Keith's Blog

Publishing Under Threat? + Apple's Announcement Today #ioe12

2012-01-19T22:36:00.000+01:00

So this was the view from my office a while back, while the library was being modified. There's a lot of empty space! Now the work has finished that space is once again filled with books but I do wonder if the future will mean lots more empty space in our libraries.

Yesterday I wrote about the publishing industry feeling threatened and Jeroen asked an interesting question in a comment. Are the companies really threatened or do they just feel threatened?

My answers would be yes and yes but of course it is much more complicated than this. Publishing, even more than the music industry, was a very stable business for a great many years. Changes were incremental and the basic model didn't change much. Certain areas (for example academic publishing and textbooks...) were real money-spinners with a certain market and locked-in buyers.

Suddenly all that started to change and this staid business could see its model becoming less and less valid.

One part of the threat was Open Educational Resources, and another was the advent of open publishing. In fact these areas didn't make much of an inroad into publishing profits so in the beginning the threat was more felt than real. However, when prestigious universities starting insisting that research paid for by public money had to be openly published the threat became real and the lobbyists were called in to do their stuff.

Of course, some companies have realised that their old model is under threat and therefore they need to create a new model. Today's announcement from Apple "iBooks 2 released - textbooks reinvented" shows the direction we are going in (Think if IBooks does to publishing what iTunes did to music!) It also shows that some companies (who already have their products on iBooks) are moving rapidly towards the new landscape I wrote about yesterday.

How does CC and remixing fit in here? Well, that is the other part of Apple's announcement - a multimedia authoring tool combined with a platform to collect and show off your creations. Will this become the tool/platform of choice/distribution point for future works, both free and commercial? We'll have to wait a while to find the answer to that.

Publishing Under Threat? + Apple's Announcement Today #ioe12 by Keith Bryant is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at keithsworkblog.blogspot.com.

Week 1 #ioe12

2012-01-18T23:27:00.000+01:00

I thought myself fairly knowledgeable about open licensing but gained interesting new ideas and concepts as I worked through the material and read the work of others. The CC game taught me about remixing and licensing the remixes. This game will have a concrete effect on how I produce and license works.
Pollocks 2006 paper Value of the Public Domain also gave me a new angle on the economics of openness and copyright, discussing how we value property and how that valuing influences the economics of the system.
Towards Openness by Allan Quartly (January 14 2012) summed up the material far better than I can. I particularly liked his graphs.

Today Wikipedia is blacked out as part of the protest against SOPA and PIPA. I can't help feeling that these acts are a reaction towards the success of the openness movement. Venerable companies and organisations are threatened by the new media and the concepts of sharing, remixing and openness. Rather than opening up the new landscape, creating new business models, these companies are instead trying to close out the new landscape. They want to force us all back behind the fences where their old business model will continue and they will continue to thrive.
Parallels with East Germany could be drawn and we all know how successful that model was!
Fortunately there are exceptions, companies that are adjusting to the new landscape. Andreas Link's ScoopIt pointed me towards the Springer publishing company with its decision to broaden the use of its Open Choice option.

A stretched excuse for a picture - Another form of openness - a wonderful program of modern dance by Norrdans in our Swedish town. The dances are designed for their large windows. The public stands outside and gets to see the whole spectacle for free!

Week 1 #ioe12 by Keith Bryant is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at keithsworkblog.blogspot.com.

Openness in Education - An Open Course!

2012-01-11T23:57:00.000+01:00

Wow - suddenly it's 2012 (OK, only just!) and I'm back to this blog I ceased writing almost exactly two years ago. Why did I stop writing? I didn't lose my interest in internet and education but I did get very busy with new jobs and that sort of thing. I was also writing another blog on another topic and that ate into my time. (Maybe more of that later...)
Question 2 - Why start writing again now? Well. I noticed this interesting open course led by David Wiley on "All Things Open". Go take a look at the contents if you doubt me.
I've been interested in Creative Commons and Open Educational Resources for a long time but there are other areas there I haven't delved into. So, I hope for new knowledge in the areas I'm not so familiar with and new insights into areas I am familiar with.
Right now I've watched the first video used on the course - Lawrence Lessig talking about Republican (right wing) support for sharing and re-use and by extension Creative Commons. Now that was a new insight for me!
Well, that has got me started and I already have an idea for my second posting but here in Sweden it's the middle of the night so that is for another day. I'll finish with a superfluous picture of myself mostly because I love photography and I feel every blog posting needs an illustration!

Thank you David Wiley and participants for returning me to the blogosphere!

Openness in Education - An Open Course by Keith Bryant is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at keithsworkblog.blogspot.com.

red-tailed hawk

2010-01-18T15:34:00.003+01:00

red-tailed hawk
Originally uploaded by profiles of nature

Just an example from Flickr. There are so many beautiful pictures on Flickr, available for teaching or just for admiring. Personally this one, with flight, action, colours, and good technique felt perfect for me on this grey winter day.

(Written March 2) Of course the photographs are sometimes removed from Flickr and then you get a "photo is currently unavailable" notice.

Not to worry - just go to Flickr and search for "red-tailed hawk" and you'll find hundreds of other images!

The web is now much more Readable!

2010-01-15T18:06:00.004+01:00

You can make this text, look like this!

Example text from Aftonbladet Jan 15, 2010

Do you spend a lot of time reading text from the web? I mean slightly longer texts such as newspaper articles, scientific texts, books, long instructions, or course material. If so you may want to check out the Readability tool, which removes all clutter and leaves only text!
It all works via the web, and there is nothing to download. You follow the link to Readability, make a few basic choices about layout and colouring using the example text, drag a bookmarklet onto your bookmarks bar, and hey Presto you are ready to go.

By the way, this tool can be very useful not only for reading but also for printing.

Using Internet Resources for Teaching - Perspective (art)

2010-01-13T14:57:00.000+01:00

After a request from my wife I started looking for teaching resources to help with drawing in perspective. I thought this type of subject which is not simple but does follow rules, would be ideal for internet and I was right. There is a lot of material.

Sources for slide presentations includes slideshare and slideboom, and of course there was some very useful material on YouTube. Strangely enough Wikipedia was not so useful on this occasion, which is unusual. The above picture is one of my own. The following is the shortest useful presentation I found on YouTube.

Write or Die!

2010-01-12T11:43:00.000+01:00

Found a fun tool for anyone wanting to write and needing something to get them going. I wrote something to check how it worked and this is what came out...
OK, I'm writing and if I stop writing the program does evil things to my text. I paused just now and it all went red round the edges. So I carried on writing. I wrote "edges" a few times and then waited. It got redder and redder, and them my words started to DISAPPEAR!!!!! This is the kamikaze setting. This is fun! Och man kan skriver på svenska också.

Give it a try! You can get a badge like this...

or like this...

depending upon your aim in your writing.

(Thanks to Terry Freedman and Dr Wicked)

Froguts

2009-11-16T11:11:00.001+01:00

I'm returning to an old favourite here. Around the year 2000 I was working at SSVH, (The Swedish Institute for Distance Education) in Härnösand. One of the teachers found "Froguts", a web-based dissection simulator, where you could "dissect" a frog. If my memory serves me well, after discussion with the developers the site was translated into Swedish so we could use it with our students. We thought this was one of the best educational sites available, because it ...

was directly relevant to the school curriculum,
made a somewhat specialised activity available to many more students,
greatly reduced the "yuk" factor, and thereby increased accessibility and learning
last but not least, prevented the killing of a large number of frogs!

SSVH no longer exists and the Swedish version of Froguts probably sits inside an archive as a series of printed pages. :-(
However, Froguts is still very much with us. The quality, and the range of dissections available, continues to develop, and the annual subscription is affordable. The reasons we thought it an excellent tool are still relevant today and perhaps the prevalence of computer games makes it even more relevant to today's students/pupils. Take a look at Froguts home page and demo!

By the way, here is another favourite web site I have probably mentioned earlier. SSVH ceased to exist in 2001 but I can still link to several versions of its web page via the Way Back Machine, an incredible and wonderful archive of the internet. Here is an English version of SSVH's home page, back in 1999. If you are feeling nostalgic, or doing research into how an organisation used the web earlier, then take a look at the Way Back Machine.

New Scientist - educational items

2009-11-04T11:38:00.000+01:00

I've been reading the latest New Scientist and found a couple of articles relevant to education. The first is a brief article about using Twitter to provide relatively simple continuous student-assessment of teaching quality on a course - an interesting idea I thought.

The second article provides food-for-thought rather than directly applicable methods. It contrasts IQ, which is hard (impossible?) to alter, with "RQ", rational decision-making skills, which can be taught. There are a lot of people with a high IQ who have problems making good decisions!

"A high IQ is like height in a basketball player," says David Perkins, who studies thinking and reasoning skills at Harvard Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "It is very important, all other things being equal. But all other things aren't equal. There's a lot more to being a good basketball player than being tall, and there's a lot more to being a good thinker than having a high IQ."

What is interesting in an educational context is that working to improve students' RQ would help everyone, and perhaps even help make the world a better place.
Everyone can read an introduction to the article, but only subscribers can read the whole article.

Happy reading!

Internet history - happy birthday!

2009-10-26T12:01:00.005+01:00

According to the Guardian newspaper we can pick 1969 as the year the internet was born, and to celebrate they have produced a year-by-year history with side links to many of the events and personal stories of internet usage.

Why 1969? It was in this year that the first two host computers were linked together by Bill Duvall and Charlie Kline, and as part of the Guardian's history of the internet we can watch an interview with them and learn that by the end of 1969 there were 4 host computers on the Arpanet, as it was then known.

Ten years later there were 188 host computers, and another ten years on, in 1989, a Cern researcher called Tim Berners-Lee outlined a proposal to store Cern information using "hypertext links" that will allow information from one computer to appear as if it is stored on another computer. He calls his system the "Worldwide Web".

The worldwide web then starts to develop at an ever accelerating pace. Read through the Guardian's year-by-year history...

Wikis and Medical Information - Developments

2009-07-28T11:29:00.006+01:00

First a question...
If you want information on Swine influenza (H1N1) do you go the library, your doctor, or to Internet?
I've just been reading about the use of health information on the Internet in the latest New Scientist. Much of it concerned wikis and especially Wikipedia, for example that 50% of doctors use Wikipedia for health info. At the moment there are speciality wikis, written by doctors etc, and Wikipedia, written by anyone, including doctors. Since the public are using Wikipedia as their source some in the medical establishment think that it is a good place for specialists to place their advice and knowledge. For the whole article go to http://bit.ly/Q0G76
Other medical sources on the web...
Medpedia, WebMD, UK's NHS
This is yet another example of how Internet is becoming society's knowledge source and democratising knowledge.

OER temporarily unavailable

2008-05-08T11:19:00.002+01:00

Hello OERers
I have a little work left to do on the course, mostly the last week and a half's stuff but just now I'm on holiday i Sicily, enjoying some sun. I get back on the 15th and will get down to work on the last bit's and pieces of this very interesting course.

OER week 8 - late!

2008-04-30T17:49:00.003+01:00

I been on the road for a few days and time and a lack of fast connections has slowed me down a little, not to mention the disgusting cold I have! However I finally got my film loaded up to dot.sub, transcribed and then translated into English.

I learned several things from this process...
I learned that if you are going to have written text accompanying the pictures then the pictures and the text need to be coordinated. Having pictures change and the text stay the same, and then suddenly the text changes but the picture doesn't.... all too confusing, and now I've seen it fairly obvious, but then that is how we learn things when we learn by doing. Strangely that wasn't a problem (was it?) when I was listening to the text and looking at the pictures
I need fewer pictures on for a longer time.
I need to choose the pictures more carefully. One of my blurred pictures was followed by a sharp image to give contrast. Unfortunately the compression process rendered them BOTH fairly blurred - better examples next time!
That's it for now, I'll be back later!

OER week 8 - film

2008-04-27T19:01:00.004+01:00

Creating a film - this turned into a very tricky task as I fumbled around between a Mac, a PC and several programs. I've done this before but this time the technical gods were not with me! This took me back to the earlier days of computing when you expected things not to work; it seems like it can be still be like that today!
Anyway, here is a short film on using the macro function in your camera. I made it because I am involved with a study circle in digital photography and it seemed logical to create something I could use. Unfortunately this means it is in Swedish but there will be an English language version available soon, and hopefully a dot.sub English translation available late tomorrow (Monday).

This creation showed me just how frustrating the combination of creation and technique could be. This is always a useful reminder of how it often is for our less technically interested colleagues and students as we try to persuade them of the joys of Internet materials!

But in the end it was satisfying to get this (definitely less than perfect) material out there on Youtube.

Weinberger, Leonardo and TED - oer week 8 (a)

2008-04-24T11:47:00.005+01:00

There is a lot of interesting material around on Internet. Amongst the material are many conference presentations and lectures which are interesting to listen to but which really gain very little by being filmed because the camera (usually only one) and the speaker never actually move! This makes for boring viewing, especially if the lecture is long.

When we are physically present at a lecture we (like the single camera I mentioned) are usually stationary but we can let our attention move around the room. We can at least switch between the lecturer and the slides and if things get boring we can check out all the other things in the hall!

So a good presentation switches our attention back and forth. Of course it really does help if the speaker speaks in an interesting way too! Here is an example from Videolectures.net and in this presentation you get to see the speaker, the slides, and even both at once.

Everything is Miscellaneous

David Weinberger

This is a Google lecture (copyright Google!) so we can be fairly sure there were plenty of resources available. In a similar way the embedded TED talk below also uses a lot of resources to make sure the talk is interesting.

.

This talk has the added advantage that it is only 4 minutes long, and it's CC licenced!

Having written about a well filmed resource I am afraid my offering is not going to be of wonderfully high quality - but with practice I will improve, and my film is omly going to be around 4 minutes long, about the only thing it will share with the TED film!

OER - week 7

2008-04-18T13:30:00.016+01:00

Home 17 April - the spring winter
Originally uploaded by keibr

Let's start with Bötsle.
If you want to know exactly where Bötsle is then click on the photo on the right to link to the original in Flickr. From there you can fly to Bötsle if you have Google Earth installed, via the first comment. Once you've seen Bötsle's general location (from a hight of 21 km!) you can zoom in. If I'd lived 200 meters south of where I do you could have seen my house on Google Earth but the high definition area around Härnösand stops just short of Bötsle!

I already had audacity and LAME installed because I've used sound in my work sometimes so there was no complication there. Figuring out how to load up a podcast to Switchpod was not the easiest task in the world so I went looking for another site and found the site that now hosts part two of my description - PodOmatic. This service seems to provide you with an audio blog. You can take a look at my page if you want to see how it looks. Naturally they would love you to sign up for a paid subscription but they do give you 500 MB of storage and 15 GB of download per month in the free version. My only criticism of PodOmatic is that there player is nowhere near as nice as the Switchpod one. (You can see them both further down this posting.)

The question of mp3 versus Vorbis Ogg is interesting. Mp3 has become a world standard and for normal users is both free and convenient, which makes it problematic to persuade people to use an alternative open source program. Using Vorbis Ogg requires the user to take extra steps, for example downloading an extra plug-in to enable Windows media player to play Ogg files. It isn't much extra effort or technical knowledge that is required but people are lazy! Why take the extra effort when you don't need to? Anyway, having written that I took the extra effort mentioned and went looking for Ogg music. I found some music I really liked and a recording studio with an interesting idea - sponsored music - but all the music I found was also offered as mp3! Can Ogg survive in an mp3 world? I guess time will tell.

What role does RSS play in podcasting. Well, first it does exactly the same as it does in the blog world and tells you when something new has come along. The additional factor is that the podcast can then be downloaded to your player and becomes portable. If I want to read your blog I have to have to use my computer but I can listen to your podcast as I train in the gym.

Originally I had part 1 of the podcast embedded here but as soon as the page loaded it started playing, which was irritating, especially when it was no longer the latest posting! So now there is a link to the podcast. Click on the link and then return to the picture above while you listen.

and when you've listened to that one you could try part 2...

Click here to get your own player.

By the way, read Barbara's comment - she makes the point that the switchpod player is more useful for the user/listener as you can move around in the podcast, something you can't do with the embedded PodOmatic player, although you can do that from my PodOmatic blog.

OER week 6b- Creating, Sharing and Using Images

2008-04-11T15:02:00.005+01:00

This is really part two of the weeks post. Take a look at part one too.
Well, it was a little difficult to take good images this week as the snow kept falling. What I really mean was it was difficult to take educational images; it was no problem getting interesting pictures. Here is a view from my house on the first day of snow, the next day it was even deeper but fortunately I'd moved the car by then!
However, I did what all good students/teachers do; I cheated and checked through the pictures I'd taken a little earlier.
As outlined in my previous posting I was not so impressed with getting pictures out of the Commons and into my blog. Now I tried uploading images to the Commons and again I found it a rather complicated process, if I compare with loading images up to Flickr for example. But in the end my "Sandö Bridge" image was part of the Commons.
However, the second picture (Härnösand Harbour) went a lot quicker. Of course, it's not just uploading the pictures it's also getting them into categories and adding them to galleries. Immodest as I am I even nominated "Sandö Bridge" image as a "quality image". That added another another hour to my work as I learned how to promote and decline other nominations. I find the whole wikimedia thing very addictive and hard to let go off once I get into it! :-)
I am interested in photography and have had my own Flickr page for a couple of years now. I also use Picasa as my photo album and to carry out certain editing tasks. I tried Adobe's new Photoshop Express and was reasonably impressed but it seemed to take a long time working with 4 and 5 MB images. Perhaps it will become faster as the service develops. However, for most editing tasks I prefer to work within my computer with Photoshop. I see immediate results and can do much more than with the other tools I have tried. I haven't tried Gimp but several of my friends have used it and are very happy with it It is open-source and cost-free so if I had to buy photoshop myself I would definitely give Gimp a trial first.
As always it has been an interesting OER week. I thought I could quickly get through this weeks tasks as I am already used to working with images on Internet but as usual there were new items to learn, new tricks to try out and even more of that addictive Wikipedia coding to learn!

OER week 6a - Sharing and Using Images

2008-04-07T17:17:00.008+01:00

Why 6a? Well, when this posting
was almost complete the
week 6 instructions suddenly
expanded. 6b follows shortly.

A Griffon Vulture (Gyps fulvus).
Originally uploaded to
Wikimedia Commons by Thermos.

Sin título
Originally uploaded by mekatharra.

The two pictures of Griffon Vultures above this text are both licensed as Creative Commons. They can be used freely for non-commercial purposes as long as the photographers are credited. The picture on the left was found on Wikimedia Commons, the one on the right on Flickr. Both sites have a large number of high quality images available to use.

As a comparison I can say that when I searched for "Griffon Vulture" I found 34 images on the Commons and 97 CC images on Flickr. (In total there were 997 images in Flickr of which about 850 actually were Griffon Vultures.) When I decided to load these chosen pictures onto my blog, complete with links to the originals and attribution, it took me about 1 minute to do this from Flickr and about an hour to do the same from the Commons. Most of the hour was spent wrestling with HTML code within my blog and with more expertise I could probably have reduced that time considerably but it is clear to me that Flickr wins on usability.

However, the only item I got from Flickr was the image, whereas searching within the Wikimedia community I found the image, an article about Griffon Vultures, an extra link to information about vultures and even a link to some lovely videos of these birds of prey (yet another link!). Another consideration is that Flickr is a commercial site and the Commons is non-commercial although I'm not sure if this makes a practical difference or if it gives one site or the other an advantage.

I haven't yet found a photo-school on Flickr but there were some excellent guidelines to creating quality images on the Commons. and more useful information inside Wikipedia.

The two sites seem to complement each other. For downloading to a blog I think I would always look first on Flickr due to the ease of use, but for other purposes the two sites are more evenly matched. Basically I think it is wonderful that there are so many quality images available and so many talented people who use CC licenses.

A few numbers - Flickr has passed 2,3 billion images whereas Wikimedia Commons has over 2 million images
If no suitable cc can be found use Flickr to find a suitable but copyrighted image and then ask the photographer for permission to use it. I have done this three times and got permission twice. (The third person never replied.)

OER week 5 – Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation

2008-04-07T10:28:00.012+01:00

Children in Birao 18
Originally uploaded by hdptcar

Today's featured image on Wikipedia Commons...

I must start by explaining how much I learned this week through the suggested reading! Like many others I have used Wikipedia without really thinking about how it works or the structure and organisation that lie behind it. I was vaguely aware that there were other wiki-projects but had no idea which were part of the Wikipedia Foundation and which were not. Now I feel much more knowledgeable!

Here is a list of some of the points I found to be most impressive...

The sheer audacity of the concept – that given the opportunity Internet users would collectively create an encyclopaedia to rival the classic encyclopaedias such as the Britannica

The amounts of time people are willing to give freely to create, maintain and improve these commons projects. The principle described by Benkler(2) of the breaking down of tasks into small units must be helpful here – If a lot of people feel able to give just a few minutes or an hour of their time that adds up to a lot of hours! However, there still seems to be a number of people who donate a considerable quantity of their time, perhaps because the system offers non-financial rewards such as status and promotion within an (unpaid) structure. Various technical tools, such as templates, also help users to utilise their time efficiently.

The emergence of “a sophisticated set of processes” (2) that have developed to increase the quality of the material and the fact that these arose through self-organising (collective choice) arrangements. This seems to be a very open and democratic process and even the discussions that lead to these rules and principles are (mostly) also still accessible on the “talk” pages.

The ongoing nature of the projects. Development continues and as it does so the quality threshold is raised and what was acceptable earlier is no longer of a sufficiently high standard. Examples of this are the evolution of Featured articles in Wikipedia and Featured Pictures in Wikimedia Commons. Logically this means that if the English Wikipedia was almost comparable to Encyclopaedia Britannica in 2005 (See Nature magazine's blog) then in the future (now?) it will be superior to Britannica, assuming that does not also improve.

The local nature of the Wikimedia Foundation’s projects. Each language can have its own version of each project and it was interesting to read in Dirk Riehle’s interview with “three leading practitioners of three different Wikipedias how the practices vary from country to country. This reflects Ostrom’s first organisational principle(2); congruence between rules and local conditions. Different languages and cultures have different needs and perhaps require different structures to fulfil those needs. I was at first surprised for example that the Italian Wikiversity’s front page did not have the same layout as the English Wikiversity. After a little reflection I felt pleased that there was room for diversity within these projects and that the English language/culture was not dictating to the rest of the world! Another surprise for me was that several smaller languages were well represented in some of these projects. For example the third largest Wiktionary language is Vietnamese!

Part of the joy of Wikipedia is that it feels to be part of our common property, something we can contribute to, something we all have a stake in. As the quality of Wikipedia and the other projects improves this increases the benefits to all users. However, at the same time the very increase in quality and the level of expert knowledge among contributors may reduce this feeling of common ownership. When it is no longer possible to contribute, unless you are a real expert in something, will we still feel Wikipedia to be common property? This is perhaps another of the challenges of the future for Wikipedia.

How and Why Wikipedia Works: An Interview with Angela Beesley, Elisabeth Bauer, and Kizu Naoko by Dirk Riehle.
The Hidden Order of Wikipedia by Fernanda B. Viégas, Martin Wattenberg and Matthew M. McKeon.
Wikimedia projects

oer - copyright discussion - week 4

2008-03-28T15:41:00.014+01:00

SML Flickr goes Creative Commons /
2007-12-30 / SML Screenshots
Originally uploaded by See-ming Lee 李思明 SML.

This week we are looking at the history of copyright, how it is being expanded in modern times, and how the use of creative commons and similar licences can help in the creation of an alternative to copyright, a “commons” of material available for use. This commons can include free and open educational resources.

An argument that is often heard in favour of copyright is that without copyright artists, authors and similar would not be rewarded for creating their works. Like all good arguments there is an element of truth in this but it was interesting to read in the history of copyright that the first common-law forms of protection actually protected publishers and not authors. In some ways the wheel seems to have turned full circle, again protecting the corporate owners rather than the authors of works. As Lawrence Lessig points out, modern copyright in the USA protects a work for the lifetime of the author plus 70 years. It is hard to see what interest a dead creator of a work has in continuing to own copyright!

It is not in itself problematic to grant certain rights to the creator and owner of a “work”. That they are able to benefit from their work is only fair, but if that protection becomes too comprehensive then it hinders the creation of new works. Our previous reading (Standing on the Shoulders of Giants) and Lawrence Lessig's presentation points out that all new “works” are built upon what went before them. If creators are denied the right to use what went before then this hinders them in their act of creation. The difference between “copying” and “creative derivation” is not always obvious. Lessig’s example of the Disney Corporation’s careful guarding of their creations from any form of copying or derivative use shows how copyright can be used to frustrate development. That many of Disney’s creations were built upon material in the public domain, and that Disney has effectively removed aspects of this material from the public domain makes matters even more frustrating!

The creation of open resources, with creative commons licences, bypasses this copyright problem. It gives the author/owner certain rights, ensures that the material cannot be destructively copyrighted and at the same time allows for the creative cycle to continue, building upon the work in question. Bissell and Boyle in "Towards a Global Learning Commons: ccLearn" point out in the importance of licences being compatible if the work is to be reused. I have already come across this problem. I moved some of my photographs from Flickr to Wikiversity and found that not all levels of CC licences used in Flickr were accepted in Wikiversity.

Bissell and Boyle also divided OER into levels – their lowest level, minus one(!) is interestingly numbered. The use of “minus” shows that this level of openness is not really very useful, even if it is better than nothing! The problems of incompatibility that they raise have also appeared in the work of CFL in Sweden. CFL’s materials repository has been created over the last five years and ensuring compatibility with other repositories and with learning platforms has been an ongoing work!

Rose has already written about Swedish copyright laws in her posting so I won't repeat that. However, I will mention a couple of other points. Swedish law allows for the limited non-commercial copying of CD’s and DVD’s under a “personal use” definition. If I wish to make a copy of a CD and give it to a friend I can do that legally. This right is rather restricted and a special duty on copying mediums (blank CD’s and DVD’s) pays for this right.

Sweden also has a rather well-developed sense of the value of the commons, traditionally rooted in the right of free access to the countryside, laws restricting the privatisation of water-side land and a sense that culture in all its forms should be available, freely or at an affordable price. Perhaps this is why it is estimated that between 10 and 15% of the Swedish population downloads copyrighted material via internet (voting with their feet for affordable culture!). The Swedish government has been reluctant to pass a law effectively criminalising this large section of the population and most people in Sweden see little point in trying to prevent the unpreventable. This perhaps explains the existence of the Pirate Bay in this otherwise very law-abiding country!

OER week 3 - Philosophical Background

2008-03-21T15:40:00.010+01:00

ATC: The World is Flat 1
Originally uploaded by kellypuffs

I work mostly with Swedish folkbildning, part of the Popular education movement that we read about in the introductory material to this part of the course. As I read the different articles (listed at the end of this post) I saw a number of tensions between different elements of society.

One of these tensions is between popular education and formal education. That there is a popular education system in many countries shows a belief that the formal education system is lacking in some ways. The Swedish parliament funds folkbildning because:

People are to be given the opportunity to influence their situation in life and take part in social development. Democracy is to be strengthened and developed. Interest in culture is to be broadened and participation and the individual's own creativity is to be furthered.

The Swedish parliament sees that the formal education system, for whatever reasons, does not fulfil all the needs of society. That this is so can clearly be seen in present developments within adult education. Formal adult education is seen more and more as a tool for economic development, with the cultural and democratic development of adults being left to popular education.

Within the library system there is a tension between public libraries and other more specialised forms of library, such as the university library. In some parts of the world the public library system is being questioned with regard to “value for money”. Do “the public” need to be able to borrow whatever books they want to? Should the system be restricted to “Good and worthy Books”? These arguments are reflected in the debate typified by Andrew Keen’s “The Cult of the Amateur” and James Surowiecki’s “The Wisdom of Crowds”. These ongoing questions are reflections of debates within the Enlightenment. Is knowledge something to be restricted to a certain group or can “the crowds” be trusted with knowledge? (Or even with the creation of knowledge!)

Open educational resources are also a part of that debate. Are educational resources best left to experts, or can the crowds also provide high quality resources

Although it is not mentioned in the article on public libraries one of the forces behind the development of the public lending library was the falling cost of books. While books were very expensive to produce it was not possible to lend them out but once the cost came down to a level where the loss of a book was not a disaster the lending library became a possibility. With the development of digital materials the cost of “owning” or providing books and other materials has sunk dramatically. This offers an alternative to the lending library which is excellent news in parts of the world where such things are not on offer, although the downside of that equation is that questioning of the need for libraries even in the developed world!

This worldwide access to information has led us nearer to the global village, or as Thomas Friedman writes in "The World is Flat", nearer to a level playing field.

What my reading has shown me is that there is a broad philosophical background to the OER movement, which is not to say that it is universally accepted or universally popular. I have mentioned one philosophical ongoing debate about the wisdom of OER and there are other forces in the world, economic and political, who are not in favour of free access to information for all, but that is perhaps the subject of another posting!

Sources

Enlightenment - The Age of Enlightenment - from Wikipedia.
Science and "standing on the shoulders of giants" - from Wikipedia.
Origins of the public library as a social institution - from Wikipedia.
Free Adult Education: Popular Education and Folk High School - from Wikipedia.
Free Software Movement - from Wikipedia.
An introduction to Swedish folkbildning
The World is Flat
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folkbildning

OER - Deep in Wikiversity

2008-03-14T17:52:00.008+01:00

Longleat Hedge Maze
Originally uploaded by Howard Gees

Well, the start the journey, the process, of getting my hands dirty, working in the field, went well. I arrived at Wikiversity, registered and created my user-profile page. This was a useful way of getting started with editing a page - I found the "Editing help" page quite useful here, except for when I tried to add an image. On this point it failed to tell me I had to load up my image first (obvious?). I thought about editing the "Help:editing" page but lost my nerve at the last minute!

Then I moved on, deeper into Wikiversity to find some projects (and/or people) to work with. I had read in the introduction to learning projects that Ten introductions to knitting are just as valid and acceptable as one but when I looked for a photography project to work with I got very confused and seemed to be lost in a maze of half-finished pages and empty stubs! I did rewrite one short lesson however. So I retreated from photography, and moved on to education. Things were a little better there and I signed myself up to work in that area, providing a link and a few words to fill a more-or-less empty topic page on Distance Education.

I must admit I have not yet started my own project. Boldness is not usually a problem for me but I seemed to be lacking in inspiration. This week has been very heavy at work so perhaps next week I'll take a look at Le Mill and start a project there. Wikiversity is a big place to explore, and despite the helpful advice from Erkan I spent a lot of time getting lost among the categories, topics, lessons and projects. I felt I had to explore enough to get a feel for the structure and that took time but I would like to experience Le Mill too.

Changing the subject slightly - one of the "joys" of living out in the country is the lack of reliable Internet connections. I'm using mobile Internet and the signal is very weak just now. I'm reconnecting about once every 45 seconds so I'll do a final reconnect, publish this post and finish for the night!

OER - different OER projects

2008-03-07T14:26:00.006+01:00

001
Originally uploaded by leighblackall

Now I have checked out the open education projects suggested.

Warning - Each of them seems to contain a lot of information, modules, functions and so on. Any impressions that I mention here are formed after this first short glimpse of these sites and are not really to be trusted!!

The projects I looked at were OU (UK) Open Content Initiative, MIT OpenCourseWare, Rice Connexions, LeMill.net and Wikiversity. Here are those first impressions!

The projects can be split into two groups. The MIT and OU projects seem to mostly offer ready made educational materials. I felt there was something of a take-it-or-leave-it attitude but the OU does offer a Getting Started section with a very user-friendly area to help you as a student use the materials offered.

Rice Connexions, Le Mill and Wikiversity are all communities where you can both use the material on offer and also contribute to the material – in fact you are strongly encouraged to get started with your contributions! Rice Connexions definitely wins the prize for the easiest site to search for materials! I had problems finding my way around Le Mill, partly because a lot of titles are not in English so you have to open an object to see what it is about. Of course, this disadvantage could well be seen as an advantage if Estonian is your first language.

As I browsed I found that these different projects can be linked together. The Le Mill Atmospheric Processes unit used a module from the OU’s OpenLearn site as reference material.

Another way to divide these projects would be by language. If you need materials in English there is something for you in all of these projects but if you are looking for materials in other languages then the different sites have hugely varying amounts.

Terminology – modules, learning resources, media pieces, collections – each project uses its own terms. In practice I suppose most users stick with one or two projects and quickly learn the associated terminology.

These five projects contain a huge amount of educational material and there are many other projects, including CFL:s own Course hub. Perhaps the next stage is to find a way to search the Internet for OER, or perhaps a specialised search engine already exists. If you know of one please get in touch!

PS I found the photo illustrating this entry by searching for "open educational resource" in Flickr. There were plenty of images to choose from and most of them were free to use under the CC licence!

OER - Tuomi's report

2008-03-06T11:07:00.006+01:00

The discussion continues
Originally uploaded by keibr

Tuomi has written a very interesting report which provides me with a structure to better understand the field of Open Educational Resources (OER); not just what OER are but also where they come from, how they can be defined, how they fit into our economic system and how they may affect the future of learning environments.

I work with the professional development of teachers and if I can start with a slight criticism it is of Tuomi’s view of future learning environments. He seems to be very sure of the future. In the final paragraph on page 5 we find that; “…educational systems will be redesigned…Education and learning will be integrated…will shift the focus towards adult education…” All this is possible and there are already educational organisations and networks moving towards this future. However, I feel that all this will only happen if governments encourage the redesign of educational systems in this direction, change the direction of teacher education and the professional development of working teachers. Otherwise the result will be islands of development in a sea of traditional (outmoded?) education models. Of course, this report, prepared for the OECD and this course are a part of that encouragement!

I found the “Open resources” section particularly interesting. (pages 25 -28). However, Tuomi describes three hierarchical levels of openess (P26) but I am not sure these levels are entirely hierarchical. As I see it a resource can fulfil the requirements of openness 1 and 3, but not the requirements of 2. The resource is accessible (level 1) and available for modification, repackaging etc (level 3), but the user still cannot “access all the services generated” (level 2). Rosemarie discussed this point with a slightly different focus.

I found the concepts of rival/non-rival and the four different types of resources (private, common pool, public good and open fountain) useful in explaining certain tensions within the media world today. Tuomi writes (p 33) “Traditional goods are rival… Public goods, in contrast, are non-rival…Digital products and knowledge are in many cases such non-rival goods.” The music recording industry has seen music as rival but now music is rapidly becoming digital, non-rival and (often illegally) public goods. The concept of the open fountain is new for me but it usefully explains why resources such as Flickr or Wikipedia have grown and gained in value so quickly.

For me the position of non-commercial activities with regard to the market is interesting and I feel Tuomi does not really take up this question beyond mentioning that it is;

“…a tricky one. As non-commercial typically means either that no commercial players have current interest in the activities, or that society has structured the markets so that some things are not provided by commercial actors.” (p 32).

In some cases this feels correct. For example the creative commons section of Flickr makes millions of images available to non-commercial users, but it is unlikely that these users would have purchased pictures commercially if Flickr did not exist. However, in other cases I feel certain that the “new” non-commercial activities have an effect upon the market. As JLH writes in OER Chatter; “OER savings could allow financially challenged districts to cut educational material expenditures so that money could be allocated elsewhere in the system.” The publishers of text books will not be happy if they are replaced by OERs! Another (Swedish) example is that educational organisations are ceasing to subscribe to the “National Encyclopedia” often citing increasing cost as their reason. Could it be that the free availability of Wikipedia enables these organisations to save money?

As this report made clear tomorrow's educational world will look very different to today's. I hope the predictions made in the report are fulfilled and it will be interesting to help in making that future.

OER - Who am I

2008-03-04T17:39:00.005+01:00

This post is part of the “Composing Free and Open Educational Resources” course which started on Monday.

Who/where am I?

You can find out where I am from reading “About me”. The photograph you see there also says something about me. I like being active and outdoors and that picture was taken last summer in the Swedish mountains. A picture always has a context and so I'll finish this posting with three more pictures of me in different contexts. (I'm also interested in photography.)

I work for the Swedish Agency for Flexible Learning, which is responsible for encouraging distance and blended courses within the adult education sector. Mostly I work with teachers’ professional development and “folkbildning”, the non-formal sector in adult education.

The development of Internet led to a radical change in distance and blended learning methods and the continuing development (web 2.0 etc) may well lead to a further paradigm shift. Wikiversity and this course are examples of a new form of non-formal learning and as such are perhaps part of this new paradigm.

In my work I am involved in many discussions about how education is evolving and one reason for taking this course is to go beyond theoretical discussion and to experience how it feels to be a participant in this type of course. I feel that those of us who work with flexible learning need to be participants in such a course now and again.

Of course, I want to learn more about how free and open resources can be created and used in education. Finally, I am also hoping for inspiration and insight from you other course participants, particularly as we come from so many backgrounds.

The first blogger?

2008-02-28T10:33:00.004+01:00

Person of the Day: Michel de Montaigne
Originally uploaded by divedi

"And though nobody should read me, have I wasted time in entertaining myself so many idle hours in so pleasing and useful thoughts?"
Michel de Montaigne

According to The Writer's Almanac (28 feb 08) the art of essay writing was born in the 16th century through a need to write letters but a lack of people to write to; instead of writing to one person Michel de Montaigne wrote to a public audience.
For me this resonates with the popularity of blogs; we write blogs to an (at least partly) unknown audience because we need to write/reflect but either lack a critical person to write to or wish to write to a larger audience. In the same way once essay writing became an established form essayists wrote essays replying to, and commenting on, other essays. The "conversation" between bloggers is perhaps today's speeded up version of those leisurly times and habits!

From The Writer's Almanac (28 feb 08)

It's the birthday of the great essayist Michel de Montaigne, (books by this author) born in Périgueux, France (1533). ....

Michel went off to college and became a lawyer. His father died when Michel was 38 years old, and so he retired to the family estate and took over managing the property. More than anything, he loved to write letters, but after a few years in retirement, his best friend died and he suddenly had no one to write to. So he started writing letters to an imaginary reader, and those letters became an entirely new literary genre: the essay.

Flickr - diagrams, painting and charts.

2008-02-04T15:02:00.001+01:00

Cabrillo/SR-163 Bridge Fire
Originally uploaded by docsplatter

Surfing flickr - Flickr is so much more than "just" photos. Try using a search term + the word "diagram", or "chart", or "painting. This picture was found using the terms "fire" and "diagram".

Bloggers in Eden!

2007-06-26T18:23:00.000+01:00

I've followed up on several of the bloggers I mentioned while writing from the conference.
Several entries (that's two links!) on EDEN and an interesting metaphor - Pompeii/Managed Learning Environments from Steve Wheeler. I also copied his way of using a Technorati search to give information, in this case about the excellent opening speaker Teemu Arina.
Teemu also lives as he preaches and his presentation is online both as audio and as slides. See his blog entry to access all this.
I've also been back to Ton's Interdependent Thoughts blog - no more on EDEN but a lot of interesting topics.
EDEN has given me a lot to think about and a list of 34 things to look up and check out. So if you see more about "slow learning" or "connectivism" you will know where I got the idea from!

EDEN 2007 (in Swedish and English)

2007-06-26T16:33:00.000+01:00

As I wrote earlier it is interesting to read the blogs of other conference participants. The title link leads to a contribution (in Swedish) on Learning Net, a blog in which several Swedish universities cooperate and which the Swedish Agency for Networks and Cooperation in Higher Education supports.
I found myself agreeing with most of the author's comments but when it came to the second day's keynote speeches we picked different speakers out as interesting. So if you are bilingual, English and Swedish, take a look and compare our two approaches.

Flickr User Model

2007-06-19T19:28:00.000+01:00

Flickr User Model
Originally uploaded by soldierant

An interesting image of how Flickr works. This is version 1.0 (according to the artist a simple image). Soldierant also produced version 2.0 and 3.0 which were more complicated but expanded the spread of Flickr to blogs and RSS and included the place of favourites in the scheme of things...
To really see these views you need to go to the original images and to view them on a large setting.

Blogging the Eden Conference

2007-06-15T10:19:00.000+01:00

The first full day of EDEN was interesting. The Keynote speakers started the day well with three rather different views on learning and Internet - Inspirational, technical, and sceptical. The parallel session I attended was also interesting with much about blogs and wikis. It was unfortunate that there wasn't time to discuss anything (scarcely time for questions) during these sessions. Our paper was the last one of the day in the second session but the audience were still there and interested. A few even stayed to discuss and we had to break off the discussion to get our bus!

One of the best points about working within the blogosphere is shared experience with other bloggers, who then also document the experience and enable me to see things from their perspective, or through their specialism. Generally though there seems to be a lack of activity around this EDEN conference, which is strange considering the subject, NEW LEARNING 2.0 with all the connotations of web 2.0!
However, there is some activity going on and here are some links to those who are driving that activity...
A work-place learning related entry about a pre-conference (Toni's Interdependent)
More general comments can be found on Chrisses blog, one of the other bloggers at the conference.
Steve Wheeler, who presented an interesting session on Wikis yesterday has a blog that I have now added to my aggregator.
Check out Olli Vesterinen later!
Teema Arina's blog concerning his Keynote speech on the first day. An inspirational start to the conference.

Eden again

2007-06-15T08:04:00.001+01:00

Plenary Session 2 - Innovation as Compass to the New Digital Territories
The general theme here was how policy can, could? should? steer development and vice-versa.
1) Maruja Gutierrez-Diaz discussed how important education is to the Lisbon Declaration and to the 7th Framwork Programme for Research. She mentioned that a favourable government policy towards the use of IT and innovative methods in education was vital IF these were to be part of a successful educational system. Very relevant for our organisation at the moment!
2) Claudio Dondi - a very reasoned speaker who spoke about why change is slower within institutions than it is among members of the institutions and why that can be a good thing. There is more inertia in an institute than in a new web-community but is this a bad thing? Is change more successful if it is top-down or bottom-up? When is a trend a trend and when does a trend become the norm? In contrast with previous conferences Cladio felt that both practioners and policymakers were now more positive to e-learning.
He also stressed the importance of non-formal learning, the human touch, the role of the teacher/facilitators, and education's place as a shaper of the future, even suggesting a new word - Learnovation!
3) Eric Bruillard spoke on the meeting between schools and technology and how/if/when institutes will accept/be transformed by the new technology.
4) Grainne Conole spoke about students today but for us there was little new in what she said. Some students are very hi-tech, very connected, very web 2.0, while others are less so. We need to cater for a wide range of competencies and doing so can be problematic.

Flat Earth and EDEN 2007

2007-05-29T19:29:00.001+01:00

Geisha!
Originally uploaded by Remara Photography 2.0

The Earth does go round the sun, Galileo was right, but a lot of the evidence in Galileo's time showed the Earth to be flat and there were a lot of sceptics, who we now laugh at. However, I'm sure there were a lot of strange ideas going round in the renaissance that were wrong and now are more-or-less forgotten. A certain element of scepticism is wise, even if the sceptics are wrong at times.
I've been looking at the EDEN 2007 programme and on day 2 the theme of the key-notes seems to be new trends (i.e. web 2.0) and institutional/national policy. Sometimes it seems as if the policy makers and the actors in a new area are refusing to look at one another. The policy-makers are reluctant to listen. Is this a bad thing? Looking backwards we can see which trends have become accepted practice, but we tend to forget the trends that disappeared without trace. As I wrote above, a certain element of scepticism is wise, even if the sceptics are wrong at times.

Digital literacy and folkbildning conference

2007-05-22T20:29:00.000+01:00

Today I was at a conference looking at digital literacy and folkbildning in Stockholm. One of the problems is defining digital literacy, and thereby defining the groups who need to be helped and therefore which methods are likely to be helpful. For example one group are those who have never used a computer/internet at all, another group those who can use a computer but see no reason to do so. A third group are perhaps computer literate but lack the skills required (traditional literacy skills?) to be an active and democratic user of the new digital world. And so on, the list is long!

The problem is becoming more acute because more and more of the functions of society are moving online and not being digitally literate is becoming a real disadvantage. More and more of the discourse inside society is also moving online. Developing professional skills, as a teacher for example, requires digital literacy.

Another discussion is that as the development of internet progresses more and more rapidly the whole field becomes more complicated with more to learn and the catch-up process becomes longer and more difficult. New groups become disadvantaged - if you can't use the tools defined loosely as web 2.0 are you partially digitally illiterate, even if you are an expert in other areas of the digital world?

On the other hand one of the hurdles to overcome is failure to understand why digital literacy is so important and society moving online can also be a motivating factor to go out and become digitally literate. Another part of the development mentioned above is that active use of internet is being made easier (web 2.0 again), and activity makes learning easier.

The discussion continues....

PS The picture is part of an artwork by Andrew Pepper - "Artwork or Network". see also "One Million Points of Light" by the same artist.

Salaries - discussions on policy

2007-05-14T22:59:00.001+01:00

African Daisy
Originally uploaded by Seoulwoman.

These discussions begin today, or rather, continue from 2006. We are a working group consisting of union and employer representatives.
It is interesting to see how much more efficient we are this time compared with when we started this work a year ago. There is more trust and understanding between these two groups.

Friday work development

2007-05-11T12:49:00.000+01:00

fly the flickr skies
Originally uploaded by gadjoboy.

This speaker was excellent and for those who hadn't thought much about web 2.0 I am sure it was a really interesting (inspiring?) presentation. For those of us who are already in in this world it was entertaining and interesting but I am not sure we learnt so much that was new. However, even that is knowledge well worth having. We seem to know as much as most others!!
Something that interests me personally is web 2.0 and art. Hence the picture....

Reflections - Using a Web 2.0 Credo...

2007-05-10T17:15:00.001+01:00

reflections of grasmere
Originally uploaded by adrians_art.

At a meeting today we got a bit off-theme and started to talk about the importance of having the "organisation" with you if you wanted to change the way the organisation worked. This in the context of schools, the digital media, and laptops for all.

Back from the meeting I read a blog which summed up our conversation and provided something of an answer too. It gave a credo for a school wanting to work in a web 2.0 context.

The original reference came from Will Richardson's blog for the 25 April.

Clipmarks - another form of social bookmarking

2007-05-07T13:40:00.001+01:00

This is an example of how "clipmarks" saves to a blog.

clipped from writersalmanac.publicradio.org

It's the birthday of the poet Jenny Joseph, (books by this author) born in Birmingham, England (1932). She was an aspiring poet throughout her 20s, supporting herself with odd jobs. Then in 1960, when she was 28 years old, she published a poem called "Warning," which began with the line, "When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple."

Somehow, as the poem became more and more popular, Jenny Joseph's name as the author was lost. Other people claimed to have written the poem, or it was attributed to "Anonymous." Jenny Joseph eventually published an authorized, illustrated version of the poem in 1997, which sold thousands of copies. Her name is still not as well known as that one poem, but today she is considered one of the foremost contemporary British poets.

When she was asked if she would start wearing purple anytime soon, Jenny Joseph replied, "I can't stand purple. It doesn't suit me."

Notes to me on Andy!

2007-04-30T17:00:00.000+01:00

Andy - blogging and art
Andy - web 2.0 artworks

Web 2.0 group

2007-04-25T23:30:00.000+01:00

Well, I finally found myself in a group of people who have the job of looking at web 2.0 and how it can be used for adult education. We are putting together a Wiki for our organisation on the subject. At the moment it is fairly basic but I think we can develop it into something useful.

Murder 2.0

2007-04-20T09:53:00.000+01:00

The ITC revolution we are living through is in many ways value free. It is producing a new media which can be used for both good and evil. The title of this piece comes from a Guardian podcast which takes up the murderer Cho Seung-hui and his video package.

Critics of this change in society tend to cite the darker sides of this revolution. I listened to one such critic, Lars Svedberg, at Åsa folkhögskola two days ago. He is an excellent speaker and presented a historical background to developments focussed mostly on the TV revolution. I found it hard to disagree with his critique of media developments but I didn't really understand the solutions he suggested. They seemed to involve an attempt to put the genie back in the box although in another connection he has said we cannot go back and indeed we should try to awaken people's interests outside of the academic domain (Link to an article in Swedish).

Putting the geni back in the box is not really an option. What is an option is to use the new media in a positive way and by doing that to reduce the impact, or even to counteract, the negative uses of this media.

MA answered LS's critique by pointing out that young people, our future students, already live in the world where this media is just a part of the background (not a NEW media as it is to us) and they will expect to be using it!

Using the new media for education connects education to the world that many young people inhabit, uses this world in way that is positive, and helps to weigh against the less savoury side of internet and web 2.0

Saving old formats to DVD

2007-04-16T19:09:00.000+01:00

This is just to get a record of this article for future reference.

Work and spa

2007-04-13T11:58:00.000+01:00

It has been an intensive time of looking at web 2.0 tools and reading about web 2.0, a time of both practical and theoretical input.

Part of the fun with this is that although it is work it is also an interesting subject in itself - therefore not entirely work. On Tuesday evening I found myself on a sunchair, looking at the fantastic view from maskrosen spa in Sundsvall and reading about web 2.0 in a portfolio of printed documents! What a mixture of ancient and modern!

Presenting a seminar

2007-04-11T23:20:00.000+01:00

A small group of us, led by one of the information department, are discussing if we should issue guidelines for how we should behave when leading a seminar. It seems there have been reports of less than professional behaviour from one of our co-workers. However, we felt that such a problem should be dealt with by the person concerned's boss, rather than seeking to corral all of us into some sort of approved behaviour - responsibility and creativity should be encouraged, not restrained!
There were some constructive ideas which could be usefully spread if we can find a suitable way to pass on these ideas.

Podcasting

2007-04-03T12:08:00.000+01:00

Well, I got my first podcast up and running. The only problem was finding a place to store the sound file. I solved it with box.net but this is only temporary. I must try storing them in kursnavet and see if that works well. Click on the file in the box.net widget (top of blog on the right) to listen.

Splashr

2007-04-02T11:21:00.001+01:00

Pier
Originally uploaded by seamus */.

Today I found another teaching tool - Splashr!

Splasher creates presentations which you can view directly or via a web page or blog. Here is a splashr presentation which was created using pictures tagged on Flickr with the tag "harnosand". It opens in a pop-up window.

Here is another Splashr presentation, this time tagged with "woodbridge" and "suffolk" and in another format. Both presentations could be clipped directly into the blog but that would take up a little too much room for my taste.

Interesting Friday!

2007-03-30T11:09:00.000+01:00

I've just been sitting in our department meeting - how nice to hear from different sections within the department and to feel that we really we are going somewhere.

The Web2.0 discussion we had yesterday with our boss seems to have resonated with other discussions he has had with other people. Our idea for a interest-group didn't come up directly but the organisation is interesting in deepening the level of knowledge we have.

R.E and I had thought a such group could look at web2.0 in different ways. First would be a technical look at how the different tools work and how easy they were to use. Secondly would be a pedagogical discussion - how can they be used and how are people using them in a learning and/or collaborative situation. Are they best used for e-learning (very individual) or for collaborative learning, democratic discourse and so on. Perhaps the TOOLS can be used for both and the distinction depends upon the users, rather than the tools.

It will be interesting to see how this develops. A CFL group, a private group, or perhaps a mixture of the two. There is also the prospect of a link up with Miun.

Btw today I was reading a teaching blog about cyber bullying and then found a further link to "Stop Cyberbullying Day" There are negative sides to web2.0 as well as positive ones. It's up us to see that the positive outweighs the negative!

And finally the Al Gore film "An Inconvenient Truth". Thanks for showing us this film! (Excellent pedagogics, quite apart from the content.)

Connecting the dots

2007-03-29T16:48:00.000+01:00

Went over to Miun this morning to listen to a Mac employee talk about podcasting in an educational environment. It was interesting to see the different ways one could podcast. What is interesting for me is the range of possibilities from the quick, low-quality, easily produced to the expensive professionally produced product. From learning object, saved for when needed, to the one-off message which becomes redundant as soon as it is listened to/watched.

The problems at Miun are very similar to those in our forms of adult education. I hope they set up a working group and I hope they invite me! (They also seem to be planning an interesting 5p summer course in the uses of ICT and teaching - apply?)

Later in the day Rose and I went to see our boss and suggested we would like to form an interest group to look at the whole web2.0 problem. He was enthusiastic to a degree but was going to talk to the other managers and await developments. My feeling was he also felt the importance of web 2.0 but was less enthusiastic about the "interest group" idea.

Well, we have the interest and I guess we'll develop it, inside or outside of our working life!

An illuminating session

2007-03-23T16:21:00.000+01:00

This Friday we have had one of our professional development sessions, this time with AnnJessica Ericsson. It was the second session led by her. I am sure reactions to her and her content have been really varied but personally I found her one of the most inspirational speakers we have had. The idea of integrating many areas, in contrast to slicing knowledge into ever smaller bits, hit hoe immediately.

The concrete exercise we did the first week gave us a useful method of looking at a problem from different perspectives. This week's session involved a LOT OF new concepts and really I just let the flow wash over me. The next time these terms/ideas/concepts come up I will remember them and begin to understand them more fully.

Focussing on the new task

2007-03-16T15:28:00.000+01:00

Just home from our Focus Days. The majority of the organisation was away for two days and we concentrated on ways of working with our latest task (regional development). To help us along in this work we met representatives from the regions we were working with. It was interesting to see how the needs of the different regions varied but how a program of six points could also work with these varied needs.

It will be interesting to see how the idea of forming four regional teams, with selected experts in various areas, will work out. Personally I think that the flatter organisation and the resulting discussions, both within and between the regional and expert groups will be really productive.

Personally the days were very good for me. I had been fairly depressed after the work with redundancies was over, and the people who were to be made redundant were informed. However this trip away lifted me out of my dark mood back to my more normal generally positive mood. I suspect the wonderful spring weather plus the fun we had plus the professionalism of my colleagues all contributed to this lift.

Even the news that our organisation will almost certainly cease to exist in the middle of 2008 (which came the day after our two very productive days away) did not really influence my mood for the worse!

Redundancies (and KKS)

2007-03-08T17:04:00.000+01:00

This week the 10 people who are being made redundant have all been told. It also marks the end of that phase of my active involvment. As a result of all this (I guess) I have been in a real black mood all week, picking holes in our organisation, being nasty about some people and generally feeling that this place is on a fast track to hell!!! (I have not been alone in my feelings but that makes me feel worse rather than better!)

This is very unusual for me and I am really hoping that the focus days we have soon will change things, both for me and for this place. We certainly need to focus on something positive!

On a more positive note I took part in a KKS seminar on "Young people, Internet and Democracy". Many of the problems we discussed in the folkbildning group came up again in a more academic guise. However, there were no more answers than we found, but the day was positive and gave food for thought. (Although the established political parties were invited they did not send anyone - well, they really do care about democracy don't they!)

Digital Literacy

2007-03-02T09:23:00.000+01:00

I've just been down to Stockholm and met up with a group of folkbildning people, who are part of the digital literacy "expert group" and who are interested in defining, and then working to fix, this digital divide.

As always I was impressed by the depth and scope of the discussion. We came up with some new angles and a few concrete ideas for helping to reduce the problem. Our next move is to collaborate on a document taking up these issues which we can then use to continue the work.

Sometimes you just need to meet up and throw ideas around in order to get somewhere. We had little more than a vague agenda at the start of the day and a lot of good ideas as the day ended.

I shall report back on that when the document reaches a point where it feels complete. (As a sort of WIKI it is questionable when, or if, it actually is "finished"!

Who, what and why!

2007-01-10T16:07:00.000+01:00

North mountain

Hi folks
Well, as I am about to take part in a "blogging and Teaching" discussion I guess I ought to have my own one to try out the techniques.

This is a place for personal notes and reflections and is not aimed at an audience, although it is hard to write without any audience at all so who knows. Anyone finding their way here is welcome to read what I write.

I will be slightly circumspect and probably not mention who I work for and avoid people's names. It's not that it's a great secret but I don't want to annoy my colleagues unneccesarily. If this blog turns "official" i'll restart it with another name.

This is my first text posting although I do have a picture blog which I recently revived, mostly as a place to store some of my favourite Flickr images!