Whilst wondering if twhirl was broken yet again this morning (mainly because Alan was very quiet!) I discovered that I can add friend feed twhirl. How cool is that? Or will it drive me mad? It has started me thinking if this could be very useful for our forthcoming student projects on small worlds and PLEs.
Tags: twitter
The 3rd international plagiarism conference in Newcastle was OK. I am trying to summon up more enthusiasm than that, but can’t quite manage it. I enjoyed it, met some great people, it was well organised and so on (apart from the horrible lack of sockets for my poor eeepc!!) but I wasn’t as inspired as I have been at previous conferences. This could be because the field hasn’t moved on much since last time but I suspect it was mostly to do with web 2.0 discussions.
There were several speakers who tried to address the issue, Jamie O’Connell from Acumen PI (thestudentroom.co.uk) showed the Micheal Wesch video on hypertext, which admittedly, not everyone had seen, then actually mentioned that communication was changing (yes!) and ‘lots of people’ were using twitter (hurray!!). However, when I shouted out and asked him for his twitter ID, he said it was MrBeaver.
The message about online identity management still has a long way to go then….. Jamie, this stuff isn’t just for you young funky people – I thought that was the point of the presentation?!
Gerry McKiernan, Iowa State university, gave a great presentation about disruptive technologies (re-mix, re-use, re-new), including lots of stuff from horizon 2008, but just as he was getting going, he stopped short of what for me is the real message – will we care about plagiarism when web 2 really takes over? Who should we attribute in the traditional way when 10 people have collaboratively authored a document online? How will students who work collaboratively be assessed individually?
it’s fine to talk about web 2, but I still feel that it is an experiential technology, and I am not sure that either presenter demonstrated that they were under the skin of these things. Garry Allen was closer in many ways. He admitted to finally getting a facebook account when he realised that RMIT Melbourne’s internet traffic bill had doubled in the last academic year and the largest proportion of that traffic was going to facebook. He recognised that experience was key to understanding.
And for our next conference, not only are we being charged for the reception, drinks, dinner, accomodation on top of a £385 conference fee (3 days, no speaker discount, all authors must be registered) but now a little extra if we want to work while we are there …. looks like I’ll be walking up the road to Starbucks or McDonalds!
I’m just back from a conference in Newcastle where I took my little eeepc for note taking. Unlike the OU
event, where everyone had a machine of some sorts, there were only a few laptops in evidence. Plenty of macs, even an air, and a couple of other people with eeepc’s. however, the main problem was juice. There was only one socket in the lecture theatres, and not a single one available in the lobby/restaurant/entire ground floor (believe me I looked everywhere!). What’s more, I really missed having mobile broadband. The free wifi was almost impossible to log in to (very secure!) and I only got on once and then it locked me out for the rest of the session!
I attended a workshop where the OU sought views from OU staff, students, and alumni about the Social:Learn project. I haven’t been so enthralled by a workshop in years and I have been pondering why that should be. I think there are two main reasons:
Content:
The social:learn project is fascinating. It started in response to the nightmare scenario of someone picking up the best of the free web2 tools, social networks and some dynamic Associate Lecturers to make an online university to compete with the OU. The social:learn team have tried to do the same, but for the OU, instead of against it. The result is not just another tool, but a way of thinking about higher education that provides a place for a learning network online. Martin Weller’s slideshare explains it fully. There will be tools, which I will write about in another post, but the glue is a place to organise, share and record learning online in a social way. This may sound like nothing new, but the revolutionary part, for me, was the premise that although the ‘glue’ will be OU, the tools and services interacting with the system will be chosen by the students. The big question is: will students grok it?
Connections:
I had already ‘met’ several of the conference participants through twitter, seesmic and the closed ning network set up for the workshop. Meeting them in person was great, but our previous use of web 2 social networks lead to an amazing back channel during the workshop and presentations. There was plenty of social chat, mostly about the free chocolate, but rather than a distraction, this added to the general conversation and thought processes, with ideas being discussed in real time in the room and being added to the ning network or picked up later in question sessions. If we could get students this involved in their lectures could it revolutionize the way they learn? Reingold has suggested that we make use of the back channel and engage with it which is exactly what was happening here.
Kevin asked me how to use twitter, so here is a quick video to get started
There is also Alan’s explanation of why bother in the first place.
Alan Cann and Nigel Gibson have both blogged about how TALMOS have threatened blogger Doug Belshaw for making unfavourable comments about their product on What:
What a poor commercial move by a company looking to sell to the education sector. In education we generally like to learn from our mistakes, criticism is part of the learning process. It is a shame that TALMOS doesn’t have an educational ethos as a company.
Dawkins isn’t on twitter then. How depressing. His team have gone into overdrive (I seriously doubt he scanning tweets and blogs himself) and posted a comment to my previous post about how popular his account had been. I guess this is what happens when you move into the world or arguing reason against religion, you leave yourself wide open to the cranks.
Having ventured bravely into the world of the terminal (konsole) last night to rectify a problem with accessing our BT home Hub wireless over WPA, I thought I had better do something useful and try a post from the eeepc.
Apart from awful typing, as I still get used to the keyboard, the layout of wordpress is fine on the eeepc screen (unlike MS outlook access for my work email which involved too much sideways scrolling!). I have used kwout for the image (by installing the firefox add-on), mostly using jing for screen captures at work or the iMac.
Just checking out some of the links from Alan’s blog post on evaluating our small world networks, and twittermap told me I had moved to Guatemala. Can’t think that Guatemala and Leicester are all that similar, but perhaps global warming is having more of an effect than I thought!
Twitterlocal did a good job of finding my colleagues in Leicester, so perhaps this is a better bet!
Tags: twitter, smallworlds
