experience many of those, due to my choice of session probably. Closest to that was the one by Polycom, but they did it well by having a user to describe experience of using videoconferencing for music tuition and the issues in sound quality etc. They are doing a live link up with the Manhattan School of Music tomorrow to demonstrate.

The sessions were rounded off with a 'debate' on the proposal that the internet is destroying our children's minds. A motion led by Aric Sigman who shouted and attempted to scare everyone. His extremely aggressive style offended some, particularly those unfamiliar with him (the vast majority of the 2,000+ international delegates), but for others gradually seemed like a raving madman. He attacked the audience as being pushers of this mind-rotting technology..not a great debating tactic, but he gives the impression of a man who cares about nothing other than his ego which was bloated by the use of the video projection screens, sadly.

He then was robustly challenged by Donald Clark who did a great job and was happy enough to show some passion and contempt for the scaremongering. The next two speakers were less effective. Bruce 'the Brute' (see Private Eye) Anderson, a veritable caricature of a fleet street hack, his tie slung askew muttered along the lines of trying to support the motion but being 'reasonable' (the old good cop/bad cop pairing), then some guy 'from Silicon Valley,' Jerry Michalski gave a fairly anodyne response to that...his analogy of the development of the 'automobile' with the net currently being at Model T wasn't a good one for a European audience, as a bicycling Dutchman commented!

Anyway, what needs to be said to those unfamiliar with Dr. Sigman is that cherry-picking (ie selective use of some reports and wilfully ignoring of other contradictory findings) seems to be his speciality, as pointed out by Ben Goldacre who he seemed to have a pop at during the session. If you want more on this aspect and some examples then visit this link.

'Informal' learning

Here's Zenna Atkins who gave the talk that was best received (judging by the tweets and laughter) partly because of its informality (to say the least - when was the last time a keynote spoke about 'puking in a bucket'?) and also because she only had one slide!!

In the beginning....

Sorry about the delay. Twittered this this morning, but here it is. The start of David Puttnam's presentation. The full recording will appear later courtesy of OEB themselves. He read out his speech, so will resonate with traditional educators ;-)

It's that time of year again...

Yup, Online Educa is about to start here in Berlin. The preparations are being made in the main plenary venue for the opening address by David Puttnam and others. Twittering on the event can be found at #oeb2009 - get good updates, if you speak Dutch! Each year there's rivalry to see which country (apart from Germany) sends the greatest number of participants and usually a two-way race between the UK and the Netherlands. Interesting to see if budget cuts knock out the UK this year or not.

Some Thoughts on Twitter Lists

Lists. A great way to organize the people you follow and discover new and interesting accounts.

So says the banner appearing at the top of my twitter page on twitter.com. So, I decided to give lists a try and see what use I could make of them.

A twitter list allows you to create a group of people that you can follow all at once, without necessarily following each person individually. When you look at the twitter page for that list, you see all the tweets from only that group of people.

My first thought was that it might be useful to create a celt09 list, containing the participants from our Learning Technologies module in the Postgraudate Diploma in Academic Practice. (You can find this list at sharonlflynn/celt09.) Until then, we had been using a hashtag (#celt09) to filter course-related tweets. Having used this list for a week, I can now observe:

• This is great for following members of the group with locked (private) Twitter accounts. Their tweets, even using the #celt09 hashtag, don't appear in the search, but do appear in my list.
• Sometimes participants forget to use the #celt09 hashtag, but I still see their tweets in the list. That's another thumbs up for lists!
• Most of the class participants are new to Twitter, so most of their tweets are currently course related. Thus, most of the tweets in the list are related to the course. But this is not always going to be the case.
• Sometimes other Twits (no offence) reply to the class using the #celt09 hashtag, making a (potentially valuable) contribution. These don't appear in the list. That's a disadvantage of lists!

So, I'm still unsure about the use of lists, apart from using them as a way to organise people you follow. Grouping people together around a theme doesn't result in a twitter stream on that theme. It might prove a useful starting point though.

For the moment, I'm going to combine my use of the hashtag with the list, so that I can see everybody and see what everybody is saying about the course.

One area where lists might give added value is around the participants in a conference. Here the list is a short-term artefact, and might result in something close to the theme of the conference. It couldn't replace the conference hashtag though, which has become such a useful backchannel, allowing those not at the conference to follow and participate.

Irish Learning Technology Association: Web Site and Publication News

Great to see the new Irish Learning Technology Association (ILTA) web site launched earlier this month with a webinar from Gráinne Conole from the Open University, UK discussing Cloudworks.

The ILTA Working Group will be convening on November 13th in DIT to devolve ownership of the Research, eLearning Practitioner, eLearning/Industry Collaboration and Continuing Professional Development to ILTA members.

Lots of ILTA activity going on with the announcement of a new dedicated AISHE-J publication highlighting EdTech2009 presentations, research and technology-enhanced initiatives from the annual ILTA conference which was held in the National College of Ireland on May 21-22.

EdTech2010 will take place in Athlone Institute of Technology in May 20-21.

More information from info@ilta.net or http://ilta.net

#Twittering CELT Learning Technologies Team

The CELT Learning Technologies team at NUI Galway (and this blog) is mentioned in Ferdinand von Prondzynski's President's Log in today's Irish Times, under the headline Why I've joined Madonna, President Obama and 14 popes on Twitter. The DCU President writes:

Does Twitter have potential uses in academic life? Absolutely. One group showing the way is the Learning Technologies team at NUI Galway (who also have an excellent blog, learntechgalway. blogspot.com). All of their key staff are active on Twitter, and if you follow them you will be able to share in their experience of using new teaching methods and online technologies, as well as their thoughts on other matters.

I've just created a Twitter list (more on this in a later post) collecting together some of the people from CELT on Twitter. You can find it at twitter.com/sharonlflynn/nuigcelt. Another list of people includes the academic staff taking the Learning Technologies module as part of our Pg Diploma in Academic Practice, who have just been introduced to Twitter. You can find that list at twitter.com/sharonlflynn/celt09.

Thanks, Ferdinand, for the mention!

New from Google

Google have just recently released on limited preview their new communications and collaboration tool Google Wave.

In their own words, "A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more". You can find out more here.

This is on limited preview, so you will need to request an invitation to fully explore.

Michael Wesch keynote at ALT-C

Recordings of the keynote and invited speakers at the 2009 conference of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) in Manchester (8-10 September) are now available on blip.tv.

Here is Michael Wesch's keynote. Some familiar themes (whatever!) but an enjoyable watch all the same - if you have a spare hour.

Asus ebook reader

According to the Times Online, Asus is likely to launch an ebook reader with two screens, sometime before the end of the year.
The two screens would enable a person to use the reader like a conventional book, displaying two pages at a time.
Alternatively, one screen could display the book text, while the other allows the user to surf the web at the same time.

This offering from Asus, known for its low-cost netbook, is likely to challenge other ebook readers from Sony and Amazon on price. A single screen version, according to the Times Online article, could cost less than £100.

Irish Human Computer Interaction 2009 Conference

Interested in Human Computer Interaction research?

The annual two-day Irish conference, called I-HCI 2009, will be held at Trinity College Dublin on the 17th and 18th of September. Some of the papers and presentations of interest will include research on online communities, and evaluation methods suitable for study in home, workplace and mobile settings. Check out their website on http://www.i-hci.org/

The History of the Internet

History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

"History of the Internet" is an animated documentary explaining the inventions from time-sharing to filesharing, from Arpanet to Internet.

New videos show how researchers use advanced technology

The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the UK has been funding a programme to look at exploring tools needed by researchers to do their research, interact with other researchers (who may come from different disciplines, institutions or even countries) and to make use of available resources and technical infrastructures. They call this collection of tools "Virtual Research Environments" or VREs.

Recently, JISC have begun to put some very useful videos on YouTube describing some of the projects that come under this programme. Four particular projects in phase two of this research programme include the following:

Collaborative Research Events on the Web (CREW): |Youtube video|Website|
myExperiment - a social networking site for scientists. |Youtube video|Website|
Study of Documents and Manuscripts |Youtube video|Website|
Virtual Environments for Research in Archaeology |Youtube video|Website|

Explore further on the JISC website to find out how Virtual Research Environments (VREs) can help researchers in all disciplines manage the increasingly complex range of tasks involved in carrying out research.

Augmented Reality - The Future of Education Technology

Augmented reality looks at augmenting the real-world with virtual reality in real time. It's a been around for a long time (the term first coined in 1990), and has become popularised in the public mind by the film Minority Report (2002). More recently, some interesting projects have been looking at mobile phone applications as avenues for new interest and research.

This video here illustrates an idea how augmenented reality could positvely work in an educational context. For me, it identifies the importance of reading - central to student learning - and paper as a tool to support it. The main character uses the individual reflective "alone" time to prompt ideas, that are then explored and expanded through digital interactions as he moves through the world. A simple spark of an idea unleases a curiosity that the student can then explore in an augmented way, on paper and his experience in world. The creator is Sorin Voicu, from the Valle Giulia faculty of Architecture, University of Rome, in Italy.

Check out also MIT's Adaptable Bus stop as part of their SENSEable City Laboratory,to see some other potentially transformative ideas in this space.

Oepncast expands

UC Berkeley has had a proud tradition of webcasting lectures, interviews and other content and we here in Galway have long been fans of their work which preceded the growth of youTube and iTunes. Now they have received funding to develop the OpenCast Matterhorn platform for lecture capture and video content sharing with an intended release sometime in 2010. If all goes to plan this will provide an Open Source alternative to the commercial solutions for lecture capture, although much of the development and sales effort from such companies in recent times has focused on providing resilient, simple, all-in-one hardware solutions and that might well still be an issue. Nonetheless, Matterhorn sounds really exciting and we are pleased to be part of its widening community. You can learn more from this overview and by visiting the project website.