catherine's blog

No one who reads Ida Takes Tea can have missed the fact that I've not been posting regularly. It's been one of those cases of life intervening! So, I'm very pleased to announce that I'm moving to a new job as Educational Designer at La Trobe University, starting in mid-December 2008. After eight years in the UK, I'm very pleased to have returned to Australia, and I'm excited to be joining my new colleagues at La Trobe. There are some interesting initiatives starting up at La T., and in 2009 I'll aim to keep you all informed on these new institutional projects, and on news in general from the Australian e-learning community.

As mentioned in my previous post, I have been working on creating a table that shows how selected Dublin Core metadata elements map to the available metadata fields in Sakai. I've put a copy of this up on my Wetpaint wiki, for reference.

For researchers such as myself, one issue with metadata is that it is relatively simple to deal with when you are talking about a handful of resources, but the process becomes radically more complex when resources start to number in the hundreds. Equally, the ability to auto-detect metadata has to rate high on any librarian's or archivist's wish-list for an information system design. So, what does Sakai have to offer?

At the end of any project, the time comes to wrap up work and, hopefully, to prepare project outputs for dissemination and archiving. We’re working with the folks from CTREP to create the digital archive for the Learning Landscape Project. It’s an interesting process – while working to pull together the materials for inclusion, I’m also thinking about what we learned on the way, mentally summing up the project’s achievements, as well as the things we could have done better. I’ve reflected that this process of archiving is, in many ways, the process of creating the institutional representation of our project: its official history. I’m not suggesting this is the “best” story, or the “only” story, to tell about our work – there are, of course, many stories to tell. But this collection will constitute (we hope!) some of the most accessible documentation of our work, so we want it to be diverse in content, and we want it to be as thorough -- as rich -- as possible.

I much enjoyed participating in last night’s panel discussion at the Education Unbound event in London. Held at Adam Street private members’ club, the vibe was relaxed and informal, with intense discussions continuing well after the panel wound up. Thanks to the folks at Online for inviting me to join what I think proved to be a very successful event. I got to plug some of CARET's new projects, such as EGRET and the stuff we're doing with OpenSocial. Some interesting people I talked to, in random order: Gaia Marcus, a student and journalist from UCL; Jeremiah Alexander, from startup Ideonic; and Nikolas Heyng from Online. It was a much younger professional audience than I’m used to addressing (!), and a very different bunch of people – there were few, if any, representatives from HE, with most of the audience drawn from publishing, media, start-ups, and not-for-profits, with a sprinkling of students and teachers.

Just received the programme for the inaugural Festival of Ideas in Cambridge, the "arts/humanities/soc-scis" response to the successful Science Festival. One event that looks potentially interesting is an evening panel discussion on social networking, scheduled for 25 October. Titled "Facebook: Friendship and Social Interaction", the panel brings together the Guardian newspaper's UX guru, Meg Pickard, Chris Locke of AOL Europe, Sue Hessey from BT and Cambridge academics David Good and Kathleen Richardson. Soporific? I hope not! Obviously, Facebook is not a fresh subject; yet, as far as I know, this is the first public event focusing on Facebook at Cambridge. I'm curious as to what the panel's take will be on social networks and the creation of social relationships online.

This post was written in response to danah boyd’s post, “Facebook and Techcrunch: the costs of technological determinism and configuring users.” danah focused on recent (and not so recent) attempts by social network sites like Facebook to regulate how individuals relate to others when using their service. I noticed that danah’s argument—expressing a consistent point of view, whose development you can trace in her writing—reinforces the criticisms I made of the Spock service last December.

I'm looking forward to attending this year's Education Unbound event, organised by digital agency Online Creative Communications. I'll be joining Futurelab learning researcher Dan Sutch, teacher and web 2.0 advocate David Noble, and co-founder of the "School of Everything", Andy Gibson, on the speakers' panel for the evening event. Channel 4's Matt Locke will be cat-herding, ahem, moderating what I'm sure will be a very lively discussion on all things related to learning and social media. Last year's event, which focused partly on the impact of social media on educational publishing, was reportedly thought-provoking - see previous participant Ewan McIntosh's lucid dissection of the 2007 event.

The ENSEMBLE project has recently finished its summer studentships programme (known as UROPS - Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, a concept initially developed at MIT). The key to UROPs is that students participate as researchers in a real research project, in the process gaining valuable skills and experience, and actively participating as members of an academic research community.

Today I was pleased to learn the paper written by my former CARET colleague Matt Riddle and myself has been accepted for the Ascilite 2008 conference this December in Melbourne, Australia. Our paper looks at students' ICT use in relation to their use of space; we have been doing a lot of work with maps!

I'm also looking forward to finding out more about Matt's role in an exciting new project on Spaces for Knowledge Generation, involving a partnership between La Trobe University as lead institution, Charles Sturt University, Apple Inc and Kneeler Design Architects. In January 2009, Matt and colleagues will be making a study tour to the US and UK to visit partners and institutions with key interests in learning space design. 

Educause's Matt Pasiewicz has created a great visualisation of text from university home pages, using the popular webapp Wordle. What can we learn from it about the nature of the modern university? For me, one thing stands out: the single word 'Campus'. It's huge! (In descending size, the most visually prominent words in the visualisation appear to be: Students, University, College, Campus). At a time when virtual worlds are widely promoted and discussed within the educational technology community and more widely, I think the persistence of the physical and tangible within social experience is worth acknowledging. Even if we interpret university websites as propagating a particular type of 'marketing-speak' -- as telling a particular (and partial) story about the nature of the university experience, aimed at potential educational 'consumers' -- is it worth asking, what do we understand by the term 'campus', whether physical or virtual, and how does that understanding sit in relation to our concepts of 'community' and 'culture'?

I'm excited about what I've seen so far of pptPlex, Microsoft's new add-on to the popular PowerPoint presentation software. The application adds interactivity to presentations, allowing users to "zoom" in and out of content, and permitting them (and audiences) simultaneously to view both parts and the whole of a presentation, via the "ribbon" interface. This may be familiar to Mac users, but it's new for PowerPoint, which I've always thought seemed just a teensy bit stuck in "80s corporate" mode, suffering in comparison to, for example, Apple's Keynote. A product of the OfficeLabs initiative, pptPlex could help Microsoft to break away from that outdated image - you can even navigate it using a Wii controller.

This post is not about "naming and shaming" innovative web content providers, who are making great strides in bringing interesting multimedia content to end-users.

It's just a small story to remind us that web 2.0 is not always as "accessible" as we think. For educators, perhaps it's a yet another reason to prefer open content. And it reminds us that commercial constraints and IP issues continue to prevent the web from being as "global" a resource as the educational community would like.

This is how I received the error message: browsing Jason Kottke's popular website kottke.org (now described as "a weblog about the liberal arts 2.0") , I noticed that, in a post about the film Koyaanisqatsi, Jason had linked to the popular video site hulu.com.  But I couldn't actually see the video content - all I got was the above message.

The recently-published OFCOM Market Report makes for some interesting reading. Some of its numbers you would expect: the report charts, among other things, UK growth in consumption of gaming, user-generated content, and SNS (social network systems). Among the more surprising key facts buried in the report are related to what you might call "under-use", or use of ICTs for unintended purposes, and in unanticipated ways.

Back from ED-MEDIA, I wanted to flag up this really interesting ESRC project that I heard about at the conference. It is being conducted by an interdisciplinary team from the OU and Mike Sharples’s LSRI group in Nottingham (standard disclaimer: I’ve previously worked with the OU’s Grainne Conole, who is a key team member, on various CARET/OU projects :-) ). The Personal Inquiry (or "PI") project is designing new educational methods of scripted inquiry learning, and aims to evaluate their effectiveness through a process of scientific enquiry. The curriculum focus is UK Key Stage 3: “Myself, My Environment, My Community”, with emphasis on engaging young learners in investigating their world. Lots more details available on their website.

Report on ’Sharing Learning Designs: Lessons from the LAMS Community’, presented by James Dalziel, Macquarie University, Australia

I'll begin by noting that James’s presentation was not designed for an audience of ‘specialists’ or LAMS practitioners - many attendees were totally new to LAMS, or else use ED-MEDIA as their annual opportunity to glean news on the latest updates. James began by introducing LAMS, explaining that it is a toolset for adding structure / scaffolding to the learning process, and in particular, building a framework for educational activities "that a simple list of course resources on a [web] page [or LMS site] doesn’t have".