WE/ME in epedagogy design

Dear all,

I am sorry to have missed the Seminar in Helsinki in the beginning of June, but I was occupied with a PR campaign in Manchester, UK. I’m writing a bit off topic here, but hopefully our network can also function as a bit of an alumni, even if our graduated student rate is jet low :).

The company I work for, Miltton, is arranging a PR campaign in Hamburg during the second week in July. Now we would need help from local people that are innovative, outgoing, social and who are interested in new approaches toward marketing and media. Naturally my first thought was my co-students in Hamburg. Do you think some of you might be interested in participating in the campaign? We need involvement for 1 - 2 weeks in July.

I guarantee it’s something new and fun. You can e-mail me (clindeberg(a)gmail.com) for more information and please spread this around your co-students in Hamburg, even if they don’t study at the E-pedagogy programme.

And to everyone: have a great summer and I hope I’ll see you at the next seminar!

During the recent Helsinki international seminar the participants formed 3 working groups based on their preference of 3 different discussion topics to brainstorm the issues and possibilities within these topics and to ultimately come up with a research topic proposal.

In Working Group 1, Wey-han, Arie, Antti, Ville, Lynda, and myself, with Martti’s assistance, had the pleasure of engaging and brainstorming the topic titled, “Envisioning new interfaces in cooperative media culture”.

Arie introduced an interface problem encountered by the medieval scholars when operating the new interface of the “Book” (as presented in the short sketch Medieval Helpdesk on the Norwegian show “Øystein og jeg”).

We developed a stronger understanding for what an interface is and potential problems surrounding the interface, as presented in the brainstorming map linked to the image at the right. Most importantly we identified that when engaging the topic of interfaces there are a number of visual, conceptual and metaphorical aspects which need consideration. During discussion in the working group and following our presentation we identified that there may be two approaches to considering this topic, from the perspective of the physical interface (buttons, keyboards, mouse, etc) and also the virtual interface (windows, browsers, web interface etc).

We identified and presented our research proposal, however we understand that it will require further discussion and fine-tuning in the coming weeks:

“To consider the visual, conceptual and metaphorical elements of interfaces in a learning context for inexperienced user groups.”

Now that the project I was involved in has finished I have (as promised) written it up as my final essay for Jaap’s VLE course. There are in fact two interlinked essays. One describes the events of Semano Semano, and the other describes the pedagogical approaches we adopted to achieve what we did.

The first is here: http://www.owenkelly.net/2007/05/15/semano-semano/
The second is here: http://www.owenkelly.net/2007/05/25/second-life-a-component-in-a-vle/

Together they form my assignment.

A third bonus essay will follow in time tying our approaches into current pedagogical theory in a more technical way. 

I would be VERY happy if some people would be able to find the time to read them and post comments. I am genuinely excited about what we are doing, and I want to find time to talk to people about it while we are all together in Helsinki.

Have a good weekend!

This is only indirectly related to the epedagogy course in some ways, and it is directly relevant in others.

Last week, as part of the Eurovision Song Contest festivities, Arcada ran a huge mobile tv project and we ran a parallel festival in Rosario in Second Life. We ran ten one-hour long events - one every four hours from 13.00 on Friday to 01.00 on Sunday. Over 700 people attended (which is a lot in SL terms).

I am slowly writing this all up on my site, and it will all be ready within a week - not least because some of it will be my report for Jaap on virtual learning environments.

In the meanwhile you should know that Rosario was banned from the contest - AGAIN - on the spurious grounds that it was “not a real country”. Undeterred we went ahead and found a candidate and recorded the entry. Then we made a video.

The candidate was L’angelot and his MySpace profile is here: http://www.myspace.com/l39angelot

You can also see the official video at YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18BzfsbVCJA

Final note:

Next week Second Life is due to be upgraded to include full voice chat. Avatars will be able to speak to each other and voice will be distance-based (that is, you will get quieter as you walk away from someone until they cannot hear you). This has profound implications for what we can use it for ourselves. For one thing it allows cross-platform group voice chats for up to 40 people at once. We should add this to the list of things to discuss live in Helsinki

trams & roads - Helsinki

Originally uploaded by Jimmie James.

Hey fellow students from Helsinki, please listen up!
Some of us students from germany are looking for a place to stay at during the international seminar.
Those who’ve been to Hamburg last year are already familar with the system. Those lokal students who can offer a place to stay for international students during the seminar please “raise your hands” in the blog. I know that at least Christina, Alex and me would prefer to stay in one of your places than in an expensive hotel.

Don’t let us live on the streets of Helsinki, please!

We have decided to use this blog to unfold and share with you the planning stages of our seminar as for invited speakers, lectures, student presentations, work shops, leisure activities etc. The opening is scheduled for June 7th, University of Art and Design Helsinki. Closing debate will be most likely Sunday evening, depending on Henry Jenkins’ travel arrangements. That’s the current status in our planning.

Wednesday, June 6th: Arrival date

Thursday, June 7th:

9.00 - 12.30
1. Welcome and introduction of the seminar program.

2. Separate morning session with our new students including general information on the MA program.

3. Working session with our existing students.

12.30 - 13.30 lunch time

14.00 - 18.00 Helsinki Sanomat publishing house visit and excursion.

20.00 - Welcome party Kipsari

Friday, June 8th:

9.00 - 12.00

Student semester project presentations

Discussion

12.30 - 13.30 lunch break

18.00 - 19.30 Video conference with George Siemens at Arcada

Only recently George Siemens confirmed his participation in a VC session during our international seminar. We agreed on having our session on June 6th at 6 pm EET.

You are all invited to post into our blog relevant questions and topics you wish to discuss with him. The idea behind this kind of preparation phase is to create a vibrant discussion forum from which we can filter out pertinent questions.

David Bolinsky´s 3-D animation of a blood cell was primarly ment to be a pedagogical tool for medical studies, but it has now attracted even the Hollywood film makers.

The Inner Life of the Cell depicts in 8 minutes what´s going on inside one white blood cell. Bolinsky and collaques at his company Xvivo created it for Harvard´s Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology. He says that they wanted to make something that would give people a strong sense of a cell - not as a list of topics to be studied, not as a compendium of tables and graphs and charts, but as a “bustling, immensely purposeful metropolis populated very, very densely by these micro machines that do a huge amount of work at great precision and purposefulness”.

See the film on AIM , its better quality than on UTube.

It took 14 months to produce it. Now the Wachowski brothers, the guys who did The Matrix, are doing a remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and they had come across the animation and they want to included it to the special effects they’re planning for the movie.

Since the premier show of The Inner Life of the cell last summer in Siggraph´s animation contest they have been getting e-mails from major universities all over the world asking if they could use it for their students, calls from high school teachers wanting it for advanced biology classes … and museums that want them to work on museum exhibits because they want to modernize how they teach science.

Nice clip and the film is beautifull, I would say. It makes the blood circulate the opposite way. Hollywood content is used to do permanent invasion in classrooms, but this time it´s vice versa.

Read the hole story on Wired News

-Raimo-

“VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project’s main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field”. cf. http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/