Book reviews

Some years ago I wrote book reviews for FirstMonday and I’ve just had cause to try to find one of them (to give someone the link). Rather than searching the archives again I’ve decided to put links on here so that I know where they are in future.

Atlas of Cyberspace, Dodge and Kitchen

Communities in Cyberspace, Smith and Kollock

Islands in the Clickstream, Thieme

The Cyberspace Handbook, Whittaker

Delivering learning on the net, Weller

Uncanny Networks, Lovink

Connecting, Chayko

Cornucopia limited: Design and dissent on the Internet, Coyne

Technoromantiscism, Coyne

Virtual Community, Rheingold

Cyberpower, Jordan

Smart Mobs, Rheingold

What does education do?

Just thought I’d tie up a hectic week and try to tease out some thoughts.

Tuesday was talking to prison staff at HMP/YOI Rochester (the original Borstal) and on Thursday I attended an OU degree ceremony in a prison. This was a very moving event. We recognised the achievements of a number of prisoners including one who had earned a degree.

Of the many thousands of people in prison in this country only a few hundred will never be released, the rest will eventually have to find a way of surviving in a world which has moved on. And this raises an important question. What is the value of education in this context?

The audit commission report last year stated that the cost of prison education is £110M each year. Only a very small proportion of this goes on higher education, the bulk is on lower level skills and training including basic numeracy and literacy. Yet there doesn’t appear to be any coherent research on the value of education on reoffending. The question then, put simply, is “Does education help to reduce reoffending?”. There are some high profile success stories -Bobby Cummines attributes his transformation from one of the most disruptive prisoners in the system to founding “Unlock” to his Open University studies on release from prison. Eric Allinson spent much of his life in prison and now writes for The Guardian – he’s a passionate advocate of education in prison and recently wrote about the difficulties offenders still face while studying in prison. His piece and others reflect what we believe to be the value of offender learning but can we quantify this value? The government’s education policy is predicated on the presumption that a better qualified workforce will lead to an improved economy, and has been for many years, but does this hold true for offenders?

I’m still thinking about a research degree and this is the kind of area that I’m finding increasingly interesting. More to follow?

BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Super-charged battery breakthrough

The video from the BBC battery piece

more about "BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Su…", posted with vodpod

Fast charging batteries

This piece is from the BBC but The Register suggests that it’s jumping the gun!

It’s the viral thing stupid!

I’m in a hotel, hooked onto my BT Openzone wifi connection and chunking through some mails. Twitter is burbling away in the background. I spotted a tweet from Laura about niche social networks.  That sort of stuff floats my boat so I clicked the link and liked what I saw. Of course I want to share that with a wider audience so I shared it on Facebook. Laura had included a Slideshare-hosted presentation by Lee Bryant, Niche Social Networks FTW!

and my point really is…………..

A network came into being to transmit  Lee’s presentation to a wider audience.I know the network was already there but the synapses snapped and this was deemed worthy of transmission – there is a decision process in here somewhere. There is an “added value” in that we (Laura and I) have implicitly said that we think this is worth sharing. The benefit to Laura and me is that if our readers think we’ve not wasted their time our status within the network is enhanced or, at the very least, it’s reinforced. We also benefit in that others will share this type of stuff with us because we’ve signalled that it’s of interest.

These messages are whizzing round the Internet and we’re creating/reinforcing our niche social network.

Social networking video

This is developed from the presentation below. I’ve converted it to a video for use at a conference that I can’t attend – why should they escape just because I can’t be there?!

SociaLearn conference

Back from the SociaLearn conference at Horwood House, Bucks. I’ve mentioned the conference in an earlier post but in case you missed it the public-facing blurb is available on the SociaLearn site and that also gives an overview of the project. Jo has also covered the initial premise on her blog posting (which has just popped up while I was writing this)

The whole event was fascinating and an opportunity to share space with some really imaginative, smart, intelligent, bright, awesomely clever and switched-on people. Jo mentioned the backchannel and I think that’s also the main thing which struck me.

We’d been invited to take laptops and PDAs and there is a (closed) Ning community for catching and discussing ideas. Some of us were also using Twitter and Purk to bash around and develop thoughts – a commentary on the event which was building and scaffolding understanding about how we might do things and where we might take them. And all those thoughts were captured for later analysis and development or restructuring and reassessment – and, to me, that’s part of what using web technologies to support learning should be about. Attending a presentation where I can quickly run a search on an author the presenter has mentioned, bookmark a couple of papers and, perhaps, speed-read a blog piece which outlines their work is my idea of how things should work. Seeing responses to a presentation as it’s happening, watching the shape of people’s ideas while they are sparking off each other, being an active participant rather than a passive observer – that’s all very powerful stuff and even if we can’t make every learning experience like that then we can certainly replicate parts of it by finding ways of introducing learners to these communities of practice.

That’s how I see SociaLearn “adding value”, it’s an opportunity to plug into these roving groups of people with common interests. It breaks away from the formality of tutor group-based conferences and allows students to find groups with which they feel comfortable. Maybe these groups are moving at a different pace or in a slightly different direction but groups can form, work together for a short period and then break up as a different subject group is coalescing. Web 2.0 SNS tools allow for these loose, informal, groupings and learning doesn’t occur in lumps of a given size (see Weller slide 10) and students are rarely working at the same pace and the current OU practice supports the 80% in the middle of the train but the 10% sprinting ahead and the 10% struggling along at the back tend to be alone. If we have a series of groups and students are shown how to move between groups or to straddle a few groups they can find what they need when they need it – peer-supported student-centered learning perhaps?

I need to spend more time structuring these ideas but I also have to write a profile for the PET web site, iron some shirts and clear out the fridge tonight so I’m going to post and revisit another day.

Who decides?

Laura Dewis has blogged about “Allmyfaves” which seems to be an aggregator for web sites it describes as “the creme de la creme”. Not only is it an interesting (and not particularly new) new idea but does it raise some questions about who mediates the web. As the whole thing is already bigger than anyone can embrace we need to rely on signposts so who should we allow to guide us? How can we tell who is credible? Why should we trust this site or Google or Yahoo? No sign here of who the “favies” are, the people who determine the ranking, so do they work for one of the big organizations or are they the same as you and I? Is this another SNS or are we being “sold to”?

Reflections on the day

This is an abridged and extended version of a post on my other blog. I’m slightly changing it here as I think it also applies to the reason I keep this blog.

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Today I was talking about “Social Networking” and I took some photos and uploaded them while we were at the venue to show the immediacy available in the digital age. The format of the conference was great and we had some quality keynote speakers.

First up was Seb Schmoller from ALT. He brought an XO laptop and that was the first time I’d physically held one so that was useful and his presentation set the scene for what we were doing – eLearning technologies in the wild and also in the OU.The poster sessions were hard work – the attendees were split into 11 groups, one per workshop, and moved round the posters while the workshop facilitators explained what the workshop was about. So we stood by the poster and burbled on to 11 different groups.

Then, after lunch and chance to catch up with friends, Denise Kirkpatrick – PVC Learning and Teaching at the OU gave a presentation about the OU’s VLE and eLearning projects (including SociaLearn).

Then the workshops. I did my stuff and then we looked at some social networking sites and we looked at how we might use some of these tools in learning and teaching. I prepared a Seesmic video before I left for the conference and I’ve just done another to “top and tail” the day. All the photos are now on Flickr.

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Looking at what I took from my workshop I think the main messages are that there is a real hunger to understand these technologies and no real way for most people to know how to engage with them. While I’ve been writing this I’ve been and signed up for Tumblr to see what it might offer – how might a colleague get from reading Wikipedia to, perhaps, editing it to messing about with Firefox extensions to see whether hyperwords is a useful Firefox extension?

I think we need to find ways of making sure that we don’t leave people behind or, worse, alienate them by talking technobabble without offering a series of easy routes to access the tools. I think we’re already past the tipping point and another digital divide is opening between educators using these technologies and those becoming increasingly fearful of the technical changes which everyone else seems able to handle but them.

Slideshow for AL Conference

NB Some slides difficult to understand because of the loss of animations. I’ll edit and re upload when time allows