WE/ME in epedagogy design

Hey Guys, unfortunately no one of the international ePedagogy students participated in my seminar this semester. Thats was a little bad sad for the other participants, but because the students expected an seminar in english language and there are other international students in we are having the seminar in english, yeah!
You can follow most parts of the seminar on the web as I mentioned already. I just wrote a little blogpost about the seminar in my own blog which might be interesting for you, it is in english too.
It is about Reasons to work with a Blog and Wiki in Seminars, the Request for Feedback to what the students did and an outlook what will happen in the next weeks with the seminar. It would be great if you find some intersting stuff for you or give feedback to the students blogs! (They admitted that the international collaberation would had been very intersting for them!)

Thanks!

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.

I have been talking for some time about creating a method of putting something on one web site and having it published across the web. This is very different from making a link, or using RSS feeds, in both the way it works and its implications.

I have now found a way to use the online word processor Zoho Writer to do this, and I have written about it here: http://www.owenkelly.net/2007/03/13/zoho-for-distributed-publication/ I would be VERY HAPPY if some of you could read this, comment, and if possible try it out by cloning the essay and republishing it on your site.

Even if you only do this on a temporary basis then it will be very useful research for me. I need to see if it actually works, and to do that I need to see it working on some sites where I had nothing to do with the design, layout or content

I have contacted Zoho about the idea and their initial reaction was highly enthusiastic. They have asked their development team to go through my article and comment. If the developent team are happy with the changes to Zoho Writer I am suggesting then this might actually turn into a fully functional real-world project.

Those who have been keeping up with my wanderings will probably understand why this is a key step forward for the whole idea of a memi.

Yeee hah!!!

Dear VLE-group,

I finally managed to develop my list of criteria for the analysis of a Virtual Learning Environment. You can have a look on it here. Please feel free to comment on it.

Jaap, is it right that we now should fulfill the analysis until end of March? Because there seems to be some uncertainty amongst the students…

Cheers,

Christina

Hello everyone,

I cannot be at tonight’s meeting but I have finished my version of assignment 3.1 - which is to say I have written some proposals for analysing VLEs.

You can find the proposal here:

http://www.owenkelly.net/2007/02/14/analysing-virtual-learning-environments/

I would be very happy if you could look at this - at least briefly - tonight.

Please note that there is a box for comments at the bottom of the page. You are supposed to be able to engage in direct discussion about stuff on my site So it would be very useful indeed if anyone who has any comments about what I have written would kindly post a comment on the page.

You do not need to log in to do so. Just write and save and all will be well.

Many thanks.

Maintenance in the “second world” interrupt or VLE-date last Wednesday. So we try again 7.3. 20:00 CET

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.

Last Wednesday the VLE discussion on Skype circled around the idea of microlearning and its possible applications to our work.

I have now drawn together some links to related papers that I have found on the web, including the ones that Ralf originally pointed Christina and I towards. The post also includes links to Marc Prensky’s papers outlining the concept of digital natives.

This is all by way of trying to drum up some readers for my site, of course.

:)

This is mainly intended for those doing the Virtual Learning Environments course, but it may well be of use to everyone else as well

I have been reading an ebook called Learning Spaces, published by Educause, and I have posted a piece about it on my site. If you go there you will find a short description, a link to a page where you can download individual chapters, and a link from which you can download the entire book.

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