CC Image - Karen Cropper - Attribution

Martin Weller’s blog, The Ed Techie, was the first technology blog that I followed and he’s a constant stream of intrestingness. His latest post is really valuable for anyone interested in ed-tech generally, but also open educational models specifically. He has done interviews with a number of OU luminaries (Martin Bean, Grainne Conole, Andrew Law and Simon Buckinham-Shum) and basically asked them 4 questions:

• What are the benefits of technology for learning?
• What are the interesting areas around openness at the moment?
• Are there any interesting trends we should watch over the next few years?
• What do you think about the open, online approach of the conference?

The interviews are between 8 and 15 minutes long each.

I was particularly interested in Grainne Conole’s point about moving towards more open models of research and blogging ideas in progress to get the communities input rather than waiting to publish them in closed  journals.

The conference is running next week on the 22nd and 23rd June and he’s posted the agenda here. Follow Martin’s blog and his Tweets for more info.

PS: Trying to embed this playlist was an unexpected hassle. Ended up having to go into the source code of Martin’s blog and copying the embed code from there. Thanks to Steve for his help. Do you know an easier way?

Image: Luke Cantrell Att-NC-ND

I’m extremely grateful to Nick Shackleton-Jones, the BBC’s Manager of Online and Informal Learning, for letting me share this with you verbatim.

I was trying to write a post about personal styles having undertaken a Myers Briggs Type Indicator questionnaire as part of a team exercise. It was principally about questions of identity, learning, social interaction and having a strong preference for introversion, but could never quite nail what I wanted to say…

…so I gave up.

Instead, here’s Nick’s very personal, articulate take on a similar theme. I wanted to post it here because it’s a really interesting insight into someone whose natural style is to keep things hidden. I’m naturally quite reticent, finding it hard to express what I’m thinking and why I’m thinking it so I found Nick’s candour very surprising and refreshing.

Originally posted on his blog, he’s allowed me to present it here as a guest post. I don’t recognise all the aspects he’s talking about in myself but there are things that I relate to very closely.

I should clarify, I’m not posting this as a claim that I have Asperger’s. I just thought it was a great piece of writing.

Read to the end; it’s not merely an apologia.

Please have a look at his fascinating blog on learning, Aconventional, and follow him on Twitter.

“We are not and never will be real boys and girls. At best we are mimics. Most people feel awkward as teenagers, but for us that awkwardness does not resolve itself but instead crystallises as a syndrome – a collection of characteristics which, if we’re lucky, lie just beyond the normal deviation. Often the breakthrough is realising that whilst we can never be real there are rules that we can follow and that by carefully observing and mimicking these, by learning to play the game, we can seem real – sometimes even more so than the people who learn such things implicitly. We learn that the secret to relationships is eye-contact and listening. We learn to monitor our use of space; of the physical space around us and of the space we occupy in a conversation. We match phrasing and gesture. By concentrating on such things we find that successful interpersonal interactions in a finite context can easily be achieved.

But however good we get, certain things will mark us out and establish beyond doubt that we are not merely introverts or nerds: no matter how proficient we become interacting with people is always an effort and a challenge. Nothing is more exhausting than a day full of meetings; at the end of a such a day we can barely hear people when they speak. Unlike most people we do not actively seek out other people or interaction and encounters are only ever draining. A party can literally leave us feeling dizzy and sick, engaging in the ridiculousness of small talk in the shameful hope that at some point the conversation might turn to something important.

We suspect that other people can sense this instinctively: we are rarely approached, the seat next to us is invariably the last to be filled. It is as if when we are not concentrating on engaging others a light ‘goes off’ and people steer clear. If we are in a room with someone else we feel no need to speak to them – however long we are in that room – beyond the sense that according to the rules we should, or that it might make the other person more comfortable if we did so.

In meetings we struggle to understand turn taking – bursting with something to say, but it feels like trying to cross a busy motorway on foot. Eventually we dive in and cause a pile-up. Most of all, though, never, never understanding that because someone is your ‘boss’ that one should accord them, or their views, some special status.

Telephone conversations are difficult at best. This might seem strange, but calculating how to respond is so much easier with the help of non-verbal cues. Often people say ‘is this a good time to talk?’, sensing our phone strangeness. It’s such an effort of concentrate so hard to do pull these off – I find it helps to walk around. Physical contact is perhaps the most paradoxical area of all – if we are not careful we instantly give ourselves away here: protective of our distance, anxious regarding the decision to hug, kiss or shake hands. Even now it takes great effort of will to suppress this kind of trepidation. And yet physical contact can be where we feel most at home – the only real connection that we will have with another person.

I can’t help loving my routines – much as I despise myself for it, a stereotypical routine stops my day feeling like chaos, and when something spoils my plans I have to work hard to convince myself that things might still be ok. Humour is tough to master, but it should never be thought that we lack feeling: I have learned that it is only a very small part of the mechanism that has failed. Our mirror neurons work just fine; we empathise with the pain registered in the faces of sufferers, we cry in movies. It is as if our reward system doesn’t kick in for social stuff; we have to learn it the hard way because it doesn’t come naturally. We learn to connect with everyone and no-one.

Developing professional relationships over the medium or long term is almost impossible: there comes a point where other person realises that there is something ‘fake’ about your delivery – you see it in their expression – and from that point you are doomed. ‘Trust is essential’ as the saying goes, and there are few things more damaging than perceived dis-ingenuity. How do you begin to explain to someone that pretending to be a real person is what makes you the person you really are?

But it could be much worse. We are not excluded, we are not institutionalised. We find it easier than most people to visualise things or to spot patterns of thinking. Unlike most people we really do care about stuff – rather than just friends – and for that reason alone we have the potential for greatness. And we appreciate that diversity expresses itself in many ways, some more visible than other, but all forms essential to success in a creative world.”

Does this reflect you? Do you recognise this in the people that live and work around you? Give us your thoughts…

Image - gordon2208 cc on Flickr

It struck me earlier this week how much of a role technology has played in helping us with our move to new jobs in Newcastle. Some aspects were fairly bland but others have been a little more interesting. I thought I’d itemise the different ways and then draw some tenuous conclusion as I usually do. I’ll try to keep it brief.

Getting a job

Using Google Reader to keep tack of job adverts from various sources – There was a lot of irrelevant stuff to wade through but that may be down to how well I configured my searches. I didn’t want to narrow this down too much in case something came out of leftfield that looked interesting. It was the rss feed from Newcastle Uni that threw up the Netskills job.

Twitter - part of researching the role and the organisation was to start with the website and read around it but more useful was actually following the Netskills employees on Twitter. This did feel a bit like stalking initially and I was a bit cautious about what impression I was giving through my own Tweets when they started following back. One of the most important things about jobs for me is the people I’d be working with so this was an opportunity to see whether I thought I would fit with the general feel of the place. It have me a window on Netskills that more traditional research methods couldn’t have done. Twitter was also useful for getting my networks opinions on the topic I was given for the presentation.

Blogging - Candidates were asked to provide a sample of their work as part of the interview process and to bring it along to the interview. My work at the CLC involved only a little bit of materials writing and I didn’t think this gave a good account of what I was capable of. I had a few videos I’d produced, a podcast or two and actually the blog itself is a good representation of me as a learner. So I created a showcase page on this blog and embedded the various bits of meida hoping that it demonstrated I was at least competent with the technology. It was like making a mini e-portfolio.

Prezi - oh Prezi, how do I love thee. Let me count the ways… Both my wife and I had to do interviews with presentations, both of us used Prezi and both got the jobs. See my effort here – obviously you miss out on the sparkling repartee that went with it (and the grilling I got from the Netskills audience afterwards) but it’s a flavour.

Finding a house

So you can search for properties on the internet. Yada yada, so far so normal.

Google Streetview – as we’ve been moving to an area we’re not familiar with and that involves a 2.5 hour car drive to get there having Streetview as a way of getting a closer look at the outside of a property has been invaluable. I’ve always been frustrated that brochures for houses never give you an clear picture of the surroundings but with Google’s various mapping tools you can see how a house fits into the neighbourhood, proximity to services, noise sources etc.

iPhone/iPod Touch – I’ve jumped on the iPhone bandwagon the the last week but had access to an iPod Touch from work for the majority of time we were looking at properties. Aside from the fact that checking emails has been a cinch Rightmove have a nice app for doing quick property searches where you can see the pics of the property, find it on the map and request further details. Viewing a house yesterday having the iPhone to take pics and video of the rooms has been a useful aide memoire.

Choosing a school

Oh the shame of it. Most of our research on schools was done via the OFSTED site. I felt like a complete Judas! The schools’ websites varied so much in quality and content that it made it difficult to draw comparisons. A decent school website can give some indication of their approach to ICT and other things and for people coming into the area from outside with few contacts and local knowledge it’s a nice starting point.

Social Networking – On the subject of local knowledge using Twitter and Mumsnet to help us navigate the confusing set up for mid-year admissions in Newcastle City Council was a boon.

And so the the contrived moral of this tale…

Organising this move up to the North East would have been perfectly possible without all this technological input but having these tools at ones disposal can really improve the way you build connections,  the range of choices you have, remove some (not all, definitely not all) of the anxiety and also introduce a bit of fun into the proceedings.

…and that is one of the reasons why I think it’s worthwhile me helping people become more confident with technology.

Image credit - Drinksmachine

For over a year there’s been a link to my blog from the Online Stopwatch site which is designed and run by my friend Aaron. This has been lovely as his site is insanely popular and it has generated a vast amount of traffic to this blog.

Last week I was getting about 600 hits a day which looked great in Statcounter. I’ve had 135,000 hits since I started counting in September ’08.

Trouble is, of those between 80-90% of my visitors stayed for less than 5 seconds and the vast majority never make it off the home page so it’s all a bit of an illusion.

I’m really not that interested in having a popular site. As this blog has progressed it has become more of a CPD tool for me and a way of keeping track of thoughts. Most of my contact with the rest of the ed tech community happens on Twitter now rather than through comments on the blog.

So, a few days ago I asked Aaron the remove the link.

Unsurprisingly, visitor numbers have plummeted from 629 pages views last Tuesday to 30 this Tuesday.

…and it feels very liberating!

If you’re reading this it is more likely that you came here for a reason other than accidentally clicking on a link and that for me is much more valuable than a huge visitor number vanity figure.

So, thanks for visiting. Happy St Patrick’s Day.

Fear - by Mark Sun on Flickr (CC)

As part of our MSc we’ve had to read a paper by Guy Merchant (2009) on Web2.0, new literacies and the idea of learning though participation. We were asked to provide a response on it in a form of our choosing. I thought I’d have a go with Audioboo as I haven’t really had a chance to play with it.

You can read the paper here. It’s well worth it if you are interested in web2.0 and social networking for eductaion.

My response was just a quick thing about the relationship between participation and engagement on one hand and fear on the other and how it links to reading I did as an undergrad about fear (informed or otherwise) influences behaviour in real landscapes. The book was by Yi Fu Tuan and can be found here.

I don’t draw any radical conclusions as this was more a way of recording some thoughts.

PS – Sorry about the tag cloud – slight issues following updating the plugin…

I feel the need to be mean and uncharitable. It’s been that sort of week.

With a few exceptions, all the videos of school productions I’ve seen have been unwatchable tosh. It’s a shame because you know that it’s been a labour or love for staff and students and they’ve thought “let’s preserve this, let’s film it” but what you end up with is mess that doesn’t really do the production justice.

Actually, there is a point to this. I was having a discussion with one of our partner teachers about documenting work done for their Arts Award submission and it got me thinking.

Filming a stage show well is REALLY tricky. You have problems with bad light, dodgy sound, audience noise and the like. Most schools  either stick a single camera at the back of the hall and let it run or try to use a few cameras. We’ve helped one of our schools do it using a 3 camera setup but it’s time consuming to sync the footage then edit it together (the students used Adobe Premiere CS3). The editors just got bored wading through what in the end was 5 hours of raw footage and it wasn’t really a great use of their time.

So what other options do you have?

Assuming your aim is to have some sort of record for posterity of the event you can use loads of different tools.

Learning Platform – use your platform to create a mini-site for the production. Most platforms will allow you to blog, have discussion forums, display media and keep tabs on relevant dates. It will also give you the opportunity to link to web pages on the play itself, sites that talk about acting/singing/dancing technique. It gives a great opportunity to widen the community involved in the production.

Photo-sharing – having good quality images of the rehearsal process and the maybe from the tech rehearsal as well is actually a much better record of the activity. Most of the fun and enduring memories come from the rehearsing anyway. Use Flickr or Picasa Web Albums for starters although there are loads of others.

Blogging – why not have people involved contributing to a group blog about the production from day 1? This will give you a great reflective record of the highs and lows of the whole process. Use your school’s learning platform blogs, Edublogs or WordPress. (Edublogs actually runs on the WordPress engine but is set up for school use). Alternatively, for UK schools, your regional grid for learning may have a system for setting up blogs for you.

Video – I’m not dismissing video out of hand; there are alternatives to just sticking a camera in the hall and hoping for the best. Why not try do a “Making of…” documentary using some footage of rehearsals, video diaries and photo slideshows. Alternatively, link up with your school’s media department and get their students to do a proper film of a small section of the play using a few camera angles and properly edited. I’m having a bit of fun with Fliggo at the moment for hosting short videos in a reasonably secure environment that I can access for embedding in blogs or sharing with people.

How has your school or college used ICT alongside your production?

Image – DavidQuick on Flickr

In a few weeks we’ll be launching a new design and moving host so everything will look a little more sexy, run quicker and let us do a few more fun things.