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Glenn Hardaker :: Blog

November 27, 2006

Interesting addition to Skype 3 (beta). Been testing and looks useful. Teleconferencing for free with text messaging. As with Skype distributed tool and therefore set up for long term contacts I feel. I expect to use it in the near future. Currently just tested https://skypecasts.skype.com/skypecasts/home. Just on Skype now as always and just noticed there is currently 4,633,745 users online!!

 

Filed under: P2P communications elearning <br />

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November 20, 2006

On the plane  coming back from Poland I read an article on social software and in particular what seems to be  for high bandwidth users. The most fascinating part was the 'Second Life'  (online world) focus which I have been following from a distance  for a while ... and then yeasterday Evening on Aljazeera there was a special report on 'Second Life' and how Reuters has just bought land and built a replica building to there head office in the US. Aljazeera also went on to discuss the first news channel opening up in 'Second Life'. They  gave you a tour around as a reporter and all the news stories  are based on 'Second Life' communities. In the context of reporting news various journalists are pushing to get the story first  and this was viewed to be the same as real life. In Second Life you can buy land, build houses, buy goods and just chat to people via various  online communications tools. Whe you enter it is  quite strange when other people are moving around you  (animated characters)and they are being control l ed by people in the real world. You also need to get some cloths - buy an avaiator. You get for example a 'Second Life' name etc. At present  the population is approximately 1,500,000. For example last night  when I checked there was a spend of approximately $500,000  over 24 hours . When you first enter there does seem  to be  significant amount to  learn  in terms of being able to be involved with the community based software.
Other social software applications that are now being used by a wide range of organisations include YouTube, eBay and MySpace . Many businesses have found the most creative and hardest working teams are those who are mainly users themselves. For example eBay, Wikipedia, Sim City and SecondLife have emerged from people who are users and from that have the depth of understanding. Online virtual reality worlds allow companies to host vast brain storming sessions and presentations via Webcasts to employees internationally. Cisco and AT&T  have laucnhed similar  internal tools to YouTube and MySpace. Cisco for example widely uses distributes video messages using Flash communications tools. IBM last summer hosted what they called an Innovation Jam that included employees, family and friends and they had over 300,000 people attend and it was hosted in Secon Life. They generated a total of 37,000 ideas and they have committed $100,00 to invest in the one with the most potential.

For IBM they are using these new social software technologies to vastly increase the pool of ideas within there company.

Just thought that as EmeraldInsight being online may be worth exploring opening an office in Second Life along with Reuters and News organisations. Speculative but the land is currently very cheap and expected to go up significantly in value!!

 

Filed under: eLearning socialSoftware peronsalisation culture

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November 08, 2006

I like the idea of the pedagogical patterns concept... capturing practice through innovative ways... Patterns are designed to capture best practice in a specific domain. Pedagogical patterns try to capture expert knowledge of the practice of teaching and learning. The intent is to capture the essence of the practice in a compact form that can be easily communicated to those who need the knowledge.

A pattern language is a set of patterns that work together to generate complex behavior and complex artifacts, while each pattern within the language is itself simple. The patterns community has begun to realize that patterns in isolation provide only incremental improvements to software systems, organizations and processes. It describes how to design and deliver a short course. Little in this language (or any pattern language) is novel, but it brings together in one place expert knowledge that is often forgotten and sometimes overlooked

Filed under: pedagogy

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November 07, 2006

Interesting viewpoint led by a narrative enquiry perspective and from Denzin what he calls postmodern/poststructural perspective. Talks about quantitative, positive research methods and assumptions and how many researcher have rejected this approach. They argue that positive methods are 'telling stories' about the social world but just in a different way to qualitative methods. A science that silences too many voices. Narrative approach just chooses different methods for evaluating there work including: verisimilitude, emotionality, personal responsibility, ethic of caring, political praxis, mulivoice texts, and dialogues with subjects.

Filed under: narrative methodology <br />

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October 30, 2006

This is one of the most rich resources around I have visited in years. Massive potential and could make significant impact on HE/FE sector. http://labspace.open.ac.uk/ . It the Open University initiative thats moving fast and based on Moodle. The content is the main thing to check out. loads of it and increasinf fast

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Filed under: elearning

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October 26, 2006

Here is a useful quote from someone who has significant influence on my thoughts in the context of bilingual education - Professor Jim Cummins.


"Nowwhere in this anaemic instructiuonal vision is there room for really connecting at a human level with culturally diverse students. When we frame the universe of discourse only in terms of children's deficit in English and in phonological awareness (or deficits in any other area), we expel culture, language, identity, intellect, and imagination from our image of the child. In contrast .... an instructional focus on empowerment, understood as the collaborative creation of power, starts by acknowledging the culture, linguistic, imaginative, and intellectual resources that children bring to the school"

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