WE/ME in epedagogy design

Hi everyone and especially Jaap,

I just read in a comment (on VKB’s group-entry) that there was a Skype-meeting between Jaap and ‘i-don’t-know-who’ because i wasn’t in… Maybe it’s my fault and we had a clear appointment, but i don’t remember (and didn’t write down) anything like that. The only information that i saved so far (concerning Jaaps seminar) was that we will start the 15th of November. For you, Jaap, i would very much recommend to send a note via email and remind us (students) to have a meeting. Or post a message in the blog…

hope to hear you next time - Antje*

Hey happy Wikipeople! I took care of the bad commentspam we had in our Wiki. From now on it’s only possible to comment on pages if you’re logged in.
Write on!

another interesting article from George Siemens on Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age. See also http://www.connectivism.ca

It is not Big Brother who is watching you, it is Every Brother… In this note we start our research in “Transparency and Surveillance in ePedagogy and education.” As we had communicated at the seminar here in Hamburg we are going to make our process transparent to everybody - and therefore I have now set up a blog (panopticon.ferngespraech.net) and a wiki (due to some problems with my Server only having PHP 4 my provider has to move my data to another Server, so the Wiki will be online tomorrow…) so that everybody can follow our thoughts and the work in progress.

Please have a look at our work - ideas, questions, recommondations etc. are higly welcome.

Cheers,

Christina

The third international seminar in Hamburg, like the previous ones in Helsinki and Rotterdam, pursued and strenghtened the importance of biannual physical meetings as a major constituent within in our MA program. However, the crucial question remains similar to what we did encounter during the last seminars: how can the spirit and lively atmosphere of the seminars being continued over distant project work? During last semester project “Blogosphere”, it has become evident that cohesion in collaborative project working over distance are dependent on the following key factors (please correct me, if I am wrong):
1. Commitment
2. Motivation
3. Individual and group time management
4. Rational, background and justification of your project
5. Objectives and allocation of tasks
6. Outcomes and dissemination
7. Means and methods
8. Communication, collaboration and project management
9. Evaluation and peer review of project stages.

We’ve already seen excellent examples during last semester, which in a certain way irrefutably demonstrated the interrelatedness between motivation, shared interests in a certain topic, competent usage of communication and collaboration tools, means and methods and pertinent outcomes. So, what did we learn from last semester experiences, what were the main drawbacks and challenges and what kind of means and measures need to be undertaken to improve forthcoming project work?
Please go ahead!

By the way, do you know George Siemens (this year key-note speaker at EDUCA Berlin) latest publication “Knowing Knowledge“?

You can download a free pdf-version here:
http://www.elearnspace.org/KnowingKnowledge_LowRes.pdf

Cheers,
Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss

Thanks for all your impressions concerning our seminar in Hamburg. I’d love to read more of them. To make sure that also the content is documented Ralf created a special wiki page to store the results, questions and topics. Please fill it with all your presentations (or links to them) and group plansand results.

These are not to be read as critics, but what apeared to me - the new student - as new and what I recognized to effect the situation and possibly how I acted in it…

Seminar-situation

At first I felt very strange, because all the time everyone seemed to be permanently working on their laptops and I was wondering what you are doing all the time and if it effects your real-life-communication. For example, when somebody told something in a discussion or gave a presentation, the other people that I thought were the listeners did something else but listening. I thought that you are either not very interested, capable of multiple action, or maybe just pay attention to the main key-words that mostly didn’t explain me a lot.

However it was very interesting to see how you work and that there is still a lot of outcome from this behaviour. I will try to bring a laptop and be busy the next time, too.

Free-time

What disturbed me a lot during the free-time was the digital cameras as I don’t feel very comfortable with people photographing me all the time, especially when it is again and again because the photos of me do not turn out to be nice, but thank you for trying. Now that I have seen the flickr-accounts with some really good photos I wonder what is going to be left when we remember the seminar and have these photos that emphasize certain moments, situations and of course the fotogenic people. Will I be part of the memory when there is no portrait of me available? Seems a lot like some kind of visual knowledge building…

What I enjoyed very much were the stories of your personal life and your thoughts that you shared with me. I want to thank you all for letting me get to know you a bit and hope very much to continue the discussions online, in a different environment that I still have to explore a bit more. So here are the first steps into a permanent-online-social-life.

Greetings from Antje*

Quite a lot of us planned to start Blogging for they’re ePedagogy research. As beeing quite deep into blogging I set up a Wiki Page about Blogging. There you can find some basic information and they will raise up if you post your questions here or there. I would recommend Wordpress as a Blogging system dooes’nt matter if you want to install it yourself or want to use a already installed one where you just have to sign up for.
But maybe you would like to use Vox which could become something like myspace for adults. The structure seems to be much cleaner and I think more serious than on myspace.
Btw, I set up a Blog (in english language) for my personal ePed-Research as well and hey YOU ARE WELCOME to visit it .

Other useful social software apps are del.icio.us for social bookmarking and flickr as a photo sharing platform. (We have a epedagogy group at flickr!)

The deadline to agree for a date for the next international seminar is january 15th 2007.
I am looking forward to meet you

On Saturday night the whole group went to the Dialog in the Dark performance where, for ninety minutes or so, we walked through a series of environments which were all totally dark. We had sticks and we were accompanied by a blind gide who talked us through the environments and helped those who got lost of stuck.

Several things occurred to me as I walked around.

Fistly my eyes were conjuring up phantom images and were not “seeing” the uniform blackness that was objectively all there was. At one point when we were sitting in a simulated boat being blown by simulated wind and splashed by real water my perceptual apparatus was inventing a rocky shoreline that persisted. By persistence I mean that I could follow individual rocks as we moved past them, turn away, and then look back and see them again.

Secondly, my experience of the safety of the different environments varied for no external reason at all, except for the audible noises and the textures of the surfaces. At one point I realised that I was quite confidently walking around what we had been told was an empty room, whereas a few moments previously I had been shuffling along in case I tripped over any obstacles or steps that probably existed only in my imagination.

The final environment was a dark bar in which you were invited to purchase drinks and snacks: a process that involved finding your money, paying at least the right amount and then possibly getting change as well as the glass and the snacks. I had a beer and a peperoni thing ( a BIFI to be accurate, fact fans). Nobody spilled anything, or at least I heard no smashing glasses.

We had a discussion later about whether the barman was really blind and operating using only his other senses. This arose because he was so fast and so accurate, even when he was handed banknotes. Certainly he recognised my note as 5€ and gave me the correct change.

Eventually everyone agreed that no cheating had occurred, which was itself an insight (if I can use that word in this context) into operating sightlessly in the world.

 Update:  thanks to Christina for pointing out the correct spelling of Bifi which I didn’t know because I received and unwrapped my delicious pepperoni-style snack in complete darkness.