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OpenLearn conference
Patrick McAndrew (keep blogging Patrick!) sent me a call for papers for an open learn conference here at the OU, which might be of interest to some readers: The call for papers is open for the openlearn 2007 conference: researching open content in education. Deadline for submission by short papers (~1000words) is 31st May 2007. The conference will be held 30-31 October 2007 near The Open University in Milton Keynes, UK. There will be no charge for attendance with priority for registration given to those responding to the call for papers. Selected papers will be developed for publication in a special issue of the Journal of Interactive Media in Education.…
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Value of EdTechie
John pointed me at this Cyberwire site which calculates the monetary value of your site – pointless but irresistible. Mine is worth $5,662. For one moment I thought that was a monthly figure, but it’s annual. We always said we didn’t do it for money didn’t we? (and I bet if I did start plugging this site for adverts as much as they suggest the traffic would wane).
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The future is here…
.. we just haven’t noticed it. I had a fairly normal working day today, but I reflected on how technologically infused it was. This posting isn’t meant to be smug and purvey how modern my life is, since I’m aware that (strange though it may seem) some people are not working in educational technology, and so the working day of, a plumber say, may not be so affected (but probably more financially rewarding). And also there are people who live a far more technologically enhanced life, but it struck me that we have these small incremental changes and occassionally we have to take stock. Below is my day, and I…
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What a difference some design makes
I came across wetpaint today – a service that allows people to easily create wikis. Nothing particularly new there, but here’s the catch – they look good! Most wikis are a bit on the bland side, but without any specialist programming skills anyone can create an attractive wiki here. It seems to have caught on too with lots of hobby and interest sites flourishing, although a lot of them seem to be just using it to create websites that don’t really do much by the way of wiki. I am currently considering where we house the FLOSScom summer school (which will be about learning in an open source community), and…
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Flickrvision and glanceability
I spent rather too long gazing at Flickrvision today (via Alan Cann). In a kind of web 2.0 orgy, I had some americana music playing through LastFM also which made it an audio/visual experience (of course I should have been twittering about it to really be 2.0, but I’ll blog instead). Tony Hirst recently blogged about the concept of glanceability which we picked up from James Cridland. This strikes me as a good example, although I didn’t so much glance as lose myself (perhaps we need another term such as procrastinatability or gazeability). I could dip in and out as I worked but it was more than just radio, and…
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A critical mass of tagged, subscribable content
I haven’t looked at Pageflakes for a while and went there the other day. I registered as a new user, and it impressed me with the default content it provided. It picked up I was in Cardiff from my IP address and provided me with a decent set of Cardiff related content, including: Cardiff news stories Cardiff photos A google map with Cardiff events marked on it Cardiff weather Several things struck me about this, apart from thinking ‘that’s cool!’ (as an aside can a 40 year old actually use the term ‘cool’ in any context without embarrassment?). The first was that considering it only had one bit of info…
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The poetry of webcams
When I first started out on the web, around 1995, I thought web cams were marvellous. They’ve kind of fallen off my radar since (maybe they’ve been made a bit grubby). I was playing around with Google Desktop today and one of the widgets you could add was one that cycles through webcam shots from around the world, which you can then call up. I spent an hour or so looking at these, and there is still a thrill at being able to take control of a camera on the other side of the world and turn it to look down the street. It strikes me that a better writer…
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Chasing the Hawthorne effect
In a response to a comment from Alan Cann I glibly mentioned the Hawthorne effect and that maybe it wasn’t the evil it is usually portrayed as. I’ve been thinking about this since, and wanted to explore the idea. It goes something like this: The Hawthorne effect says that because you start experimenting that can change the behaviour of the people you are observing (see also the related Pygmalion and halo effects) . It bedevils educational technology, because say you introduce podcasting on a course and then measure student performance or satisfaction then you can’t be sure that any change is really due to a pedagogic benefit of the podcasts,…
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Some more reasons to blog
In a recent post I mused on some reasons why educators should blog. Since then I’ve done my official ‘thou shalt blog’ report (incidentally, I am really enjoying running to Thou Shalt Always Kill which contains the excellent lines ‘thou shalt not judge a book by its cover/thou shalt not judge lethal weapon by Danny Glover’) in which I added a couple more: It exposes the process – much of the community of practice theory argues that being able to participate in a community novices should be able to observe, and to an extent participate with, experts in action. A blog is good means of allowing others to observe some…
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Some 2.0 reality checks
The Pew Internet report on Typology of ICT Users (thanks to John for sending me this) has some interesting findings. We do rather tend to get swept up in our little bubble around web 2.0 and modern usage of technology generally, but this paints a rather different picture. It has some great categories also: ‘omnivores’, ‘lackluster veterans’, ‘light but satisfied’, and my favourite which surely describes most of us at some stage ‘connected but hassled’. A few of the finding that caused a mild raise of the eyebrow: Those who have ever gone online for no particular reason, just to pass the time – 62% (28% yesterday). This seems quite…
