Web 2.0 will eat itself

My new best buddy James Clay has posted the link to the video created for the Web 2.0 Slam Performing Innovative Practice Workshop at the ALT-C conference here in Nottingham earlier today. It's hosted on YouTube right here and shows the delegates in their small groups performing their own vignettes and parodies of Web 2.0 tools. We laughed until we stopped - a bit like our trip out to the Jongleurs Comedy Club last night (sponsored by our kind friends WIM-Bah! Thank you Bob Mills!) where we laughed until we ached.

Well, already there has been a lot of interest in the Web 2.0 Slam workshop, and a fair amount of blogs and other sites are carrying it. I know my blog hits have gone through the ceiling. Web 2.0 has a habit of looking back in on itself, and reflecting its own capabilities and characteristics. Talking to Mark Stiles tonight over dinner, it appears that Web 2.0 may not exist at all, and if it does, it's in danger of disappearing up its own backside. Or maybe it will simply eat itself. Whatever it is, now all we have to do is try to catch a little of it and make it work for our students...

Just Wiliam

Dylan Wiliam nailed it for most of us at the conference this morning. His keynote (the second at ALT-C this year) dealt with how technology will help to change the way our learners are assessed. Building his case expertly (liberally dosed with dry humour) Professor Wiliam showed how formative forms of assessment are key to the success of learning that actually 'sticks'. Teaching is complex and chaotic, he said. Your don't need to know about 'learning styles' either, he said. What you need to know about is differnt styles of teaching, which will tap into and challenge all kinds of learner styles and approaches. Technology can help us to do this he said. He said a lot of things actually, too numerous to mention in this short blog, but interestingly (as with all the Keynotes at ALT-C 2007) his talk is available on Elluminate as a video on demand. Dylan Wiliam's conclusion, convincingly argued for many of the delegates, I sensed, was that automated aggregative technologies will provide the solution where teachers need to know excatly where the group stands in terms of the knowledge and understanding they have just acquired. Straw polls taken through classroom clickers, discourse software (where student responses can be projected onto a screen for the whole group to discuss) or even simple handheld voting,will all indicate to the teacher that students need more explanation, or are ready to move on.

Well, move on we did - because many of the delegates have been talking about this keynote over lunch. The bottom line is: we need to realise it is more important to improve pedagogy than to improve subject knowledge. Wiliam believes that aggregative technologies will do this.

Wham, Slam, thank you m'ams

I thought Josie Fraser, Helen Keegan and Frances Bell caught the mood of the ALT-C conference today with their excellent workshop this morning entitled: 'Web 2.0 Slam'. In it they worked through a number of salient issues about the use of social networking technologies, including privacy, identity, communication and copyright. (That's me pictured with Helen doing a Web 2.0 Slam on social tagging using bits of crumpled up paper ... yes it really was that mad). The audience was encouraged to participate, and each small group was asked to create a 90 second 'slam', about some aspect of Web 2.0.

The wiki resulting from this session can be found here on Helen's blog. Thanks for an excellent, well worked and thought ptovoking session ladies!

...and the tension grows, and this time it's Mobile...

I attended a very interesting symposium earlier today, led by Agnes Kukulska-Hulme with presentaions from John Cook, Tom Boyle and John Traxler. More tension.... The title was 'Tensions between personal space and social space in mobile learning'. Toward the end of the session, we were asked to get into small groups and think about the design issues if we were asked to create a mobile technology friendly site within a city centre. Several issues emerged, including cover from the inclement British weather (electronics and deluges do not mix - ask Noah.) We also thought that because some people didn't have access to mobile technologies (the so called digital divide) that we should make systems/access for them using kiosk based technology. By far the most important issue for our small group was the problem of finding somewhere to top up your battery when it goes flat. How could this be achieved...?

There is a blog related to this subject run by James Clay, which you can visit to contribute toward the discussion.

The tension grows...

It's been a morning of tension. Several of the speakers were visibly nervous as they approached the daunting task of encapsulating the conference for a group of worldly wise tech savvy academics and practitioners. I for one was glad to be sat in the audience (I had Mark Stiles and Helen Keegan for company and camouflage...)

Michelle Selinger's keynote this morning set the scene for the ALT-C 2007 conference. The 'corporate backpacker' (Mike Sharples' description not mine) took a global perspective on e-learning, giving us all a break-neck world tour of e-learning initiatives. She talked about the tensions between informal vs formal learning, north vs south, schools vs higher education and cultures vs economies. There followed an insightful presentation covering the problems, solutions and caveats of implementing digital technologies in education. Perhaps Michelle's most memorable comment related to the imposition of technology expectations upon cultures that would not or could not countenance them. She named it 'technology dissonance' - and cited the example of university campuses in the Far East that would find videoconferencing unworkable when they only have 1 Mb of data coming into the campus.

The themes for ALT-C were also introduced, each with their own 'tensions'. Each can I think be summed up in a dichotomy... Designing learning spaces = formal vs informal; Large scale implementation = simplicity vs complexity; Internationalism = imperialism vs multiculturalism; and finally, the Social network generation = user-control vs institutional control.

The tension(s) will not ease... this conference will reveal them all, and leave us with more questions than answers I think....

The big T's

Well, I have managed to arrive in Nottingham in one piece and the drive up was absolutely fine. I also found the East Midlands Conference Centre without trouble, although it took me 45 minutes to walk up to the venue from my 'B & B' in Beeston. They seem to be short of letter T's here in Nottingham because the sign above the entrance actually reads 'Eas Midlands Conference Cen re'. Could this be an ominous portent - The 'T' in ALT stands for 'technology' - might this also be dropped (and with it all the shiny new technology)? I don' hink so...

Even with the dropped T's this year's ALT-C conference venue looks good, and although there are only a few people milling around at the moment, the place looks ideal for a successful conference. I can imagine it tomorrow buzzing with delegates. The exhibitors stands (all but JISC, who's stand is so large in the foyer that it's actually difficult to see) are all placed nicely around the outer edge of the 'Banqueting Hall' where it looks as though we will be enjoying most of our meals. Overall, good first impressions, and there are even some free access networked computers near the poster displays (I'm using one now). If I bump into you at ALT-C this year, say hi. Oh - and enjoy the free icecream on offer when you visit the ALT stand in the entrance hall!

Mast hysteria ... again

I blogged about the dangers of radiation from mobile phone masts back in April and like the perennial weeds that pop up uninvited in my garden all summer, they’ve raised their ugly heads again. The September issue of The Psychologist runs an article entitled: ‘Psychological origins of phone mast symptoms’. It reports on a study from Essex University where researchers asked 44 self-reported 'electro-sensitive' individuals and 114 ‘controls’ to take part in an experiment. Unpleasant symptoms were reported by the 44 but not by the 114 when they stood close to phone masts (but none knew when the signal was on or when it was off). The researchers concluded that the symptoms the 44 reported were merely psychosomatic - i.e. 'all in the mind'. Well that’s the first time I have heard of leukaemia being labelled ‘psychosomatic’….. (oops – bit of politics there!) Of course, the results might also mean that the 114 were merely less susceptible to any effects from the masts….

So, let’s follow this train of thinking. Whenever I turn on the TV and listen to a cabinet minister holding forth about some new government plan to cut health service funding, raise taxes or send more troops to Afghanistan, and I get an uneasy, nauseous feeling inside me, am I just being oversensitive? Whilst my Government supporting colleagues nod sagely in agreement, does this mean that for me it is all in the mind? Or does it simply mean that I have a better inbuilt bull**** detector than they do? Perhaps we should be told….