WE/ME in epedagogy design

I just want to coment you about a center of art production, information and research focused in digital culture (http://medialab-prado.es). It is placed in Madrid and it’s quite “young”. I tell you this because it can be interesting for you to know what’s going on in Spain. If you have any project or presentation, I also think it’s a good place to apply ( they organize seminars and workshops quite often). I copy the info they give about themselves and stop this litle “propaganda”.

Take care,

eva

Medialab-Prado is aimed at the production, research, and dissemination of digital culture and of the area where art, science, technology, and society intersect.

Our primary objective is to create a structure where both research and production are processes permeable to user participation. To that end, Medialab Prado offers:

· A permanent information, reception, and meeting space attended by cultural mediators.

· Open calls for the presentation of proposals and participation in the collaborative development of projects.
We have several on-going programmes, which are as follows:

Interactivos?: creative uses of electronics and programming

Inclusiva.net: research and reflections on the network culture

Visualizar: data visualization tools and strategies

Laboratorio del Procomún: trans-disciplinary discussion on the Commons

AVLAB: audio-visual and sound creation

John Connell has written an interesting piece about the relationship between pedagogy and technology.

He argues that it “is an absolute truth that the technological basis of the society we inhabit will have a profound effect on the nature and form of education that can take place in that society. Indeed, new technologies can change what we mean by education because they change what it means to be educated.”

I found the piece via the RSS feed from George Siemen’s elearnspace site.

During the international seminar in Karlsruhe the idea came up to optimise this blog as central entry for us students.
Please comment here, what you think should be changed to achieve good usability.

As Arie says great pictures from Ralf and Alex which my family enjoyed too- thank you. I trust the trip back to Hamburg (and Helsinki of course) was not too bad with the snow - we had the Four Seasons in One Day (Crowded House?).

Like Ralf and Christina, I’m offering a seminar for the ePedagogy Design programme, open also for students of the Hamburg University’s Faculty of Education (33 participants as yet).
It will focus on game based learning, striving for an overview on learning theories, theories on game and play, and selected medium specific theories and practices dealing with (digital) game design. The goal would be to reach a deeper insight in the workings of educational games, on what different cognitive levels a (computer)game could be used as a learning environment, to get an overview on some popular genres of Game Based Learning and generally to take a personal and reflected stance on this topic.
Project work will aim for a documented and reflected draft, design or analysis of a gaming environment usable or used for education. Documentation and results will be made available in the projectroom’s public wiki.

The seminar will take place with synchronous sessions at tuesdays, from 12:00 to 14:00 german time (13:00 to 15:00 Finland time), where you should be available to participate via internet connection, and asynchronous, self-organised project work in groups of two to four students.
For questions or requests for participation as student or guest, please mail to wey-han.tan [at] uni-hamburg.de.

I am also giving a seminar, starting in the first week in April. It belongs to the seminar series “KnowledgeFormation” - with the focus on “Change of media - change of educational settings”. At wiki.christinaferner.de you find a description of the seminar.
There will be synchronous events on Tuesday, 14-16 p.m. (German time). The seminar will be mainly based on project work and discussions via Skype or Adobe Breeze. The project work will be based on building up a media-rich knowledge base in a wiki.

If you want to enroll, or if you have any questions, please leave a comment or write a mail to christina.ferner@uni-hamburg.de

Hello ePedagogy Fellows!
Within the first week of April my first Seminar for the ePedagogy Program will start. The Title will be “Premesis of eLearning” and it deals with… yes, eLearning.
You will find the description of the Seminar here.
22 Participants from Hamburg already signed up, but the concept of the seminar takes into account that there might be participants from anywhere else where you will find a Internet connection.
We will have some synchronous Sessions on Tuesday 10.00-12.00 (UTC/GMT +1 hour) and a lot of work in groups, more or less asynchronous, but you should be available (online) during this time.
There will be Tasks every week, and if you like you can already start with the first one…
If you don’t have time to join us regularly think of participate via the blog even sometimes, would be nice.

Owen says “hello”.

He adds: I am running a course on Learning and Second Life for anyone interested in doing it as part of their epedagogy masters. The course will be worth 5 credits.

The course will be entirely online, and will involve chats in Skype; inworld explorations in Second Life (and hopefully Active Worlds by way of comparison); and course timetables, project plans, documentation and discussion on Airset.

The course starts on Tuesday February 5 at 20.30 Helsinki time, with an introductory Skype session. So you know what you will be getting into, I have published the current version of the course description on Zoho, and you can read it here.

If you want to enroll then please email me at owen@owenkelly.net. If you know someone who might want to enroll then please tell them.

Hi, as you all have already read the Application period (is) open. Help us getting more students into our program by spreading this information throug your blog, website whatever and bring some posters on the wall of your home university.
In order to inform potential new students about the MA program and the Application period I designed a poster which I would like to share with you. If you have designed one as well it might be interesting to have that one also on the blog!
Cheers,
Ralf

I have been teaching a course on social software. During this I decided that Facebook offers a very good front end for a lot of “serious” activities, including the epedagogy MA. I have therefore started an epedagogy group in Facebook. So far it has 5 members, and a link to this site.

It would be very good if everyone else on the course (past and present, staff and students) would also join Facebook, message me and then apply to join the group. (I have set it as a closed group so you have to apply to join. This stops people messing around with it.)

I think we could use this as collective action research. My initial hypothesis is that using this as the front end to our online networking will be good because we will then get a richer picture of each other, and this will enable us to engage in more fruitful collaborations.

BTW, for those with genuine privacy concerns Facebook is VERY privacy conscious. You can set everything to be viewable only by your friends, if you want - and people can only become your friend by applying to you and waiting for you to say yes or no. It is absolutely NOT like MySpace, Bebo, or similar sites.

Later that same day:

I wrote a slightly longer argument in favour of this on my site (which is now being updated again) here.