pault's blog

Having indicated that I would write something about Web2.0, I finally get round to doing something.  Have you ever wondered about the concept of 'friends' in social networking site?  I've been thinking for a long time that they dilute the meaning of friendship and try to address this here by appeal to some Buddhist teachings, particularly the Sigalovada Sutta...

This is to share an experiment in social bookmarking for the Seattle conference, in which I hope others will join.  Allow me to describe below...

I've been reflecting recently on the subject of open courseware and, more specifically, OpenCourseWare following the keynote for the Sakai conference in Amsterdam delivered confidently and enthusiastically by Hal Abelson (a podcast is available). In this post I'll briefly recap some of the core aspects as I understand them and then go on to explore this area, based on personal experiences and ideas I've been formulating at Oxford.

Oxford made a decision in Autumn 2006 to migrate to the Sakai VLE with the announcement of the Tetra collaboration. Since the completion of the academic year, we've been able to focus more on the task in hand. For myself, I decided the best way to quickly gain a feel for Sakai was to attend a Sakai gathering and conveniently the 7th Sakai Conference was recently held in Amsterdam, the first time the conference had been held outside the United States. I was primarily interested in sessions that addressed system migration, deployment and support, but also keen to hear about pedagogy and usability, leaving it to my colleagues to cover the more technical development aspects. I wanted to know what approaches were adopted to move to Sakai: organisation, resources, timescales, etc.

So was it a case of all aboard...?

I've been following an interesting exchange between Stephen Downes and Leonard Low concerning the mobile sphere (see particularly Leonard's posts on Does Mobile Technology equate with Mobile Learning? , Stephen's response  and then and Leonard's follow-up, Making M-Learning Mobile, Open, and Ubiquitous ).

It is timely for me as I've volunteered to present on the topic, 'Handheld Musings - From Portability to Ubiquity - Observations on the Evolution of Mobile Computing.'  (The title itself should keep me going for a few minutes :-) As the audience is a Computing Services department, the focus is naturally on technology, hence mobile computing.   I hope to convey that general notions of mobility and the associated terms have been gradually changing and diversifying and that this really needs more attention support beyond enabling wireless access for laptops!   Indeed, the LSE on behalf of a technical working group within UCISA, recently launched a Mobile Computing Survey which recognised the growing support issue in this area.   Although it mentions in its preamble, "The support of "mobile" devices (in all their guises - Laptops, handheld PCs, PDAs, 3G mobile phones, Blackberries etc.)..." this survey is not aimed at laptops as the section on 'Mobile devices' asks: "What operating system(s) do you provide support for and lists as the named options: Windows Mobile, Palm OS, Symbian."

[Sorry it is so long since I posted - the Western New Year and Chinese New Year have both passed!]

My job title of 'VLE Administrator' covers a wide range of duties, many of which are quite technical and system-oriented, but it also involves advising staff on developing their areas in the VLE (LMS), the service front line, as it were.  This term I've spent quite a lot of time preparing and delivering courses on how to use WebLearn;  the face to face contact makes quite a pleasant break from coding or answering emails stuck in front of a computer screen.

We are now coming to the end of this term's series of lunchtime courses.  They have usually consisted of a presentation with slides and demonstrations followed by hands-on where people work individually through a number of exercises, familiarising themselves with some aspects of the VLE.  The peak of interaction usually would not go beyond viewing each each other's test area. 

However, I've recently found myself in one of the so-called flexible learning spaces within the department - a wide room with islands of workstations and a lot of gadgetry.  After a couple of weeks delivering the standard format in this space, I've only just realised that I ought to make more use of such communal spaces. 

It's already a month since Educause 2006 finished and it feels like it happened only a few days ago.  However, that's time enough for me to stand back a little and reflect on why I went in the first place and particularly what - if anything - has emerged.  

One of the main reasons for my attendance was to promote Bodington through the poster session.  A bit of rush at the last minute, but eventually my colleagues furnished me with enough to weigh me down - laptop, CDs, posters, leaflets etc, resulting in a pot pourri presentation - lots to see, but perhaps not so coherent (this was at the end of the session and remarkably two Thornton mint chocolate creams remain).   If I ever get to do another poster, I shall endeavour to bring someone with me because once the doors opened, there was a constant flow of people, so no time to take a look at the other stalls.

I had various conversations, distributed lots of fliers about the Bodington 2.8 release, gave a few demos of the system, and handed out quite a few WebLearn bootable CDs.  What about the topic 'From Personalized Learning to Open Courseware: Learning Management Systems Can Be Flexible'?  I didn't receive a single query about personalized learning, which I found a bit surprising, though it may be that the term has been much more widely promoted in the UK than elsewhere, because of high level UK government support.   However, the title got spotted by a group from the OpenCourseWare consortium, and several of them came over, curious to know what I was presenting and seeing an opportunity for another member!  I subsequently attended their panel session and came back to the UK with plenty of enthusiasm.  However, since then my enthusiasm has waned as I consider a number of issues.

Whilst carrying out some moblogging as part of the RAMBLE project, I sometimes wanted to do quick sketches to augment the text input on my PDA.  Now that Firefox 2.0 has been shipped with improved support for SVG, I'd like to revisit the idea of supporting doodles, especially as more smartphones are now coming with styli.  Anyone interested?

One of the difficulties in working in a highly distributed environment such as Oxford is keeping informed about what's happening, who's doing what, etc.  Many potential opportunities for collaboration seem to go unnoticed.

This is just one of the many scenarios that social software and Web2.0 should address, which is my way of bringing in... the Learning Learning Technologies Group Spring 2007 Conference, The Shock of the Old 6: The Shock of the Social.

It'll be our sixth annual one-day conference on educational technologies and will take place at the Said Business School, University of Oxford, March 22nd 2007.  Details available on the LTG site at:
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/events/shock2007/

The dust is now settling after Educause 2006 came to Dallas, Texas. It was the first time I had attended and I enjoyed very much those few days of heightened activity - the Dallas Convention Center was an excellent venue, the presentations were varied and informative, some quite entertaining; the chats were friendly and stimulating, the hotel was comfortable, even my cell phone arrangements worked out fine.

It's tempting to think that when a conference closes with its final keynote, that you can slowly wend your way home and have the luxury of gently pondering all that's gone on. I was back in Oxford on Friday, so at least I had the weekend, but I used up a fair amount catching up on sleep and I spent the greater part of Sunday just tidying up the copious notes I had jotted. I knew that once I returned to the office I wouldn't have much opportunity to tidy them up much further, especially as the conference took place during Week 1 of Michaelmas, our Autumn term, not an ideal week to be away!

So it's back to user support queries, teaching preparation (rather more than expected), ideas for e-learning projects and funding applications, and more queries generated by the important Tetra announcement and so on.