TEL Away Day - SocialLearn - afternoon

The first part of this afternoon session started with Martin talking about the concept of SocialLearn, a new initiative being explored by the Open University.

SocialLearn will provide a space for users to pull together their own learning events into an open API. Associated with this there will be a set of learning applications. Links will be provided to systems such as COHERE, CLOUDWORKS, MICROLEARNER, TWITTER, FACEBOOK, OPENLEARN, 2Learner...some developed in house and others externally available.

This is aimed at:

informal learners
students in formal education
educators for the creation of content
partners selling services and content
geeks - to play with Open API
vocational learners

'Creepy treehouse' - an academic tries to become your friend on Facebook - the jumping on the young peoples' use of social networking tools - distinguishing between, personal, institute, and inbetween zone.

Move away to give focus on student control over their own learning....letting go... a lot more bottom up...

Do we end up creating our nightmare competitor? We need to take that risk to a certain extent.

Question of duplication with OU VLE? Applications will plug into it e.g. mystuff...idea of putting together lots of things...'edu glue'

Activities

In this section we looked at the suggestions made by people in the room for learning activities. Here we were given the opportunites to read others and give them a rating. It looks like Canan's got the highest rating...this was where a teacher would do something dramatic in front of the class and then there would be a period of interpretation.

Mine seemed to be rejected..which did no surprise me - probably did not like the terms repetition and variation and missed the point... I would love to be able to learn a poem easily - the question is how can one do this? Based on work of Marton.

Idea behind cloudlets is to do with simple ideas. How on earth does that kind of thing happen? Is a good method of doing things...scaling up.

Patrick mentioned 'neat little ideas that worked' and martin about some ideas that work..social objects, but I feel that something is missing.

The idea of scanning all the bar codes from peoples' books was suggested so that we could have some kind of lists of all the books that were available within the department. Since the department is moving into a new building these things would become possible. Of course I probably won't be moving anyway.

TEL Away Day - Morning - eTools

Away day for our section within IET -

TEL - Technology Enhanced Learning.

In the first part of the session we divided into groups to discuss the various tools such as Wikis, Twitter, blogs.

Martin reported back from our group about Wikis - we felt there should be a clear focus for their use e.g. to support meetings where people can add to or correct texts.

Eileen reported on Twitter: what would you use it for? the barrier between work and other parts of your life...Twitter however was considered a safer area. Eileen liked the brevity of it. Patrick commented on the life-work boundary, conversations of which were more likely to occur over coffee...in our case me, Agnes and Doug discussed Richard Dawkins. I said I disliked his manner, felt he did not argue his points very well, and was pompous.

Doug - distinguished between social use and work-based used. Do tools like Twitter help to 'get work done'.

Patrick aiming to get five point action plan:

- let's give twitter a try - no cohersion, a place for people to gather
- encourage people to blog - can be put into aggregator
- have a look at Cohere and Compendium
- have a look at telsns.ning.com

Martin: Broadcast strategy review followed by a self created movie. Concept of Edupunk. ...Everything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger

Broke up into groups: discussed what makes people get involved with these tools...why do people choose certain tools and not others? How we might present PhD thesis on FlashMeeting.

Question about whether people read the notes made at meetings.

Questions of quality raised by Anne - also issues of being 'extra work' but as educational technologists we had to do it. Issue of needing the extra support to help us develope these skills.

Issue of quality is an area which often comes up in these talks - BBC quality is virtually unattainable but the 'rough video' thing can work and give something different. These are probably skills that we need to develop. Martin talked about the motivation that he had where he was doing it for fun. Robin talked about making little audio and video clips and how these can make things more interesting.

It' great that we can feel free to type and use computers at the same time as the talk is going on.