Game changers in the Training Zone

This week, ahead of my speech at the Learning Technologies Conference I recorded a 10 minute podcast interview for the Training Zone. You can listen by clicking on the embedded link below. If the link below doesn't work for you, try this one. My interview is at 18.45 in the podcast. To give you a taste of what was discussed, here is some of what I said in an excerpt from the transcript:

Q: What are the big technological developments we can expect to see implemented in 2013?

Steve: I think there are several that we have to look at as changing practice. I'm talking about disruptive technologies, things that will change probably forever - irrevocably - what we do in the workplace and in learning in particular. So for instance, one of the big developments I'm seeing happening right now is the move from keyboards and mice to touch screens and maybe even non-touch technologies.

One of the examples I've seen recently at the CES - the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas - it was reported that there was a new touch screen device which goes 'lumpy' when you want to put a keyboard up on it. The keyboard actually appears but it's through crystallisation within the screen. The keys are actually surrounded by raised areas so that people with visual impairment for instance can use the touch screen tablet. So there are really practical developments coming out which I think are going to improve working conditions for lots of people with visual impairment.

But I think for all of us touch screen technology is already revolutionising the way we do things. Some people say that you will never see the death of the computer keyboard, but I'm not so sure. I think that in a few years time maybe our grandchildren are going to sit on our knees and say 'did you really have to touch a computer to make it work?' So I think touch screens and non-touch technologies, things like the Xbox 360 Kinect, technology with a depth camera and an infra red camera, I think is going to change forever the way we interact with technology. We are going very quickly towards the Tom Cruise Minority Report data manipulation.

I think another big development is going to be larger screens, flatter screens, in fact screens that are flexible. Screens that you can stick onto any surface so that you can make the whole of the wall of your office or your workplace into a television screen which doubles up as a computer screen and for data manipulation. And I think this is coming, I think it is going to be quicker than we think as well, these are some of the developments we are looking at.

I think ultimately, the biggest game changer which has been going on for some time now, is mobile learning. Using your own personal devices to access learning, access peer groups, access social networking, access the ability to create and share content, anywhere and everywhere. As we're talking I'm watching citizen journalism going on, on the television in front of me. This London helicopter crash that has happened. Most of the pictures the BBC are actually presenting at the moment are from people who were on the scene at the time with their mobile devices. I think we're going to see that impact a whole lot more. Those are some of the trends I see happening.  

The TrainingZone podcast - January by Trainingzone on Mixcloud

Game changers in the Training Zone by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Learning by making

The transmission model of learning is still dominant in education. Whether you are in a primary or secondary school classroom, or in a lecture hall or laboratory in a university, you will almost always see the teacher or lecturer directing proceedings, often from the front, usually 'instructing' their students in some way. You may also witness other, underlying pedagogical models playing out, usually where students are asked to do some group work or find out for themselves through individual project work. Whilst these approaches to learning are often more effective for personalised and collaborative learning, they tend to be kept to a minimum in most cases, because teachers like to maintain some level of control over their students, and finite time and resources constrain them. So passive reception often becomes the dominant mode of learning in traditional environments.

Back in the early 1990s, when I was involved in nurse education, I introduced a project where students were given an entire day to create a 5 minute video on a subject directly related to their course. In groups of threes and fours, the student nurses were sent out to conceive their video, script and storyboard it, decide on roles, procure their props, scout out shooting locations, record their video, and then edit it. Then, during the final hour of the day, each group introduced, showed and discussed their 5 minute video. Many of my colleagues were sceptical about the value of this kind of approach to learning. They argued that it was a waste of time when the nurses could be studying their text books, writing their essays, or practicing how to give injections into oranges. I countered that the students were, in fact, engaged in a very high level of cognitive activity where they were engaged in learning by making. It wasn't until a few years later when I discovered the work of Seymour Papert (now one of my Facebook friends!), that I was able to build a theoretical framework around the nurses video project. In his theory of constructionism, Papert argued that we build mental representations of what we learn, and that the situated nature of where we learn influences and strengthens that representation. In other words, we learn by doing and building within relevant environments, and that authentic tasks can be very powerful in support of that situated learning.

At the time I showed my colleagues that the nursing students were learning numerous skills that they would later be able to transfer across into their professional practice. To successfully complete their video project they needed to be able to solve problems, create content, construct artefacts, take decisions and make critical judgements, work together as a team, divide their labour and select appropriate tasks, manage their time, think creatively, negotiate difficult situations, consider ethical issues, work with finite resources, successfully bring a task to completion and reflect on their practice. How many of these skills could be modelled and situated within a classroom in such a short period of time?  The very act of constructing something tangible allows students to test out hypotheses, learn from each other and solve problems as they progress. Abstract ideas and concepts become concrete and are situated in real life contexts. These are essential skills for 21st Century working. It is for these reasons that making things is a central part of all my courses, and whether it is a video, podcast, blog or any other digital artefact, students gain ownership, and invest their energies and their ingenuity into making and presenting it. In so doing they are constructing their own versions of knowledge and developing the skills they will later need outside in the world of work.

Photo by Ah Zut


Learning by making by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Cut price education?

There is a discussion kicking off right now over on the TES pages. It's about the front page story covering the announcement that some colleges are planning to offer 'cut price' qualifications that rely on a combination of podcasting, online learning and remote self study. If you can manage to manoeuvre your way past the journalese and read between the lines, you might just surmise that this decision has been made due to budget cuts and economic expediencies, rather than as a decision to enhance the quality of the experience. Call me a fool, but I would rather offer no courses at all, than put my name to a course that is inferior due to cost cutting. But let's put the quality issue aside for one moment and consider the economics of this plan. 


Do the leaders of these colleges really believe that shifting learning activities completely over to online distance learning mode will actually cut teacher time and save money? From my own professional experience, I would very strongly suggest that when online learning (in any of its forms) is conducted appropriately, teacher workload actually increases rather than decreases. Adrian Prandle, education policy advisor at the teaching union ATL gets it right when he says: 'Developments such as podcast learning should be in addition to time with lecturers, not instead of it. What is important with projects like this is that they have input from those in the classroom at every stage.' We live in tough times, but whichever way this 'project' is viewed, it is simply false economy.

Just how was the decision to offer 'cut price education' arrived at? Are the managers of these programmes so naïve they cannot see that teachers will need to be on call to answer endless queries and address never ending concerns from remote students? Are the managers of the colleges so lazy, so complacent that they have failed to check the online learning and distance education research literature? It is bordering on the myopic if managers think they will be reducing the costs of education by hiving learning off into a distance delivered, online experience. Forget the many, many hidden costs for a moment and consider this: It is an established statistic that 30%-50% will be the expected attrition rate for the majority of distance education programmes, worldwide. Will colleges who wish to cut the costs of their programmes stomach such a dropout statistic? I think not.

Image by Steve Wheeler


Cut price education? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Digital literacy 7: Organising and sharing content

In yesterday's blogpost, I talked about why students should create their own content. The very act of creating content, whether it is a video, blogpost or podcast, is often with the intention that it will be shared in some way, usually on the web. Now we have the social web, there are more ways than ever to make your content available to a vast audience. But how do you share in such a way that makes it visible to the web? Answer - you organise it by 'tagging' it. You think of words that best describe your content, and then insert them into the appropriate box within the tool you are using.

Tagging content is a bit of an art. Choosing the correct descriptive words to tag your content with, can sometimes be a little hit and miss. But tag you must, if you want your content to be searchable. So this blogpost for example is tagged with a few key worlds such as 'digital literacy' and 'content creation' as well as more generic terms such as 'social web', 'blog', 'podcast' and 'video', because these terms have appeared in the text (see labels below). Because I have tagged this blogpost with those words, anyone who is interested in any of these areas, and who types those words into a search engine will, if they drill down far enough, be able to find this blog post. Tagging will also make finding content within a large list of bookmarks a lot easier. You can search for content in 'bundles' - this is useful if you only want to see the links in your list related to 'podcast' or 'audio', for example. Some tagging tools also offer tag clouds - clouds of labels that have larger or smaller font size depending on the amount of times they appear in your bookmark list.

But we can go further using tagging, so that content becomes a community artefact around which groups can discuss, interact and collaborate. Using a web service such as Delicious for example, will allow you not only to make your content more visible to those who are searching using key words, but it will also reveal to you (and to the other users) exactly who else may be interested in the same, or similar content. This is more than just bookmarking. It's social bookmarking - organising your content, and the content of others, into sets that are more useful and more socially coherent. The blue box at the end of each hyperlink displayed in my own Delicious account indicates the number of other people who have bookmarked the same link. If you click on that box, it will display them. Click on any user and you will see what other links that user has bookmarked. Some of these may have slipped past you, but you can now see them and also visit those sites and then bookmark them if you think they might be useful to you. You can also hold conversations with those others around you about the sites you find interesting- and perhaps learn even more about your mutual interests. This is the power of social bookmarking - just one of the many ways you can organise and share your content on the social web.

Image source

Organising and sharing content by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Digital literacy 6: Content creation

One of the most important digital literacies students require today is the ability to create appropriate, subject specific content. Content creation is an important feature in many personal learning environment (PLE) models, and together with organising and sharing, makes up the cardinal triumvirate of skills that provides learners with a clear advantage. If you subscribe to constructivist theories of learning, you will understand why the creation of content is important in any context. We learn by doing, and we more actively engage with learning when we create artefacts that can be shared within social contexts such as communities of practice. Artefacts are a material outworking of knowledge creation, and according to Vygotsky, they can be aids to solving problems that could not be solved as effectively in their absence. In turn, such artefacts can also influence the individuals who use them to draw attention to previously unknown activities and ways of conceptualising the world around us. When I write a blog post for example, I am creating new content as I write, and then in turn, that content may reveal to me something I may have missed if I had not written the post. The blog content allows me perhaps to view a problem from a different perspective. In essence, writing a blog enables me to know what I am thinking, in a concrete, persistent and searchable form.

There are many other ways to create content besides the blog of course. The use of wikis in group learning to promote collaboration and make a record of what has been learnt is becoming more popular in all sectors of education. Podcasts, normally in the form of the audio recording of an event, are also a means of projecting and sharing content to others so that they can listen at a time and in a place (usually on the move) of their choosing. Sharing of other forms of content such as images and videos can be easily achieved with the use of photo and video sharing services such as Flickr and Youtube. I often share my slideshows through this channel, and receive feedback and other data on their subsequent uses. However, for any of the above formats of user generated content to be fully usable, it first needs to be located. Without organisation and tagging (the use of key descriptive words) such content is not searchable. In my next blog post in this series on digital literacies, I will explore this facet of the social web in more detail. Tomorrow: Organising and sharing content.

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Content creation by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

CONCEDE Project

User generated content is everywhere. Students are using social networking sites to post up their content, including text, images and links they would like to keep and share. In more formalised education settings, there is a proliferation in the use of wikis and other collaborative shared spaces. Blogs are kept by teachers and students alike to document and publish their personal and professional reflections. Podcasts and other pushed services are on the increase, particularly for recorded lectures, useful for thise who either couldn't attend a lesson, or who would like revisit what was said during the session.

The Concede Project (CONtent Creation Excellence through Dialogue in Education) is an EFQUEL supported and ERASMUS funded Europe wide project that is investigating the uses of user generated content in higher education, and seeks to discover who creates and uses this content. We are also interested in how we can benchmark the quality of such content. To that end we are currently engaged in gathering data from an online survey. If you are working or studying in HE and use any form of Web 2.0 or social software services, please consider completing this survey. It's currently presented in English, Spanish and Hungarian and usually takes no more than 10 minutes to complete.

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This work by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

PeLC's digital footprint

I'm sat here exactly one week after the 5th Plymouth e-Learning Conference - #PeLC10 - ended, and reflecting on another great event which everyone seemed to enjoy and learn from. As part of my reflection on the event I have been looking at the digital footprint the conference has left on the Web. There are blogposts, images, videos, and a huge Twitter stream searchable through the #pelc10 hashtag.

I'm sure there will be more accounts, images and videos posted (including the official videos of the two great keynote speeches by Josie Fraser (see the Video here) and Dave White (see the Video here) links of which will also appear soon on the conference website.

Here are just a few of the blogposts and other remnants of the event for you to revisit if you were there, or get a flavour of, if you were not able to attend this year...

Privacy has gone by James Clay

Don't feed the Pelicans by James Clay (includes a podcast and interviews)

Keep calm and carry on by James Clay (Podcast of debate)

Taking a step back by Fleur Corfield

Twitter is dead... Really? by David Hopkins

Learning without limits by Malinka Ivanova

PeLC10 e-learning debate by Bex Lewis

The view from our window by Our Lesson

5th Plymouth e-Learning Conference by Zak Mensah

Mypelc10 - Day 1 by Flea Palmer

Mypecl10 - Day 2 by Flea Palmer

5th Plymouth e-Learning Conference by Mark Pannell

Busy month ahead by Pat Parslow

Make sure you see the Pelican (Part 1) by Dan Roberts

Images of PeLC10 on Flickr by Dawn Wheeler

Community, privacy and identity by Steve Wheeler

Pushing all the right buttons by Steve Wheeler

Angels in the architecture by Steve Wheeler

There is also an aggregation of #pelc10 Delicious tags, Flickr images and Tweets here. And finally, here is an interesting statistical breakown of all the tweets that were tagged #pelc10 during the conference, courtesy of Andy Powell from Eduserv. It's a clever little application you can use to compare the #pelc10 statistics against those of other recent conference tags such as #jisc10 and #mootuk10. It is interesting reading indeed. If you know of any other pelc10 artefacts that are out there on the Web, please post a link in the comments box below.

PeLC10 final plenary session photo courtesy of Dawn Wheeler (from L to R: Steve Wheeler, Thomas Fischer, Josie Fraser, Dave White). The link to the uStream video of the final plenary session is here.

PeLC's digital footprint by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

On camera

Back in 1985 (strewth, is it that long ago?) I started using video with groups of nursing students. I would ask a group of 3 or 4 to go out and record a short (3-5 minute) on an important topic related to nursing, video, edit, caption and narrate it and then present it at the end of the day to the rest of the group for discussion. Sound like an easy task? No - it was actually quite complex. The students recorded their work on VHS tapes using bulky old cameras with unreliable batteries. People were a lot less familiar with video then than they are now, and editing the tapes was tedious, time consuming, and frought with technical difficulties. All of this didn't help when the groups were working against the clock. The learning pay-off though was amazing. Students developed and improved a lot of transferrable skills including problem solving, negotiating, team leading, decision making, technical troubleshooting, creative skills, time management and presentational skills. All of these were later used in their professional practice as care givers.

25 years on, it has all come full circle. It was great this evening to attend a seminar/workshop presented by Professor Derek France (Chester University) who spoke to us about using video (or in his words digital storytelling and video podcasting) with students on geography fieldtrips. Derek gave us an insight into some of the benefits and constraints of using these methods. He advised us that if we wanted to make this effective then staff should develop a few basic technical skills. He emphasised the importance of students creating storyboards, and said that assessment of the final product should be appropriate. At the University of Chester, the digital component makes up 30% of the mark (the remainder is on the written research report). We also discussed copyright and IPR issues, and expored how creativity in video could be assessed fairly.

Students who participated in this kind of technology enhanced learning reported that they thought it was a good use of their time (86%), that it encouraged better group interaction (95%), that it made the topic easier to understand (66%) and that it increased motivation to learn (70%). This is a form of personalised learning, said Derek, because some students are more articulate in front of the camera than they are on paper. It's great to see that the art of integrating video into higher education is not dead. I only wish I could have got my hands on Flipcameras, Audacity and Moviemaker 25 years ago....

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Noughties ... but nice

The first decade of the 21st Century was highly significant for personal learning. Such a vast array of new personal devices and web applications was introduced that have become so deeply ingrained in our everyday lives, many of us would probably feel at a loss if we were suddenly transported back to 1999. If we time jumped from then to 2009, the way we now communicate, learn, search for information, share content and consume entertainment would be unrecognisable. The concept of personal learning environments was also introduced, as a counterpoint to the notion of the VLE. Here are just a few of the personal technological innovations (good or bad) that emerged in the noughties:

Mobile ringtones: OK.... perhaps we could do without ringtones. Those irritating little tunes you hear on the train, in the supermarket queue and even interrupting performances in the theatre have actually grossed over £112 million in sales in the UK alone, and they ain't finished yet. As the next generation of mobile users comes of age, they too will demand that their favourite tunes be made into ringtones. The music industry must be rubbing its hands with glee.

iPods and Podcasts: The Touch, the Nano, the Shuffle, the Classic, you name it, versions of the iPod popped up and grabbed our attention in the noughties. First appearing in 2001, the iPod series is now the most successful digital audio player in history with over 220 million worldwide sales at the time of writing.

The Nintendo DS (Dual Screen) appeared in 2004 and was one of the first handheld games consoles with a built in microphone and wireless connectivity. The dual screen technology was not as smart as we first thought, but never the less, it's a great little device to amuse yourself with for a few hours whilst waiting for a train, on the bus, or in the dentist's chair (eew).

The iPhone: Apple strikes again. For most people who have them they are the best thing since sliced bread. But there are those who absolutely hate this smart, touch surface mobile phone. Battery life sucks, the camera on the first series was naff and they are expensive when you are locked into an O2 contract. But they have revolutionised mobile phones with their pinch gesturing and responsive multi-touch screens, and with several copycat devices available, there really is no going back now.

Social networking sites: Facebook (2006), Myspace (2003), Bebo (2005), LinkedIn (2003) and other sites together have changed the face of social networking for ever. For good or bad, millions of users worldwide flock every day to their favourite social networking sites for their daily fix of pokes, foodfights, online games status updates and live chat. Friends and friends of friends - the race is on to see who can collect the most links to people they will never ever meet. Seriously, social networking has blurred the boundaries between public and private, business and leisure, even good and bad taste. The way you manage your on-line identity is more important than ever. Nothing it seems, is 'yours' anymore - once you have posted personal information or photos to Facebook, they are no longer simply 'your property'. They are there forever, and burying the past may prove to be a problem for many...

YouTube: Freaking out, spoofing, parodies, pirated music videos and plenty of dross - that's YouTube for you. Before Youtube it was very difficult to upload your video clips to the Internet. Youtube made it easy for millions. If you want to know a fact you Google it, but if you want to see a clip, you YouTube it.

Nintendo Wii: This small object of desire appeared in November 2006. If we were cynical, we could surmise that Nintendo worked out if all their games playing customers continued to sit on their backsides, they would get fat and die of heart attacks. So they invented an active sports style handset to get games players up and moving about, thus keeping them alive longer so they could earn more money and spend it on Nintendo games and Wii technology. Clever.

Wikipedia: Created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001, Wikipedia has grown rapidly to become one of the largest reference web sites, attracting approximately 65 million visitors each month. It's the first stop students make when they need to know something, and also the most vilified reference source for many scholars and academics. Where else would most of us go though, for quick information.

Google apps: Streetview, Scholar, Google Earth, Docs, etc - all of these applications appeared in the last decade, and have revolutionised the way we learn, work together, look up information and generally play out our online lives. Augmented reality was introduced as a result of the combination of a number of smart device apps including mashups, global positioning and touch screen technologies. The coming decade will see smart devices, augmented reality and haptic semantic applications coming of age. We will then see how these can be applied to enhance and extend the personal learning environment.

...and of course.... there was Twitter: Forget all the celebrity rubbish and media hype. Twitter is one of the best stripped down social networking tools available to humankind. Don't be deceived by it's simplistic appearance though. It's a powerful tool with plenty of filtering capability and its amplification and connection potential is yet to be fully tapped. Twitter and its third party bolt-on tools will be one to watch in the next few years.

So what are we to make of this truly technological ten years? We have seen radical shifts in our views of identity, relationships, copyright, communication and learning. These are deep changes that will not be recinded, and as we move into an ever more connected society, the changes will increase in their pace and intensity. Personalised learning has never been so easy to establish, and never more contentious. No-one can quite agree on what a personal learning environment is, but that is predictable, because for each of us, it is something different. And what of the future? We don't know what the next decade will hold, but we do know this - it will be increasingly connected. It will also be different - probably more different than we can begin to imagine.

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Podcasting and the listening culture

On Wednesday I was over at the University of Bath, keynoting the Higher Education Academy sponsored Podcasting for Pedagogic Purposes SIG workshop on podcasting. Podcasting is quite a new technology, but its roots run deep back to the broadcasting cultures first emerging in the middle of the last century when radio was the prime method of mass communication. Podcasting taps into an even older culture of listening though - one that can be traced back into the mists of time, where tribal elders and story tellers would gather their clans around a village clearing or camp fire and pass on their values, social mores and traditions through a form of cultural transmission.

On Tuesday night I was invited out by the SIG organisers Jethro Newton, Andy Ramsden, Andrew Middleton and others. I was very pleased to spend some time too with Derek Morrison with whom I had a very interesting discussion over dinner in an excellent Indian restaurant. We were able to bring our own drinks, and we brought our own stories too. One thing Derek said stuck in my mind: He asked what would happen if universities suddenly removed their e-mail services. Very little would change for the students, we agreed. They would simply continue to communicate as usual through Facebook, Myspace, SMS and other non-institutional media. It would be the academics and other staff members who would be seriously affected. There were a lot of conversations, and as I listened, I realised that most of our conversation was indeed storytelling.

And storytelling still remains an important component of 21st century conversation. This kind of cultural transmission continues but now at a quicker pace and also in an ambient manner because it can just as easily be technologically mediated. In the Western industrialised society, we find ourselves in a situation where people expect to be able to walk out of their door, and step onto a bus or train wearing their ear-buds or head phones, listening to their favourite music, talking book or web download. Look around you as you travel to work today and you will see what I mean. The technology mediated listening culture that first emerged in the middle of the last century has come of age, and listeners can now travel through their well trodden urban landscapes whilst their imagination and emotions are stimulated by a very portable, personalised audio system. What is the untapped potential for this type of technology in education? What are the underlying psychological principles? These are questions I tackled in my keynote. The slides from my talk are below, and also available on Slideshare.

Podcasting and the Listening Culture

View more presentations from Steve Wheeler.

Related posts:

Wisdom of crowds (Andrew Middleton)
Podcasting and the listening culture (David Hopkins)
Learning through listening (Jean Jacoby)

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Casting the pod

I have just been alerted to a new podcast available here that covers my presentation on self-organised learning and Web 2.0 that I gave in June at the St Virgil Centre for the Edumedia Conference in Salzburg, Austria. Edited by Andreas Auwarter (part of the Pontydysgu team), it offers links to my blog and also the powerpoint presentation I gave. I talk about mentoring, personalised learning, nomadic learning, and how blogs and wikis can be used in teacher education, and I explore the idea behind using social software to support professional learning. I also outline some of the findings that came from the MentorBlog project we conducted at the University of Plymouth earlier in the year. I also touch on the idea of using microblogs (such as Twitter) and images to show how students can capture their experiences whilst on their placements as student teachers.

It's warts and all - including asides, quips and interaction with the audience at the conference venue. Have a listen and let me know what you think.

Thinking around corners

Edupunk is anti-establishment apparently, and is a response to the corporate and institutional efforts to contain education. It is about destroying the boundaries of our oh so comfortable education systems. It is about wresting control from central authority and liberating the learner. Edupunk is certainly about using tools and services that are outside of the institution, beyond the walled garden, so to speak. I have been doing that for a while, with wikis, blogs and the like, circumventing the university portal. So I certainly support this movement, if that's what it is. As I write this I am listening to Graham Attwell's Emerging Mondays podcast, where he is in converstion with Jim Groom (dubbed the 'poster boy' for Edupunk, whatever that means).

I was a punk the first time around, in 80s Britain (to be honest I was probably more new-wave actually, because punk was essentially late 70s - I played in a band that was fast, loud and furious, and we stood against the mainstream culture of the time). I still have the punk attitude, to be frank - that rebellious streak - and it has carried through into my professional life, so perhaps I am one of them there edupunks. I am against the sterile, meaningless Managed Learning Environments (read BlackBoard, SharePoint and yes, even Moodle) that universities and colleges push which are purpose built to maintain strict control. They constrain the use of materials, and ensure that only bona fide students are allowed in. The students don't like them, and only use them because they have to. Anything an MLE can do, the social web can do just as well, if not better.... oh, and did I mention, usually for free. I'm really thinking about my students and what's best for them.

And that is my version of Edupunk, so I'm glad Jim Groom coined the phrase. When you have a mysterious illness, it is often a relief to be diagnosed, so that you put a name to your illness. The same applies to my 'condition' - I often swim against the mainstream, and try to find ways to subvert 'accepted practice' and I like to 'think around corners'. So it is nice to find a word that describes my condition. Whether 'Edupunk' will survive as a movement or will be strangled at birth remains to be seen. But at least now I know that there are others out there who think the same as me.

There is a tension between the Web 2.0 culture and Higher Education control mindsets and it is difficult to know how this can, or will be resolved. The bottom line is this - the MLE is dead, and the corpse needs to be removed before it stinks the place out. Trouble is, the university managers don't know it's dead, but they know it cost a lot of money, so there it remains, quietly rotting away.

Check out more on Edupunk on Stephen Downes blog, here at Professors go edupunk, and also in the Wikipedia pages.

Twemes means memes

We have been enjoying using the Twemes (Twitter Memes) application here in Salzburg these last two days. Although the wireless network connections have been playing some games with us, several of us here at Edumedia have been able to Twitter and then direct our tweets to Twemes where they are aggregated in with a stream of images (Flickr) and tags (Delicious) from the conference. Anything on these tools that is tagged with #edumedia08 is fed directly into Twemes. Pictured are Graham and I, with me in full flow talking about some research I have done on blogs and wikis for nomadic learners (Picture taken by David Roethler and uploaded direct to Flickr via Shozu).

Graham Attwell, Veronica Hornung-Praser and I have just done a session on mobile self organised learning which will be podcast by Graham via his Bazaar webcasting service later this week. The weather is a little cooler today, but the discussion is just as hot, centred upon self organised learning and social software. This morning, in our first session, we enjoyed two hours of World Cafe discussion, where the white table cloth became our notepad and where the groups constantly rotated around the room discussion key issues. A fabulous idea in every way!

Publish and be jammed

I might be wrong, but I think the days of the paper based academic journal could be numbered....

At the EARLI 2004 conference in Cyprus delegates were invited to a 'meet the editors' session, where we could quiz 15 or so editors about their journals. I was first on my hind legs to ask a question which was later echoed by several other delegates. How could editors justify the long lead in times between acceptance of papers to publication - as academics, we want our ideas to be in the public domain as quickly as possible, before they grow hairs on their chins. Satisfactory answer came there none.

One of the worst culprits is Computers and Education. A long long time ago, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth (alright, 26 November 2004), my colleagues Sue Waite, Carolyn Bromfield and I received confirmation that our article 'Our Flexible Friend' had been accepted for publication in the journal. More than two years later, our article still isn't in print, but we can expect it to be published around summer 2007!

Last year my colleagues Maged Boulos, Cito Maramba and I submitted our paper 'Wikis Blogs and Podcasts' to the online medical journal BMC Medical Education. When our manuscript was accepted, we were pleasantly surprised that it was published online the same day! Since then, in only four months, it has recorded over 5,500 viewings on the BMC site alone. It is mirrored on other sites around the globe including Pub Med Central, so this figure can be at least doubled. Our ideas and theories have been disseminated well and in a timely manner, to the extent that other articles and blogs have already appeared online reviewing, commenting and challenging us. Here are a few notable ones:

• British Medical Journal Online (BMJ.com)
• Drugscope Blog
• Clinical Evidence Blog
• Informaticopia (Rod Space)
• Stuart Glendinning Hall
• a-brest.net (France)
• Medinfo.net
• e-Learning at UWC (South Africa)
• Cases Blog
• OLDaily (Canada)

I know where a lot of my work will be published in the future... what do you think?

The Podfather (Part 1)

A well-known scene from the film 'The Podfather' (Part 1)...Dedicated to a friend who was recently 'hit'. No names, no packdrill.

DON PODLEONE: Nanosera, we know each other for years, but this is the first time you come to me for help. I don't remember the last time you invited me to your blogspot ... even though our wives text each other.
NANOSERA: What do you want of me? I'll give you anything you want, but do what I ask!
DON PODLEONE: And what is that Nanosera?
(Nanosara whispers into the Don's ear.)
DON PODLEONE: No. You ask for too much!
NANOSERA: I ask only for protection!
DON PODLEONE: Your software gave you protection.
NANOSERA: An i for an i...!
DON PODLEONE: But your daughter is still online.
NANOSERA: Then make the spammers suffer as she suffers. How much shall I pay you?
DON PODLEONE: You never think to protect yourself with a firewall. You think it's enough to have McAfee. All right, McAfee protects you, so you don't need a friend like me. But now you come to me and say Don Podleone, you must give me protection. And you don't ask in respect or friendship. And you don't think to call me Podfather. Instead you come to my house on the day I go phishing and you ask me to protect you ...from spammers.
NANOSERA: McAfee has been good to me...
DON PODLEONE: Then install Spamkiller 5.0 with your firewall, the Stinger with the Freescan, Nanosera. But if you come to me with your friendship, your loyalty, then your enemies become my enemies, and then, believe me, they would fear to attack you...
(Slowly, Nanosera bows his head and murmurs.)
NANOSERA: Be my e-pal.
DON PODLEONE: Good. From me you'll get protection.
NANOSERA: Podfather.
DON PODLEONE: Some day, and that day may never come, I would like to call upon you to do me a service in return.
(Don Podleone sits back in his chair and gives a hacking cough)