Arguing the Case Against the Libya Attack, Xtranormal Style [VIDEO]

Arguing the Case Against the Libya Attack, Xtranormal Style [VIDEO]

Some videos

I really liked the video Cormac showed us in the lecture on podcasting by Mike O'Donoghue. So here it is with a couple of others that I found and liked. I find that the video on academic writing is delivered in a really lively way completely different from the drop-asleep boring videos you mostly find on the subject. A**

Web2.0: turning universities inside out

I went to one of the Educational Technology research seminars last week where there were a couple of speakers. Helen Partridge Queensland University of Technology talking about her fellowship into looking what skills are required by library and information professionals in the age of web 2.0. And Fred Garnett, London Knowledge Lab, talking about a newly launched project MOSI ALONG in conjunction with Manchester's Museam of Science and Industry, looking at doing work in ambient learning. I'd like to reflect one of the set readings in his description of ambient learning city's (that's his vision for Manchester), unleashing information and learning beyond bricks and mortar into the wild, turning the University inside out (I think that's how he put it.)

This is to do with social networks (I'm a week behind), mixed in with what we've been talking about in terms of VLE/PLE. I liked Selwyn's Face Working - I thought I wouldn't get very much from these recounts of Facebook interactions however it painted an interesting picture through the selections of discourse as seen through a UK network on Facebook presumably connected to a discipline area (it's UK based). The main point was that students were using Facebook for University stuff but that it tended to be self-intiated, unorganised passing along of information between students.

It presents interesting questions for us when we are looking to use official sources to release important information, that the information is likely to be passed on by word of mouth through networks such as Facebook. Often this has the effect of Chinese Whispers, but we must assume that not everyone reads information directly, there is a certain filtering taking place between social structures. When we design information dissemination points perhaps we need to bare this in mind. As my last post detailed, having too many sources of information can create confusion for students. But when we set out our Blackboard units or Course Handbooks with information that we expect students to keep up to date with and to have digested the information, are we not just covering our own backs? If the information is really vital should we not learn to start to use these new channels?

One point was that often the information is obtained in passing from tutors. there is often a sense of responsibility by students to pass on any bespoke information they obtain to the wider community. I guess that I have done this in the past; by being campus based we get to quiz more easily the tutors on how assessments work and I will have passed this onto team mates who are distance learners.

Some of the discussion of Facebook tends to be self depricating, maybe building social networks between learners where they are able to be frank with each other. I would imagine that these types of interactions just wouldn't happen in Blackboard - that's the tutor's space, where everything is officially visible. But I think the social building aspect is very useful for learners, a construct of Huberman's 'hidden networks'.

The author found that Facebook was used to record accounts of sightings of lecturers outside campus. Recently I was talking to a lecturer who had been dragged out to hip Manchester nightclub by his PHD students, and found that he was surrounded by his 1st years wanting to get pictures taken with him. The information was instantly on Facebook. Is this what it means to turn the University inside out? What is it that students find so fascinating about seeing lecturers ourdoors? I think it might be something to do with the persona adopted in lectures that seems totally incompatible to life.

A point at the end is that this type of use of Facebook is no different from back row murmours, only that now exchanges are open to all and recorded.

A Joined-up campus

An interesting blog post by a student at the University of Lincoln, explains his hope of having just the one system that would do it all (one username/password, one place). It turns out that actually it's all done through a portal with many different 'areas' each with a different personality (room booking, calender, Blackboard, Exchange, Pebblepad). He goes onto explain how he hates all of the different file formats that are used. I guess for us techies that last one is easy for us to know but what about a beginner?

http://nickjackson.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2009/a-joined-up-campus/

I used to work at that uni and we made use of a VLE called Virtual Campas, which I think was homegrown in Hull where I worked, and it was quite interesting, but I only remember using it for pushing materials, but even then it was quite useful at being able to present materials to the students I needed to. I think they've now got Blackboard in.

Just came across a really old video (1999) featuring a guy I just about remember who put on something called a POTS party (Plain Old Telephone Service) from Canada in about 1998, that I listen to live through the slow 56k modem we had back then (Wales). I remember that it gave me access to music that would have otherwise been out of my reach. The same year myself and my dad put on a video webcast from a music festival (hence the interest in webcasts etc.) it felt at that time like a new wave of kind of audiovisual pioneers playing with a new medium. It's funny how things have developed into ondemand rather than live.

Below is the link to the video in situ with comments, below that is a track that I remember getting played (and written by the host on Fasttracker).

MENTAL FLOSS - TORONTO INTERNET TELEVISION on Video.ca

http://www.mentalfloss.ca/blog/_archives/2009/9/21/4328392.html

Yahoo Pipes

As I mentioned on a comment somewhere in the wiki, I have a favourite article about RSS newsfeeds (http://tinyurl.com/5vactlc) that describes the lots of things you can do with them. Like combine them, or using searchterms to filter the estuary into a river of information. It mentions one service www.mysyndicaat.com as a way of doing that, and taking a look it does look like it can do the job well with minimal fuss or advertisements. But ?I have heard of Yahoo Pipes for some time and I thought it might be fun to take a look. This article describes the process involved. I wanted to combine all of fellow student's blogs into the one feed rather than using Cormac's odpl file which gives seperate feeds for each in Google Reader - I'm going to compare both and see which is nicest to use.

http://howtotechtips.blogspot.com/2008/06/combine-feeds-with-yahoo-pipes.html

The trickyest bit was finding the real RSS feeds from each blog (the home page for a blog doesn't always work). Wordpress blogs often seem to hide the RSS/Atom link but adding '/feed/' to the url seems to go to the right place.

Anyway, here's the resultant RSS feed for everybody's blogs under the one feed (no comments - you'll need to click on the post title to be taken to the post in situ to see these):

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=0450109b84dc434ed904fe4b58e060f9&_render=rss

Encyclopedias

I had some friends over last night(still paying the price) and conversation went at one point to my course and we got talking about wikis (they knew Wikipedia). One of my friends reflected that she used to love the Encyclopedia Britannica. I book that she would quite happily read for hours on the search for some specific information and getting way-layed by lots of other different stuff (as now happens in Wikipedia). I remember that we had a set at my primary school and my grandparents may have had them. I think that at one point that there were door to door salesmen who used to sell you a set (it reminds me recently of US Amazon seller printing books of popular wikipedia articles) and you were proud to have these at your disposal on a shelf in your living room. I'm not sure how they fit into other reference type books. Did people used to use them to look for information much in the same way we now use Google? Henry Jenkins (What Wikipedia can teach us about the new media literacies (part one)) says that it is a powerful word with connotations of reliability. Who certifies that knowledge, is it something like peer review? I think he also says that most Encyclopedia are out of date. Aparently (according to Wikipedia) the first encylopedia dates from about 2000 years ago written by Pliny the Elder and the word Encyclopedia means something like recurrent or general knowledge. I'm interested to find more about these Encyclopedias
.
As for Wiki's apparently that word comes from the Wiki Wiki shuttle bus from Honolulu airport to the city centre. I went there last year and say these buses but I'm kicking myself because we got herded onto a different plush coach or I didn't even get a picture. (This picture from the Wikipedia article on wikis, by Andrew Laing)

Also really useful site for the Wayback machine: http://www.archive.org/web/web.php