Interesting friends...

I'm sat here in the foyer of The Saujana Hotel, surrounded by palm trees (the foyer is completely open air) and there is birdsong and cicada chirping all around. It rained last night, which cleared the air for a short while, but the oppressive heat is returning with a vengeance.

Someone yesterday gave me an alternative to IFIP - 'International Friends in Interesting Places', and I guess that is what IFIP is really all about. I have had some very interesting conversations with colleagues from all over the world in the last 24 hours, and you can learn a great deal from those. Last night I was also voted in unanimously as the new chair for Working Group 3.6 (Distance Education) which now means I get to lead a group of almost 90 international researchers in this field. Wow - I hope I don't get above myself. I will have to make an appointment to speak to me if this goes on. Won't be able to get my head through the door, etc, etc...

Several of the IFIP 3.6 members are actively present at the LYICT Conference here in Kuala Lumpur. Two of my (yes, 'my') members impressed me yesterday with their presentations in the main venue. Thomas Ryberg (Denmark) presented a talk on Web 2.0 tools entitled 'Patchworking and Power Users', in which he reported on his PhD research project. It involved him closely observing a group of 8 young people as they worked through the problem of 'how to reduce poverty using ICT'. He observed them re-appropriate a large amount of resources, including graphs, photographs, music and video from the Internet as patchwork ideas that they laced together into a final report. He raised issues of copyright, ownership and plagiarism, and we had a healthy debate about the implications of the digital natives and their uses of technology tools.

Later in the same session Ana Carvalho (University of Minho, Portugal) spoke on how she had researched into the effectiveness of podcasting with K-12 students. Although she experienced great technical problems with the audio playback (which had me worrying too about my own presentation to follow), she aquitted herself well and got her message across strongly. Her students largely agreed that podcasting was easy to use but that they didn't want it to replace their teacher. 58 per cent listened to the podcasts twice, and 14 per cent three times, mainly to reinforce their learning, and to gain a deeper understanding of the material they were learning. 58 per cent (not the same 58 per cent, surely?) listened on campus and 28 per cent at home. She concluded that podcasting has an important role to play in K-12 education.

That's it for now - I'm back off to my room to change my shirt.