Follow up on TwitterCamp – you install the software on GTA machine. Get students to create a twitter account. Then open software, create a unique hash tag (unit code – session number). It will trawl the timeline and bring things all together. Some thoughts of use would to offer a back channel for peer communication during a lecture. if you had a dual projector set up then you could display this channel while lecturing. catch up with richard_glover @ tees

Chase up the software – try it on our machines and then try to get some people to try it.

Lynne O’Brien – keynote

Ipod roll out – odd for them to lead with the technology. Argued didn’t know what the impact will be, lets see what happens.

Evolved into duke digital initiative. where technology changes but the idea of putting easy to use technologies in the hands of staff and students and see what happens doesn’t. Strikes an accord with my ideas about working up key themes, and let technologies work through those themes.

some key questions or new issues raised

lectures : passive <> active mode
private <> public – what should be made public compared to private?
use others’ content <> create original content – includes students work, not just copyrighted material
quality: quick & easy <> high quality
tranitory <> permanent

Not our role to decide, only raise the questions for the academic and the students to answer.

To help navigate these issues then they need better information so they can make the appropriate choices.

new york times – visualisations of data – all good. but have students got the skills to interact with it, understand the visualisation. I.e., they are showing me this as a bar chart and I think that I’d prefer it as a bubble. This requires quite high order skills to identify the data may be represented in a more appropriate way. How do they get these skills?

institutionalise new technologies

– put the new technologies into the existing work flow
– use low threshold technologies
– encouraging conversations – honesty about what works well and what doesn’t
– taking a longer view of evaluation (assuming that you are already doing some evaluation)

reports on http://cit.duke.edu/reports

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Tabetha Newman – consequences of a digital literacy review

what is digital literacy – digital literacies – concepts (book)

current state of digital literacy skills

– most young people have inadequate web search and evaluation skills
incorrectly assumed that ICT Exposure + ICT competencies

Worth trying to get hold of the slides.

Clearly no key definition – very murky. Students and staff don’t have the necessary skills.

twitter – tabethanewman

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Anthony mcneill

what might academic writing look like in a digital age

University of sheffield – guidelines of assessing digital media.

www.slideshare.net/amcneill/

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Phil – Gloucestershire – digital story telling

tension between product and process

storytelling or narrative – a new media narrative (ohler 2008).

use other to work out what is the aim of the story, and the appropriate technologies approach.

resources.glos.ac.uk/tli/lets/projects/pathfinder/index.cfm – framework for evaluation digital stories

Geraldine – where are you with story telling?
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PLE’s as a concept – flexible, changing and user-tailored.

they use the concept of a ple to show how to use web 2.0 technologies in a more systematic way.

used 4 approaches

wiki based – based on google sites .. all intrinsically connected. so easy join / mash ups.

social network – facebook solution, how connect these to lots of different technologies.

aggregator approach – netvibes / igoogle

thoughts … need people to decide what to use. need to share how to connect these different inputs – so needs lots of heads-up

interesting exercise – too many tools, so they had to draw a diagram of how the tools work for them. the types of activities they want to use.

makes me think … I should revisit the use of igoogle. think what I want to achieve (tasks and connections). re-design, and use it.

so … people will have their own model for a PLE – it needs to connect (obviously). the feedback suggests that it helps efficiency and transformative process.

twitter – torresk

re-visit flock web browser

questions — some awareness of risks of using open web based ple’s. Sounds like they need some more formal guidance. So we’d need to re-visit the idea / statement about using externally hosted web solutions.

VLEs & PLEs – debate of one or other … well surely they complement each other. when it needs to be assessed, archive, history then needs to be on uni hosted solutions. it is about  making it easier for the person to shift data / artifacts around (if they want to). I still think it should be widened out to ILE and PLE, institutional learning environments (controlled by the institution) and private learning environments. This is because VLEs doesn’t cover institutional software such as Wikis, Blogs, or even off site hosted solutions (live classrooms).
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experiment with twobile & twitter

just realised that I can do some nice searches with twobile. Still slightly slow, and need to work out how to refresh the search page.

Something which struck me while using twitter at this conference was the number of people actively using it (small room and I was sitting at the back). Also, given these weren’t my usual crowd there was lots of interesting tweets concerning resources, questions and comments. It made me think that I’ve become very closed in terms of who I follow. For instance, I’m not actively adding new people to my list. So given that the audience are all interested in technology enhanced learning, I think I’ll go through the shock09 hash tag and see who I’m not following, investigate them a little further and follow the people who look appropriate.

The other thing I’d like to do is read the tweets which used the #shock09 tag and see if I can unpick how Twitter is being used during presentations. We keep saying, it is a back channel for audience communication and feedback. But what is actually going in terms of the discourse?

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The last two sessions of the afternoon (before afternoon tea) where a little of the mark for me. Fergal made sweeping statements which conflicted each other, and had not evidence to support them. Not what you’d expect at a conference like this. The session on modelling was very interesting in terms of allow much more user control over the creation of the model. However, compared to the stuff we did with Biz/ed’s virtual learning arcade their version was very complex and the interface a little scary.