This is an interesting commenting tool in use (and probably an interesting read but I haven’t got that far yet!). A blog that allows you comment on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis. It’s being used here to draft a paper on the future of learning institutions. According to Scott Leslie it’s a WP plugin.
“Was Pepys an early blogger?” ask LSE’s Tony Barnett in a recent ‘argument’ with the New Statesman’s Ben Davies!
But, most of all, the professor wanted to talk about blogs. “My son writes a blog – his latest entry talks about doing yoga and reading John Fowles’s The Magus. Now who’s going to be interested in that?”
“Mind you,” he answered himself, “my son has a female admirer called ML in Washington – perhaps it’s a new form of dating agency . . . or is it like those round robins you get at Christmas. We get one from a man in which he tells us about his hamster . . .”
“Perhaps,” I interjected, “blogs are a bit like diaries – at one end of the scale you get a daily record of a mundane life: ‘Got up, went to the toilet, made tea, read paper’, and at the other you have Pepys recording the fire of London?”
“Now that’s interesting,” he responded, “Was Pepys an early blogger? Did he write because he witnessed momentous things or were they momentous because he wrote about them?”
The journalist bought the chance to argue with Prof. Barnett for £90 in a charity auction. See Spat’ll be ninety quid in the New Statesman for the full story. The recently revamped NS uses a blog format for most of it’s site now with RSS feeds, commenting and links to other social software (post to del.icio.us etc).
I attended a UCL Teaching and Learning Network session on podcasts yesterday. Before I get on to podcasts I’d like to mention the impressive attendence – about 30-40 with around half teaching staff. We need to give some thought to this – do we try and do something similar here or join in with UCL – the offer is there.
The format, for those not familiar, is a monthly event in a fixed time slot and location with an online presence to support it (open guest login). The sessions themselves are two hours with presentations and group discussion. Recent topics covered include tools for collaborative teaching & learning, Moodle, & student information literacy.
A bit on podcasts
The session focussed on ‘pure’ podacsts, i.e. audio + RSS with a general “what is / how to” presentation followed by a look at examples of education-related podcasts.
I attended a CDE event today delivered by Terry Anderson of athabasca univeristy, canada’s equivalent of the OU. The session had been advertised as blogs and social software but the focus was Personal Learning Environments (based on social software). He described a PLE as a “web interface into the owners’ digital environment” and spoke about the institutional VLE being replaced by an institutional PLE (such as elgg) as a transitory step to individuals choosing their own PLEs. This year he has`been teaching a class using Moodle for content, elgg, branded as me2you for blogging and making connections, elluminate for real time stuff and furl for bookmarking and sharing web resources.
Couple of quick things – Athabasca are using moodle, he mentioned some recent data on web2.0 use from the jisc spire project which might be worth a look and a strongly recommended read was Seely Brown new learning environmnts (2006).
The external hosted version of elgg has been relaunched as eduspaces. And I think elgg is defintely worth revisiting… I’ll certainly be having a more detailed look soon. Just need a project / interested academic… Since I last looked at it, with a group of PhDs about a year ago, and decided it wasn’t quite there, the following things have changed:
All in all, much improved…
Update: In today’s seminar Terry Anderson reminded me of one of key features of elgg which we identified when looking at it previously and that’s the permissions side of things. When posting to an elgg blog, adding a file or completing your profile you have complete control over who can see it – your content can be public, only seen by logged in users, completely private or restricted to an elgg community or a group of elgg contacts that you specify.
The other day I made a post with a link to a YouTube video. I tried to embed it using the code that YouTube supplies but this resulted in the blog looking like someone had taken a sledge hammer to it… and no video.
Today Charlie Beckett was asking how to do this for his POLIS blog so I’ve been looking into it. If you look at my earlier post you’ll see that it is now working but it’s a bit fiddly. I followed instructions posted by Matthias Zeller Memento which involves turning off the visual rich editor while you make the post. I’ve found that you only need to worry about your personal settings so a revision of the instructions would be:
And then repeat 2&3 to turn the visual editor back on!
This is probably old technology now – recorded Feb 2006, SO last year – but I want one!
Watch the ‘Minority Reports’ Touch screen on YouTube.
I came across this clip on StumbleUpon, a social bookmarking site that I haven’t seen before (and am finding a little confusing) but it beat del.icio.us in Dion Hinchcliffe’s 2006 Best of Web 2.0 which itself provides a useful list of web 2.0 sites.
I just came across this course which is packed full of social software resources. It’s called Five Weeks to Social Library and is running now but all the content, blog postings from participants etc are freely available. Could be stuff of interest to the CDE project but also resources for the E-Literacy and the blog/wiki staff dev courses
A good example of a blog being used for teaching by an individual lecturer is Jonathan Briggs at Kingston University. The blog is used for lecture notes, podcasts and as well as direct communication with the students, the lecturer often replies to students comments.
An interesting article on life-long computer skills from Jakob Nielsen that’s been picked up by a couple of blogs today – Future Lab Flux & Seb Schmoller.
