WE/ME in epedagogy design

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.

The seminar ‘Knowledge Formation I + II’ will start on Thursday, April 5th, 4-6 pm. The last synchronous session will be on Thursday, July 12th, 4-6 pm. Please let me know in advance if you want to participate in the seminar this summer semester. Thanks.

Seminar description: The seminar deals with the history and development of means and ways of representation in art, science and religion. The consequences on the respective systems of thought, perception and action will be viewed, ranging in time from the Renaissance invention of central perspective to the application of contemporary media technologies. Cultural-sociological and formation-theoretical implications of the “historic Apriori” in the specific epochs (M. Foucault) are of special interest. The main focus of discussion will concentrate on the abolishment of the boundaries of central perspective and its impact on further developments particularly in art history.

The seminar addresses both students who have already participated in other seminars concerning KnowledgeFormation as well as ‘new’ students. The seminar will be organized mainly as blended learning concept with cooperating groups of students from Hamburg, Helsinki and Rotterdam. Inter-group-communication will be accomplished via webbased community system (Commsy), eMail, chat and video conferencing.

Type: Tutored self-study with synchronous events
Language:English
Kind:major
ECTS:4-6
Assessment: International credit points or ‘Leistungsnachweise’ can be obtained by contributions to the seminar’s topic, usable as Learning Objects within the knowledge discovery tool „study.log“ for fellow students.
Start: Thursday, April 5th, 4-6 pm

The seminar ‘Pedagogical Media Theory’ will start on Thursday, April 5th, 2-4 pm. The last synchronous session will be on Thursday, July 12th, 2-4 pm. Please let me know in advance if you want to participate in the seminar this summer semester. Thanks.

Seminar description: Pedagogical processes are unthinkable without media, this includes the (still) so called “new media”. The seminar will approach the problem, whether and how the modern understanding of subject, society, and formation (Bildung) changes or even has to be newly defined, caused by the development of new media technology and its effects on the meaning of ‘media’ and ‘mediality’. Encompassing a wide range of mediatheoretical reflectable subjects, a pedagogical mediatheory will have to be developed, which has far reaching consequences for pedagogy (and this is not restricted to media-pedagogy).

The seminar will be a tutored reading course organized mainly as tutor-supported open distance learning with synchronous events and in cooperation with groups of students from Hamburg, Helsinki, and Rotterdam. We will communicate via CommSy, use the reading and writing tool eMargo, e-mail and video conferences or chat. This seminar is mainly based on Torsten Meyer’s book: Interfaces, Medien, Bildung. Paradigmen einer pädagogischen Medientheorie, Bielefeld: Transcript 2002 (http://www.transcript-verlag.de/ts110/ts110.htm)

Type: Tutored self-study with synchronous events
Language: English
Kind: major
ECTS: 4
Assessment:
International credit points or ‘Leistungsnachweise’ for Hamburg’s study of pedagogics can be obtained by writing several short essays.
Start: Thursday, April 5th, 2-4 pm

On Wednesday 31 January 2007 20.00 CET the meeting will be in Second Life. A very good and detailed instruction how to join and where we meet you can find here some entries before (VLE Meeting in Rosario).
Hopefully your avatars are looking nice and everybody join this meeting.

At the end of last year the Virtual Learning Environment agreed to have their next meeting in Marinetta, the capital village of Rosario in Second Life.

This is NOT intended to be a session about Second Life, but arose from a Skype discussion in which Jaap said that he found there was not enough information for him to contextualise input unless there was some visual aspect to the input. It seemed interesting to see whether the SL avatars would more or less useful information than the jerky images we get via video conferencing.

To attend the session you will need a computer capable of running Second Life; a Second Life account (which is now completely free); the client downloaded on your computer; some time playing inside SL; the coordinates of Rosario.

This is how you can get these:

1. Most computers that are less than 2 years old will run SL, including laptops with reasonable graphics cards.

2. You get a Second Life account from the SL website at www.secondlife.com and specifically from https://secure-web7.secondlife.com/join/  You have to choose from a list of available last names but the first name can be anything you want. You then get to choose a basic avatar. Once you are in the world you can customise this as much as you want - it is just a convenient starting point.

3. The joining sequence will finish by offering you the chance to download the software you need (Mac, Windows or Linux). Then you install it like any other software. (On Windows this will mean that you need administrator rights to your computer. If you haven’t then your IT department is living in the eighties.

4. Before you go into SL download a free Unofficial Users Guide in pdf format from here: http://www.sldrama.com/index.php?action=tpmod;dl=item7 The interface in SL is not the most intuitive in the world and this will be an invaluable help. Then go into SL and go through the induction procedure, which is a step by step 30 minute guide to moving around and using the controls.

5. Since the purpose of this is to convey visual information it will be useful to spend some time making your avatar appear like something that expresses something about you - or the character you are playing. (This difference - is my avatar me or is it a character in a game? - is a large debate for a session somewhere…)

6. Once you are hapy with the interface you can get to Rosario at any time by clicking on Map and then searching for Rosario. Make sure the map is showing at maximum or almost maximum scale and the island should almost fill the map. Click somewhere and choose teleport and you will arrive…

If anyone has any difficulties with any of these steps, please leave comments here and I will try to solve any problems. Please spend at least an hour or so in SL before the session because otherwise you will be stuck on Intro Island on your own for much of the session.

Cheers

Owen

Dear Jaap and the other course participants,

Something in our communication seems to go wrong… Chris(tine), Chris(toph) and Chris(tina) were online this evening, wednesday 06/12, 8pm cet - but we were missing the rest. We used the time for talking about problems in orienting in our study program. This was interesting, Christine wanted to start a discussion topic on this in this blog because this seemed to be an interesting topic for all students.

We now agreed on meeting again next  Wednesday, 13/12/06, 8pm cet. We hope to see you all?!

Cheers,

Christina

Dear Jaap,

I have one question concerning your course “Didactical Analysis of VLEs”. I would like to participate and have now heard that you have started the course yet in the Skype meeting of the project group “Visual Knowledge Building”. I have read the comment that you would join the meeting on 15th November one day late. But I did not know about a Skype meeting anyway.

Are you going to provide regular Skype meetings for your course? Is there a timetable?

I have downloaded the one document in MimerDesk - are there more documents needed?

Perhaps you could post an entry into this blog with all the information needed to participate in your course - as I probably will not be the only one interested…

Thank you!

Christina