catherine's blog

The OpenEd 2009 conference is happening at UBC, Canada, in just a few days’ time (August 12 -14). I’m not attending this year, but if I was, I’d want to hear:

• Keynote from Catherine Ngugi (Open Educational Resources Africa)
• Brandon Muramatsu (MIT) on auto-transcription and improving resource discoverability
• Christopher J. Mackie (Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) on sustainability

Also worth keeping an eye on the ‘Pitch Page’ on the Unconference wiki to see what interesting ideas bubble up before/during the event.

It seems that video content on the web has never been more ubiquitous. But in terms of education, delivering video content to students is a nut that we've yet to crack.

The Australian federal government reportedly has $AUD 1 billion left in the cookie jar to fund its ambitious PCs-for-schools program. This sum represents around half the expected total cost of the National Secondary Schools Computer Fund (NSSCF). The NSSCF aims to achieve a computer-to-student ratio of 1:1 by December 31, 2011, in pursuit of what the Government likes to refer to as the “Digital Education Revolution”, or “DER” (a DigiScent iSmell award goes to whoever came up with that particular acronym). A little over half the money still to play with! This is a call for the government to grasp the “strategic planning” nettle. To think beyond immediate economic and political agendas.

No one who reads Ida Takes Tea can have missed the fact that I've not been posting regularly. It's been one of those cases of life intervening! So, I'm very pleased to announce that I'm moving to a new job as Educational Designer at La Trobe University, starting in mid-December 2008. After eight years in the UK, I'm very pleased to have returned to Australia, and I'm excited to be joining my new colleagues at La Trobe. There are some interesting initiatives starting up at La T., and in 2009 I'll aim to keep you all informed on these new institutional projects, and on news in general from the Australian e-learning community.

As mentioned in my previous post, I have been working on creating a table that shows how selected Dublin Core metadata elements map to the available metadata fields in Sakai. I've put a copy of this up on my Wetpaint wiki, for reference.

For researchers such as myself, one issue with metadata is that it is relatively simple to deal with when you are talking about a handful of resources, but the process becomes radically more complex when resources start to number in the hundreds. Equally, the ability to auto-detect metadata has to rate high on any librarian's or archivist's wish-list for an information system design. So, what does Sakai have to offer?

At the end of any project, the time comes to wrap up work and, hopefully, to prepare project outputs for dissemination and archiving. We’re working with the folks from CTREP to create the digital archive for the Learning Landscape Project. It’s an interesting process – while working to pull together the materials for inclusion, I’m also thinking about what we learned on the way, mentally summing up the project’s achievements, as well as the things we could have done better. I’ve reflected that this process of archiving is, in many ways, the process of creating the institutional representation of our project: its official history. I’m not suggesting this is the “best” story, or the “only” story, to tell about our work – there are, of course, many stories to tell. But this collection will constitute (we hope!) some of the most accessible documentation of our work, so we want it to be diverse in content, and we want it to be as thorough -- as rich -- as possible.

I much enjoyed participating in last night’s panel discussion at the Education Unbound event in London. Held at Adam Street private members’ club, the vibe was relaxed and informal, with intense discussions continuing well after the panel wound up. Thanks to the folks at Online for inviting me to join what I think proved to be a very successful event. I got to plug some of CARET's new projects, such as EGRET and the stuff we're doing with OpenSocial. Some interesting people I talked to, in random order: Gaia Marcus, a student and journalist from UCL; Jeremiah Alexander, from startup Ideonic; and Nikolas Heyng from Online. It was a much younger professional audience than I’m used to addressing (!), and a very different bunch of people – there were few, if any, representatives from HE, with most of the audience drawn from publishing, media, start-ups, and not-for-profits, with a sprinkling of students and teachers.

Just received the programme for the inaugural Festival of Ideas in Cambridge, the "arts/humanities/soc-scis" response to the successful Science Festival. One event that looks potentially interesting is an evening panel discussion on social networking, scheduled for 25 October. Titled "Facebook: Friendship and Social Interaction", the panel brings together the Guardian newspaper's UX guru, Meg Pickard, Chris Locke of AOL Europe, Sue Hessey from BT and Cambridge academics David Good and Kathleen Richardson. Soporific? I hope not! Obviously, Facebook is not a fresh subject; yet, as far as I know, this is the first public event focusing on Facebook at Cambridge. I'm curious as to what the panel's take will be on social networks and the creation of social relationships online.

This post was written in response to danah boyd’s post, “Facebook and Techcrunch: the costs of technological determinism and configuring users.” danah focused on recent (and not so recent) attempts by social network sites like Facebook to regulate how individuals relate to others when using their service. I noticed that danah’s argument—expressing a consistent point of view, whose development you can trace in her writing—reinforces the criticisms I made of the Spock service last December.

I'm looking forward to attending this year's Education Unbound event, organised by digital agency Online Creative Communications. I'll be joining Futurelab learning researcher Dan Sutch, teacher and web 2.0 advocate David Noble, and co-founder of the "School of Everything", Andy Gibson, on the speakers' panel for the evening event. Channel 4's Matt Locke will be cat-herding, ahem, moderating what I'm sure will be a very lively discussion on all things related to learning and social media. Last year's event, which focused partly on the impact of social media on educational publishing, was reportedly thought-provoking - see previous participant Ewan McIntosh's lucid dissection of the 2007 event.