and pulled out a PLUM ... bits and pieces of interest

2008-11-25T11:39:00.002Z

Engaging Learning with Social Software

Just started with this course running at Oxford Brookes - just a few online weeks looking at the use of and using Social Software in an educational setting. Mixed emotions really ... on one hand I'm all in favour of using such ICT facilities in education (i.e. education as in learning) - I think that such tools can enable people to learn a lot about themselves, about other people & things. But on the other hand, I'm worried about using such tools in education (i.e. education as in teaching) - there's nothing more powerful as a disincentive to using tools as a teacher telling you that you should!

:-(

2007-03-07T10:11:00.002Z

"I'm not saying that knowledge is socially constructed, but our understanding of that knowledge is socially constructed." - a line taken from this CNET news report (http://news.com.com/2102-1032_3-6140175.html?tag=st.util.print) on a talk by John Seely Brown (ex-Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation and the Director of its Palo Alto Research Center - http://www.johnseelybrown.com/) … makes me worry that MY understanding of that knowledge is better than your understanding of it because MY understanding/use/manipulation of 'socially constructed' is better than yours (to paraphrase the sentiment of Animal Farm quite awfully)?

But, like many position statements, I'm in agreement.

2007-01-13T10:53:00.001Z

A useful tome to have around to be able to dip into has been the 600
page Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray
Siemens & John Unsworth and published by Blackwell in 2004.

'Humanities Computing' has trouble with maintaining a credible,
distinctive position in the field of academic disciplines ~ such trouble
is in common with that experienced by other 'new', developing
disciplines - Computer Science in the past, and Educational Technology.
This book offers justifications, examples and debate about what does
make it a creditable discipline.

A 600 page book is difficult to read in one sitting, or even in the few
days / weeks / months that one can borrow it from a library - and
difficult to carry around (books - 'portability' still accounts for much
of the popularity of this 'old' medium). But now, when you want to find
some learned words on what can be offered any particular corner of
Humanities endeavours, be it research or teaching&learning, the
Companion is available online at:
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/.

2007-01-09T13:00:00.001Z

The Best of Technology Writing 2006, a collaborative imprint of the
University of Michigan Press and the University of Michigan Library, is
now available for online reading at: http://www.hti.umich.edu/b/bot/.
Contents includes pieces on 'The Record Effect' which finishes strangely
by attributing death to the recording studio (presumably "locked from
the inside, my dear Watson!") and cyberextortionists, a new breed of
villain, who demand money to leave you alone.

2006-10-16T10:30:00.000+01:00

I keep meaning to put in a link to this 'publication' - which arrives quite often by email, sometimes (like in this instance) a list of useful links and othertimes built around a theme ... wwwtools for teachers. The "Imperial History (Maps of War) is an impressive animated mapping sequence showing who has controlled the Middle East over the course of history - Egyptians, Turks, Jews, Romans, Arabs, Greeks, Persians, Europeans have all interacted here" caught my eye in this issue ...

2006-06-15T09:42:00.000+01:00

Two examples of the sort of caring, sharing, collaborative ethic that the Internet has afforded us all, the Centre for Bioscience ImageBank consists of freely available images contributed by academics, researchers, Learned Societies, industry and individuals with rights cleared for educational purposes and the Woophy site - the WOrld Of PHotographY, a website founded by a Dutch collective of photo aficionados and internet designers who "believe navigation on internet can be more visual, logical and associative. The goal of Woophy's founders is to create an accessible, visual, current, democratic and collective work of art comprised of a database picturing our remarkable world." Raises all sorts of folksonomy-type issues ...

2006-06-01T09:20:00.000+01:00

This latest issue of Innovate - June/July 2006 Volume 2, Issue 5 looks interesting, the lead paper is by Sir John Daniel and Paul West on the digital divide - a topic that I remember was always close to JD's heart when he was VC here at the OU (Vice Chancellor @ The UKOpen University). Then there's papers on the use of 'social software', wikis, chat rooms and plagiarism, Creative Commons and, lastly, retention. Something, as they say, for everyone!

2006-04-04T12:15:00.000+01:00

I'm reading this book on Games Theory - some interesting points about the way that Games use feedback. One of the Games Theory gurus (Marc LeBlanc) defines two sorts of feedback: Negative feedback (-ve F) and Positive feedback (+ve F) ... with -ve F, which intervenes to reduce the difference between the players or the player and the compute, the game tends to stabilize toward a steady state of activity - prolonging the game. With +ve F, where the intervention enhances the difference between the players, the game tends to destabilize - ending the game. And there is a sophisticated feedback technique called Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment (DDA) that adjusts the dificulty of play ... i.e. the game 'evaluates' how well the player is doing and, if it senses that the a player is not doing very well (i.e. getting killed too often/quickly or falling too far behind), the game adjusts to make it easier for that player - similarly, it will make the game more difficult for a better player. The aim being to keep the players playing . (Salen and Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Playing Fundamentals, 2004, MIT Press, pp 218-224).

I guess in a Formative Assessment (academic) setting, this would be translated into something like a set of questions/tasks ... after the first one the computer would assess how good the student was and either present more easier questions/task to poor students or fewer more difficult questions/tasks to good students. After the second question the student would be reassessed and the number and level of difficulty of the subsquent question would be adjusted accordingly ...

2006-03-14T09:59:00.000Z

Another issue from those very helpful people that produce wwwtools for teachers, this one is all about Tags, Folksonomies and Social Bookmarking - theory piggy-backing on technological development. I know that we shouldn't let technology drive what we do, that pedagogy should ... but it seems to me that there are times (hopefully brief) when developments in technology throw up possibilities which drive a period of reflection while we put a lot of effort into thinking about whether or not some aspect of the new possibility could be at all useful. It might not be teaching & learning as we know it Jim ... but it might be next year.

2006-01-16T13:07:00.000Z

... the 16th January, 2006 issue of wwwtools for teachers is all about the potential of Mobile / Cell Phones in Education with links to various presentations by Nesta Futurelabs and Marc Prensky etc. Topics touched upon include The Possibilities, Thoughts on Pedagogy, The Hardware, Examples of Features, Applications, and Services, Mobile Phones in Educational Practice, and Classroom Applications.

2006-01-06T23:36:00.000Z

DOES DISTANCE LEARNING WORK ? - Well, there's a lot of people working where I work that think it does, at least, the way we do it with the students that we have ... many of whom wouldn't be able to study if we didn't do it. But this paper by James Koch of the Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, USA, might answer some of the fears of Distance Learning doubters ...

2006-01-05T13:52:00.000Z

OK ... this could be useful. Not to suggest that students should be chased up as if they were crooks, but the idea of sending reminders about what they should be working on this week, assignment due dates, or tutorials etc might be a good idea. Especially if it's possible to do it automatically as this article seems to suggest. Most folk these days have a mobile phone, and many of us do use them for text messages ... Courts chase criminals with SMS - Public Sector - Breaking Business and Technology News at silicon.com

2005-08-22T20:37:00.000+01:00

Protopage - AJAX personal bookmarks springboard OHH ARR another webby thingy to play with could answer a recent query about logging useful notes and things ...

2005-08-02T19:14:00.000+01:00

The Scientist :: On Your Mark, Get Set, Blog!, Aug. 1, 2005 ... everybody's doin' it, doin' it, doin't (sing along) ... everybody's doin' it

2005-07-24T17:31:00.000+01:00

Instructional Blogging On Campus: Identifying Best Practices: Campus Technology ~ from the University of Arizona including various pedagogic uses in class and interesting faculty use from the UA College of Nursing.

2005-02-16T00:06:00.000Z

ImageTexT -- Volume 1, Issue 2. EXCELLENT! interdisciplinary comics studies - great.

2005-02-11T23:54:00.000Z

del.icio.us/sartwo At last I've started to use del.icio.us ... let's see how it goes.

2005-02-02T10:01:00.000Z

Innovate - February/March 2005 Volume 1, Issue 3 some good looking papers in here (as usual) - and formatted for interactive reading as well.

2005-01-26T16:09:00.000Z

BioTheory, Science Journal, Robert Rosen, Rosennean Complexity, Life came upon this ... suspect that I ought to look at it at some time!

2004-12-02T10:56:00.000Z

Google Scholar Check this out ... see if it's better or worse than you a) expected, b) wanted or c) needed. Then make a comment!

2004-11-23T15:58:00.000Z

Electronic Enlightenment Information - I must get back to this! it looks like an interesting advance in the sort of resource that is being offered to humanities scholars ...

2004-11-19T14:17:00.000Z

Google Scholar - a variation on the ol' Google Search (which looks at everything!) ... Google Scholar looks "specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research". A relatively new offering in this more focused world of surfin' - still being reviewed by potential users.

2004-10-12T22:51:00.000+01:00

Croquet Project - the About Croquet page promises all sorts of collaborative benefits afforded by online systems ... certainly worth a look although I'm a bit sceptical about the inter-establishment sharing of knowledge that seems to be on offer.

2004-10-07T09:35:00.000+01:00

Welcome to Project Gutenberg - Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg is the oldest producer of free electronic books (eBooks or etexts) on the Internet. Their collection of more than 12,000 eBooks has been produced by hundreds of volunteers. Most of the Project Gutenberg eBooks are older literary works that are in the public domain in the United States. All may be freely downloaded and read, and redistributed for non-commercial use.

2004-09-22T12:27:00.000+01:00

Learning with software ... a useful classificatiopn&description of all sorts of Learning Theories.

2004-09-15T10:29:00.000+01:00

Into the Blogosphere ... same as previous entry, this site could provide some answers.

2004-09-15T10:28:00.000+01:00

Blog.org: Academia Archives OK - working interest ... I've got to do a very short piece on the serious use of blogging in HE. Is it done, for what, is it useful etc ... this site could help with some input.

2004-09-15T09:38:00.000+01:00

Analytics Press: Turning Numbers into Knowledge - nothing wrong with a bit of self-publicising as long as the artifact lives up to the promise. This could be very good ... but could that depend more on how I take to it rather than how good it actually is?

BLOGs - is interaction everything?

2004-07-23T13:10:00.000+01:00

Some of us were talking about what e-learning potential do BLOG pages have and one response was:
"I go to your BLOG, see your entries and see what makes you tick -- which can be quite similar to what makes me enthuse -- I learn from your entries because I have the motivation / curiosity to read it ... but if I don't tell you what do you learn? (Are we back to square one? ... talking is not listening ... you may talk/write, I can read but we need interaction ... I need to talk back to you, you need me to talk back to you ... "

According to the theory there does need to be some form of conversational framework, some form of feedback loop, some form of active reflection, for 'learning' to take place … if I BLOG something and no-one reads it or responds to it does anyone learn? (A bit like the 'If a tree falls in a forest and there's no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?" … see: http://personal.clt.bellsouth.net/t/a/tarabyl/ifa.htm or http://www.getodd.com/stuf/treefall.html … it's amazing what sort of answers there are to such clever/simple question!). And my response would be 'yes' I learn from the process of BLOGging a link to something - even if it's a personal, private diary BLOG there is still potential for learning. Mind you - it could be a bit solitary! A 'conversation' between one person and a resource within a framework … the 'disciplined nature' of the reflection will be important.

If this process of learning encompasses interaction with others then some collaborative learning might be possible - and more than one person might benefit. But a simple comment feedback is unlikely to engender much - there needs to be more.

Simon

2004-07-21T21:44:00.000+01:00

e-Government & public sector IT news from PublicTechnology.net ... I MUST be interested in this, I really MUST! Having said that, it looks like some useful information re: e-learning and education.

2004-07-21T13:06:00.000+01:00

The last seven posts on Dunstan’s blog - which is, I think, a good looking BLOG by Dunstan Orchard that seems to do some very clever things and also seems to have involved some clever thoughts about commenting and the like ... it includes a nice view of Dorset as well, weather and all!

2004-07-20T15:55:00.000+01:00

Into the Blogosphere - an e-journal about Blogs ... what better to link to from a Blog?

2004-07-14T15:50:00.000+01:00

Welcome to Academic Impressions -
Looks like it could be interesting ... there's to be a web conference in October 2004 looking at the use of Weblogs in HE.

2004-07-12T16:17:00.000+01:00

Piled Higher and Deeper (PhD comics) check out the "read the latest comic strips ... !" link. Warning ... this humour might not be universal, not everyone has suffered in this way!

2004-07-09T16:04:00.000+01:00

The Projected Picture Trust -
Excellent! ... and so close to home. One trouble with progress is that we tend to forget whatever really good stuff went before. This group seems to be about saving the technology of projected cinema - a slightly different take on the history of the cinema, and one that will be lost on the current generation of DVD (no sound of the gate) transmission.

2004-07-08T23:01:00.000+01:00

http://www.AIResources.info - a 'Subject Tracer Information Blog' devoted to Artificial Intelligence resources. Judging by the events and people at Bletchley that I referred to earlier, a lot of the efforts of AI labs in the UK is now being channeled into e-learning. It used to be figuring out how people thought and trying to replicate that in software ... now more a case of figuring out how people learn and trying to support that in software.

Thanks to the ResearchBuzz (copyright 2004 Tara Calishain. All rights reserved) for this AI link, I get an e-copy of this newsletter most weeks ... check it out at: http://www.researchbuzz.com/about.shtml.

2004-07-08T13:15:00.000+01:00

The Scientist - News Journal for the Life Scientist
quite a lot of UK-centric articles in this journal. Helps one to keep up with things!

2004-07-08T10:13:00.000+01:00

BBC Motion Gallery - Home Page -
Should be a veritable goldmine - although I suspect that the sequences that I would want have long been cut and binned!

Long post about "e-learning" ...

2004-07-08T09:50:00.000+01:00

I was at the Future for e-learning Research day at Bletchley Park last week (http://kn.open.ac.uk/public/index.cfm?wpid=2843) where lots of folk from conventional universities plus a few from the UKOU spent the day debating future prospects, funding and programmes for e-learning research. It struck me that for many of them the prospect of delivering e-learning to their students was raising new concerns that we in the OU have been dealing with since we first sent boxes of course material to our distant students way back in 1971 - i.e. they have lost the control that comes with proximity and presence - the control now has to be embedded in the e-learning material. 'Control' is perhaps not the right word to use … motivation / stimulation / incentive / rationale / interaction might be better? What, if any, lessons are there for e-learning in OUr experiences (e.g. from SAQs - self assessment questions buried in the text)?

At the CALRG 25th Anniversary last Friday (http://iet.open.ac.uk/research/calrg/index.cfm) the phrase "you become what you measure" was used … meaning, I guess, that if learners know that they are to be assessed on some criteria they will endeavour to better their performance with respect to those criteria. Given that e-learning enables us to deliver material in new ways and for learners to engage with those materials in new ways … should there also be the new criteria and new ways of assessing their performance?

Exchange is a collaborative publication born out of various UK partners' collective objective to enhance learning and teaching. The partners are:

The National Co-ordination Team based at the Centre for Higher Education Practice in the UKOU
The Learning and Teaching Support Network
The Institute for Learning and Teaching

Issue 6 of Exchange focuses on 'e-Learning', it is available at: http://www.exchange.ac.uk/ - it includes contributions from Martin Oliver (What is a Learning Technologist?), Grainne Conole (The role of research in informing practice) and Allison Littlejohn (From learning objects to learning design).

The Thwarted Innovation: What Happened to E-learning and Why report is published by the University of Pennsylvania. This study sought to answer the question "Why did the boom in e-learning go bust?" Over an eighteen-month period authors Robert Zemsky, an education professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and William F. Massy, professor emeritus of education and business administration at Stanford University, tracked faculty and staff attitudes towards e-learning at six colleges and universities. The complete report is available online in PDF format at: http://www.irhe.upenn.edu/Docs/Jun2004/ThwartedInnovation.pdf. It raises Administration and Management concerns about e-learning that will need to be countered.

2004-07-07T12:20:00.000+01:00

University of Toronto -- News@UofT -- Pause/Break Information Technology News from the perspective of a Canadian University ... interesting, not UK and not US.

Confirmation of BLOGging by Email ...

2004-06-11T11:20:00.000+01:00

Seems to work well … and this is what happens if a URL is included in the Email - http://kn.open.ac.uk/public/ which is a link to the public-access Knowledge Network developed in The Open University by the Institute of Educational Technology (IET).

BLOGging by Email

2004-06-08T12:05:00.000+01:00

This is just to check a new feature of this BLOG ... can I submit an
entry to it via Email? If this appears then 'yes, I can' - if not,
then nobody will ever know.

2004-06-01T15:10:00.000+01:00

Research Methods - grist to the mill ...

2004-05-21T10:43:00.000+01:00

SpecLab @ UVA excellent ... must find time to wade around.

2004-05-20T12:33:00.000+01:00

MindTech Gateway (circle-of-excellence.com - Peter EH Smee, Linda M Smee) looks useful ...

2004-05-17T10:56:00.000+01:00

NESTA Futurelab - creating a new learning landscape By bringing together the creative, technical and educational communities, NESTA Futurelab is pioneering ways of using new technologies to transform the learning experience ... the website includes a report: Can blogging be used in education? which demands to be read!

2004-04-07T09:52:00.000+01:00

Main Page - Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia ... 'free' in the sense that it is available via the Internet at no cost and 'free' in the sense that it is a copyleft publication open to contributions from anyone on the understanding that anyone may subsequently edit and add to it. An 'Open Source' encyclopedia.

2004-03-26T10:36:00.000Z

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, London 1674 to 1834 A fully searchable online edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing accounts of over 100,000 criminal trials held at London's central criminal court.

2004-03-13T14:10:00.000Z

Ultralab, APU - a learning technology research lab, featuring papers on elearning, online learning communities, mobile technology and lots more ... (recently come to the fore, although I had known about them from some years ago (see: memories)

2004-03-01T15:54:00.000Z

.: ideasMart :. - this might be interesting ... what works on the web (?)

2004-02-11T15:33:00.000Z

Liquid Narrative - The Liquid Narrative research group at North Carolina State University's Computer Science Department uses techniques from Artificial Intelligence, Computer Gaming, Human-Computer Interaction, Virtual Reality and Cognitive Psychology to model narrative aspects of human interaction with computer systems - sounds good!

2004-02-07T17:15:00.000Z

Visible Knowledge Project Home Page - Now this looks interesting. ICTechnology introduced into Teaching&Learning but with pedegogy driving - NOT technology.

2004-01-16T09:32:00.000Z

Epic - Europe's leading bespoke e-learning company, and also the source of some interesting papers on aspects of distance, open and 'E' learning. Look out for their White Papers under the Resources ~ More ... link.

2003-12-30T14:56:00.000Z

Institutional models for humanities computing - a resource, maintained by Willard McCarty (King's College London) & Matthew Kirschenbaum (University of Maryland) and published by ALLC. Gives links to a host of institutions / groups / publications etc that are promoting Humanities Computing (ideally as a discipline in its own right ...).

2003-12-02T22:05:00.000Z

JCMC Vol 9 Issue 1: The Multilingual Internet
The editor's introduction says "The number of non-English speaking Internet users has grown to 470 million, roughly two-thirds of all users " and this special issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication explores some issues of this many-languaged medium. One of the editors is Brenda Danet who was involved in some very interesting papers published in issue 2 of the first volume of JCMC - Plays & Performance in CMC including "Curtain Time 20:00 GMT: Experiments in Virtual Theater on Internet Relay Chat".

2003-11-24T16:01:00.000Z

Just though I'd see if I could leave an 'empty' thought (i.e. one without a built-in link) in my BLOG ... If you can read this then "Yes, I can".

2003-11-22T22:14:00.000Z

United States Secret Service: Advance Fee Fraud Advisory - ever been bothered by Emails from people in exotic places needing to transfer very large amounts of money out of their country through your bank account (for which they will pay you 10%)? ... read this ... don't do it!

2003-11-17T09:32:00.000Z

Career-learning Home Page - I was talking with Bill the other evening and he told me about his website ... I said I'd take a look. It's nice and simply done. Lots of interaction and information but no long download waits!

2003-11-11T09:54:00.000Z

IST Results - Promoting Innovation for the Information Society
"The IST Results service gives you online news and analysis on the emerging results from Information Society Technologies research. The service reports on prototype products and services ..."

2003-10-31T23:01:00.000Z

A weekly publication of the Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), Stanford University ... a diary of events and seminar abstracts from Stanford. The Diary bit comes at the start of a fairly long 'page' ... scroll down to the abstracts - they can sometimes open up interesting trains of thought ...

2003-10-28T22:19:00.000Z

The Observatory on Borderless Higher Education
"Observatory Reports provide in-depth analysis of the major issues in borderless higher education. ... reports are commissioned from external experts from around the world ... reports combine descriptive information (eg news on the latest developments), strategic information (eg an attempt to explore rationales, decision-making processes and organisational change) and reflection (eg standing back from events to consider the public role of higher education). ..."

Observatory Reports are only available to staff of subscribing institutions (the OU does) ... recent reports include "Ubiquitous Computing in Higher Education", "Staff Development: the key to using ICT appropriately in higher education?" and "Improving Quality and Reducing Costs: Designs for Effective Learning Using Information Technology".

2003-10-23T07:52:00.000+01:00

Resonance 104.4 fm - Home Page
'Resonance 104.4fm is London's first radio art station, brought to you by London Musicians' Collective.' A superbly strange collection of sounds and opportunities to hear material from places that you could never dream of ... listen on the radio or on the net.

2003-10-20T10:26:00.000+01:00

Enhancing Teaching-Learning Environments in Undergraduate Courses
ETL Introduction
Home of the people (Noel Entwistle et al) that have done so much with the:

Approaches to Studying Inventory (ASI),
Revised Approaches to Studying Inventory (RASI),
Approaches and Study Skills Inventory for Students (ASSIST)

stuff.

2003-10-19T01:01:00.000+01:00

Pixus - The Image Portal
this looks to be potentially a very useful source of strange 'academic' images ...

2003-10-03T08:39:00.000+01:00

MIT OpenCourseWare | OCW Home
Rather a large repository of course ready material here ... MIT may have started something!

2003-09-18T10:44:00.000+01:00

Martindale's 'The Reference Desk' - International Art, Business, Science & Technology
This was given to me as an 'oddly complete' collection of links ... which indeed it is.

2003-08-01T10:58:00.000+01:00

Review of Disciplinary Differences in Teaching and Learning: Implications for Practice by Carolyn Lieberg, Thomas Rocklin, Center for Teaching, The University of Iowa
a review of the 1996 book edited by Nira Hativa and Michele Marincovich.

2003-07-31T15:50:00.000+01:00

The first entry of a brand new Rummage Box. Rummage Box 2003. The original Rummage Box started life on Wednesday, 17 April 1996 but only lasted the year ... I hand-coded the original using HotMetal Pro or Claris HomePage, neither of which were designed to provide a Blogging facility.

Here are links to two of the original Rummage Box pages ...

... this one was I think the last of the original Rummage Box pages that I put up, it took the form of an interactive conference page that provided links and information about exhibitors at the HAN (Humanities and Arts Higher Education Network) Conference 1996 - original Rummage Box page 13/11/96

... this one was the archived copy of a previous Rummage Box page - original Rummage Box page 13/9/96

I would be surprised if many of the links in these two original Rummage Box pages still work.