Blog of the day

Found another interesting blog today - Keith Bryant's blog on e-learning reports all the bits about EDEN that I probably missed. Have a look at it when you get the chance, as it's well worth a read. That's the great thing about the blogosphere - what someone misses, someone else nails down. Keith holds the same opinion as me about Teemu Arina, and makes some interesting points bout what was discussed during the Web 2.0 sessions at the conference. I will add his blog to my blog roll when I find out what's causing the 'error on page' message that keeps popping up. Probably an error on the page...

Viva la difference

Yesterday I blogged that there was little or no difference between FaceBook and MySpace, principally because I thought there was no difference between the social class profiles of users. Now it seems that there may be a difference between the two social networking services after all.... A new report (see BBC News online) reveals that MySpace is fast losing ground to both FaceBook and Bebo, and that in the UK in particular, these two are much more popular.

Says the report, by Rory Cellan-Jones: 'There was also evidence that there is plenty of promiscuity amongst the social networkers - at least when it comes to visiting the various sites. Around half a million British users visited all three services in May'. Promiscuity? What does Mr Cellan-Jones mean by this?? Lack of loyalty I hope, otherwise they must all be bonkers ....

MyFace or SpaceBook?

So it's official. Apparently your choice of social networking site indicates what social class you belong to... A recent US research project (by a PhD student mind you) has reported that users of FaceBook are generally toffs from wealthier homes and are more likely to study in further/higher education than that great unwashed working class lot who like using MySpace. Well, fancy that. I guess the fact that FaceBook organises its regional networks on the basis of the colleges or universities its members attended might have something to do with it...? And what about those who use Bebo - are they part of a particular social class, or are they just little oiks who couldn't design a tasteful personal space to save their lives?

Anyway, I'm not so sure about this report. I used to have a MySpace, but abandoned it because FaceBook was easier to use. I subsequently found out that more of my friends were using it than MySpace, so it made social networking easier. The fact that I'm working in a university didn't sway me either way. The two are very similar in what they do, but for me FaceBook has the edge because I can upload my 'orrible little photos a bit easier. In the UK, incidentally, being wealthy and attending college are not necessarily synonymous, so the data in the study may not generalise to a British context.

What do you think? Oh... and not so's you'd notice, but the links above have been swapped for effect.... doesn't really make that much difference, does it?

Here is the link to the University of Plymouth elearning site and also back to the Learning with 'e's blog where you will find loads more on social software...

Every child connected

Seems our cousins across the other side of the pond are having similar problems to us, at least in their schools. This post from Mike Hasley's Election 2008 blog says it all:

Instead of “No Child Left Behind,” our goal should be “Every Child Connected.” The digital divide in our country is worse than it was 10 years ago before our schools were wired. Most public schools still have students visiting computers only for a few hours a week in computer labs. With every major corporation in the world connecting its customers, employees, and suppliers, to 24-hour networks regardless of whether they are using computers, cell phones, PDA’s, etc. providing them access to massive data resources, there is no reason we can’t build a similar networked ability for our students, teachers, and parents 24 hours a day to access the greatest libraries of the world. This will accelerate the professional development of teachers to use the new technology as well as transform education from being something that happens primarily only in school buildings into an ongoing process that facilitates learning moments happening wherever and whenever possible.

The Who released a song with the lyrics: 'Meet the New Boss, same as the Old Boss'. This is certainly true in the UK this week with Brown replacing Blair.... and we all got fooled again. It might also, sadly, be true for the USA next year, at least in terms of policy if not gender....

Google-de-Gook

Don't suppose you've seen the latest article from BBC News about language on the web, have you? Web-lish to replace English runs the title, and the author, Ben Camm-Jones writes:

'New words coined to describe things we encounter on the internet can be pretty awful, but 'folksonomy' has been voted the worst of the lot.' Well fancy that.

The article features the self-styled web policeman Bob Young, who is Chief Executive of Lulu, the 'Blooker Prize' organisers, (hang on, wasn't Lulu a singer from Scotland?). Young declares that too many awkward new words are being coined to describe Internet activity, and that 'web-lish is the new English'. He also rules that 'Folksonomy' is a word that makes you want to 'howl in the night'. Well, why confine yourself to yelling in the dark, Mr Young, when you can come up with words like 'Web-lish'?

I despair.... really I do.

Fall guy

My 50th birthday bash last night went off well - several old friends turned up, each with a bottle of wine for me (are they trying to tell me something...?) and a splendid time was had by all. Yesterday it was raining again, as it has every day since I got back from Bella Italia. It's been so bad (you know, raining Japanese car components) that a guy two doors down from me is actually building an Ark. Persistently precipitating. Not June weather at all.

So it was, in a slightly damp and depressed mood that I decided to venture off for a while into my Second Life to cheer myself up. All was going well until I fell off the side of a cliff, and tumbled down over into the side of a log cabin. It hurt! Not physically of course - I'm still able to walk without a limp. But it hurt psychologically. I wouldn't have believed it until it happened to me. But there you have it. Second Life and other 3-D virtual worlds can be damaging to your sense of well-being. The embodied mind does extend beyond the physical body and into the technological extensions we employ, whether mobile phone, blog, or avatar. I recall reading Andy Clark's book 'Natural Born Cyborgs', and he voiced similar ideas. Well, I'm not disagreeing with him, now I have the mental contusions as evidence....

Access Andy Clark's musings here.

EDEN saw play....

Now I've had time to reflect upon the EDEN Conference in Napoli last week, I can report that it was a successful conference. I met some old friends and forged closer collaborations, and also met some new and interesting colleagues, whom I will be working with in the future - this a real strength of EDEN - bringing together e-Learning professionals and enabling them to network.

Although many of the 24 papers I attended were fairly average, some challenged and positively fuelled ideas for me. I'm thinking about the Web 2.0 sessions, which came under the heading of 'Emerging New Media and technology'. What was good about these sessions was that they all dovetailed into each other. Tom Wambeke's (KATHO, Belgium) session entitled 'Educational Blogging: in search of a general taxonomy', concluded that folksonomies were less hierarchical and more appropriate measures of blogs. Deborah Everhart (Georgetown University, USA) followed, with a session on social bookmarking, using Blackboard MLE tools. I followed as the third speaker, with my session on wikis and collaborative learning, and the session was capped off by an overview of social software from Antonio Huertas (Open University of Catalonia, Spain) who dealt with 'Wikis, blogs and tagging in education'. The session was packed with over 150 people in a room designed for 120. Obviously a popular session, which was gratifying for us as speakers, and the questions were relevant and searching. Kept us on our toes...

Other sessions dealing with Web 2.0 in this series proved equally popular, and the Sala Archimede was positively bursting at the seams. Papers on podcasting, mobile technologies and Multi-player Games along with a super paper entitled 'How to cope with the complexity of Web 2.0 environments' from Paula de Waal (University of Padova, Italy) kept the creative ideas and questions flowing, and sent the delegates away with new ideas and tips to try out with their own students. Next year's EDEN will be held between 11-14 June, in Lisbon, Portugal. I hope to see you there....

City of the dead

City of the dead. That was my impression of Pompeii. Back in AD 79 old Vesuvius blew its top and destroyed an entire area of the Roman empire, including Herculaneum and of course, the infamous Pompeii. It was witnessed by Pliny the elder, who was then admiral of the Roman fleet. He subsequently died in the conflagration along with thousands of other unfortunates, who didn't try to leave until it was too late. Curiosity killed the Capt. Other Pompeiins decided not to leave, no doubt hoping that it would all 'blow over'. Well blow over it did. All over them, tons of it. When I visited there on 13th June (look - the picture is above) I saw the results - plaster casts of bodies writhing in agony as they were incincerated by the pyroclastic flow from the volcano.

I think that Managed Learning Environments are like Pompeii. They are doomed, because firstly, everything that you pay to do on an MLE can be done outside, on the web, for free. Secondly, the new generation of social networking students don't want or need to be managed. They use FaceBook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Bebo, MSN and a host of other free utilities to connect and share with their peer group outside of the university structure. They resent being controlled and told how to communicate with each other. MLEs are in my opinion, cities of the dead. The Personalised Learning Environment (PLE) will take their place. MLEs are doomed, in the same way Pompeii was doomed. Some people got out in time. Others didn't. I'm standing watching from a safe distance....

Blending in...

Finally back in the UK, and in my own comfortable bed tonight.... But on reflection, it's been a good week in Italy. I was mistaken for an Italian four times this week in Napoli. People kept coming up to me and gabbling away in Italian... it's like another country...or London. Perhaps I am blending in with the locals, or maybe it's because Italians are naturally friendly and don' care who they talk to ...? Here are 10 things you should do if you want to be mistaken for a local in Napoli:

1) Get a tan
2) Talk Italian (Although this is not entirely essential - I assure you I can't)
3) Always wear sunglasses, even at night
4) Talk with exaggerated arm waving and hand movements
5) Look nonchalent
6) Walk across the road without really looking (they will stop for you, or swerve to avoid you)
7) Ride a moped without a helmet on, but with at least one girl on the back
8) Don't drive a car, aim it
9) Drive with your horn, not with your brakes
10) Hold a mobile phone to your ear at all times, and a cigarette in the other hand

Paradise gained

EDEN conference day two, and a good start from one of our keynotes, the OU's Grainne Conole who spoke on the learner experience and raised several key issues of support, peer networking and 'net generation' response to new and emerging technologies.

Talks that have stood out above the rest are: Niall Sclater (Open University - check out his blog) who spoke about collaborative learning using wikis, Catherine McLoughlin (Australian Catholic University) on podcasting and its use to motivate distance learners and Gottfried Csanyi (Vienna University of Technology) who covered the topic of ICT and informal learning.

I still maintain that although the content at EDEN is improving year on year, there is still a quality gap - most papers were 'this is what we did, and this is how we did it...' - and little in the way of critical evaluation and research based analysis. Most people go to EDEN to network, and I suppose this is its great success story. More from the conference next week when I have had time to reflect a little more, and am a little less travel weary....

Flying Finn

To say I was impressed was an understatement. What a speaker - I have just come from the first series of keynote speeches that featured Michael G. Moore and Erik Duval. But it's not these two I want to eulogise over. If either has spoken first, they would have been deemed 'good'. But they had the misfortune to follow a prodigy. EDEN 2007's first keynote speaker, a 24 year old Finn named Teemu Arina, (Pictured Right) completely blew away the entire conference. Serendipic Learning (you know - what goes on in the third space) was one of Teemu's themes, and parasitic learning was another.

Teemu also traced the 'evolution' of man's learning development to our point in history with Homo Contextus. Never heard of any of these? Pity you wern't there then (so follow the links). I know it's not helpful, but how can I do justice to what Mr Arina said in a short blog like this. I think it's fair to say, having talked to quite a few delegates during the coffee break, that he left us all reeling with new ideas, thoughts and questions, and expertly set the scene for the whole conference. His speech was also McLuhan heavy, which is not a bad thing when repurposed in this context. Although the location of EDEN this year is pretty naff, the content, if it echoes on from this keynote, is going to be astounding....

Quote of the day: 'The future cannot be predicted, but it can be invented' (Denis Gabor).

See Naples and blog

Well, now I know the difference between a piazza and a pizza. Not a lot - they are both expensive and difficult to get through/across. Only difference is that a piazza is square and a pizza is round (except on EasyJet flights where they actually sell square pizzas - shame on them). Well, here I am in Napoli, home of the pizza, a place that is at once both beautiful and horrific. It's beautiful because the Amalfi coast, Vesuvius, Sorento, Capri, and the Bay of Naples are all naturally beautiful, scenic and the names evocative of romance and amore. It's horrific (at least where I'm staying, in and around Piazza Garibaldi) because there is garbage piled high everywhere you look, and hookers and addicts loitering on the seedy street corners outside my hotel. Must have chosen the wrong place to stay, and reminds me of a week I spent in Copenhagen a few years back.

I'm here in Napoli for the EDEN 2007 Conference, held at the Citta della Scienza (City of Science) which is not a city at all, more a repurposed complex of factory warehouses. It's ugly on the outside, very pleasant inside..... (don't). It took me over an hour to get there from the centre of Napoli today. I spent the day with my mate Palitha Edirisingha seeing the sights of Pompeii, before a long walk, dodging the taxis and scooters to the metro, a metro ride (where we were crammed like sardines inside an overheated and airless compartment for almost an hour) and then a bus ride (where we were crammed like sardines inside an overheated and airless compartment) for a few miles more. Citta della Scienza is 'off the beaten track' I would say, and many delegates arrived tonight for registration and the opening welcome party 'hot under the collar'. Not a good start, EDEN. Let's hope the content is a little better than the location.....

Saving face

A few days ago I set up my own FaceBook account. I already have 6 friends, all people I know in some way or another. 2 others have also tried to hook up with me, but I don't know them from Adam (who is also not one of my friends) so I declined the offer. You can't be too careful - they could be axe murderers or window salesmen or something worse.

Anyway - it's similar to other social networking spaces such as Bebo (which has a much younger user base) and MySpace (where age doesn't seem to matter - they take anyone). FaceBook seems to be for twenty-somethings, who are linked to a university, college or other youth fraternity. So why, I hear you asking, am I also on FaceBook, seeing that I'm ancient and decrepit and other perjorative, ageist terms (how dare you...). Well, have you ever heard of participant observation? Gotta be in it to view it...

I noticed one thing right away - students seem to prefer to communicate using FaceBook more than standard e-mail. They can say more, add their own views without fear of censorship, and embellish their comments with pictures, profanities, voting, interest groups, etc. On the University of Plymouth FaceBook network there were 6,890 members earlier this week. I checked again today and there are 7,012. About a quarter of the student population at Plymouth. Astounding growth. Let's watch and see what happens....

Back to Eden

I'm flying off to Italy (Napoli) next week to attend the 16th Annual EDEN Conference. I've never been south of Rome before, so I'm looking forward to seeing the Bay of Naples, Amalfi Coast and perhaps even making a day trip to Pompeii whilst I'm there. I will beg steal or borrow access to a networked pc during my time at the conference so that I can blog the latest news about what's being discussed and the issues of the day.

This year's conference promises to be another good one (last year over 600 delegates attended in Vienna, and the quality of the papers was generally fairly good), and I hope to meet up again with EDEN General Secretary Adras Szucs (pictured with me at EDEN Helsinki, in 2005). Michael Moore (Pennsylvania State University, USA), Grainne Conole (UK Open University) and Ge Daokai (President of China TV University - the largest university on the planet) are among the keynotes speakers. The conference is predominantly about distance education, and I will be presenting my own paper on wikis.

YZ on young shoulders....

It's been an interesting and busy week teaching here at the Technical University of Liberec, in the northern Czech Republic. Everything is different here to the UK including, mercifully, the weather (a balmy 28 degrees today). I need to be particularly careful with the keyboard I am using as it has transposed 'y' and 'z' keys. Cognitive load is more excessive than usual....

I have just finished a week teaching 20 German, Czech, Polish, and for the first time, Nigerian students. They are all very young and very enthusiastic and have been asking lots of questions, which makes my job easier, and paradoxically, harder. We have studied the psychology of interpersonal communication, with a section on Internet communication. I created a wiki for them on the spot, which you can visit at this link. It will be interesting to see if there are any cultural variations in the postings and discussions that take place.

Next week I'm back in dear old blighty, and then off to Napoli, Italy to present a paper at the EDEN conference. More later - now I'm off to let my hair down a little, before I catch my flight... Nashledanou....