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Category: ICT (page 2 of 2)

Darfur is Dying

February 3, 2007 / / 0 Comments

On the Digital Gaming EVO session I am also enrolled on we are talking about online gaming and how this can increase learner interest and motivation?

One participant, Joel, metioned that his daughter plays a game that ends in “dead babies” and this reminded me of something I heard on the BBC Digital Planet Technology podcast in Dec 2006 (they seem to have removed it now so am I allowed to share the mp3 here -see podcast below ) It was about Persuasive Gaming and I was wondering if anyone has experience of these for language learning. The ones they described where about Darfur is Dying available free and how the game is based on trying to get water for your family and Peace Maker simulating the role of Palestinian and Israeli Presidents to find new solutions. (BBC article http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5153694.stm )
Interesting?

Although the argument is these games don’t change the world and they can also trivialize a serious problem, can’t they? But the question is are they maybe a little more ethical and help get away from promoting dead babies, what do you think? I thought Joel’s comment on getting learners to write about how they feel is really good system for opening debate – The debate can be serious and maybe the way to visualize even serious problems sometimes for young learners is to make them accessible to teens in “their” language, to tap into their way of thinking and then encourage discussion on world famine, or Israeli-Palestinian issues and even on how the game has simplified the problem.

Let’s take the Darfur one as an example:

Darfur is Dying

Is it better for learners to be involved simply in creating conflictual environments (World of Warcrafts does have these elements, doesn’t it? ) or trying to resolve conflicts in an oversimplified environment? A difficult question to ask but often the key to making people wake up to the reality is to find a channel that they can tune into, surely?

If playing a game also allows room for discussion on how learners feel and exposes to some of the questions say for example:

  • How did the conflict start?
  • What is the government doing?
  • What has happened to the civilians?
  • How many have died?
  • What happened to the peace deal?
  • Is anyone trying to stop the fighting?
  • What can be done?

and room to explore the answers then I would argue that an oversimplification is helpful.

Given that not all young people know what is happening in Darfur then I would argue it’s better to help them find out. We can start with a game, if that is appropriate, and then follow on with a more serious debate on the issues of “getting water for your family”. Comparing contexts, raising awareness, discussing issues and opinions can help open doors. Not all learners will immediately respond to a New York Times article or an abridged UN report or section on Famine in our coursebooks so if technology can lead us to understand that Darfur is Genocide we can stop and help us take action to stop it then yes, let’s remember Darfur is Dying – find out more and maybe also read and create blog spaces where we can express views and explore new ones? 

Open vs Closed

February 1, 2007 / / 0 Comments

Illya said that Patricia had suggested she post some of the questions from her blog to the YG so everyone could join in the discussion.

Her questions are:

  1. How much of the wheel will need re-inventing? Is teaching for the 21st
    century different than teaching before? Will we need to teach different skills?
    Will the others prevail?
  2. How will we overcome the great fear we encounter when we try to get others to
    see that the world and the way our kids get information is changing? (is it
    really changing?)
  3. Any more questions out there? Are there any answers?

Illya says “ I perhaps focus on teaching because learning is so vague – we really don’t know how and why certain things are learned and others are not. Maybe learning will also change.”

I have to admit that I was intrigued first by the questions (but didn’t have time to answer immediately) and secondly and more importantly I was intrigued to see these questions posted on our YG discussion list (prompted by moderator). This was a clear move away from the open aggregated space we have spent a few weeks setting up and back to the
closed forum type style of a yahoo group.(the somewhat different style of this
EVO session apparent to us all)

But before I had time to write to find out why or if there was indeed a reason, Bee stepped in with “Patricia and Illya, Thanks for putting up the questions. I think they are an excellent topic for discussion. However, there are also a number of readings to do and questions we have asked you to consider and reflect on for this week before you move into podcasting next week.”

I completely agree that this and all EVO sessions have to be carefully moderated and it’s up to Bee, Patricia, Graham, Nick etc to steer the dialogue and ensure participants aren’t overwhelmed. I take this opportunity to raise my hat to you all. I know (first hand) what sort of demands it takes and you are not only extremely committed and helpful but
such rich and wonderful people.

I was just a little puzzled by this “stalling” of the flow of ideas. OK it’s week 3 and slow time, open space and food for thought.

I must admit that I am behind with reading too, too busy comparing public OPMLing features and obviously like everyone tied up with f2f work – university end of semester
exams, so maybe all will be revealed soon when I finish my “homework” but in the meantime can I ask:

  • Can we reply to Illya?
  • Should we record our ideas in audio format?
  • Or add just add text comments to Illya’s
    blog if we feel that’s appropriate?
  • or Send a message to here
  • or just simply wait …..
  • will everyone be able to male the synchronous session?

On the subject of OPEN and CLOSED from last week and moving on to teaching styles this week I thought this illustrated a point and carries on from my own notes over the past few days?

  • How does the flow of information change?
  • Just how much of a group is created between commenters and how much overlap is
    there of generating similar info?

I can see in these few weeks there are central strands and a lot of experiential staged
learning. But if we are coming or were sort of prompted to come together to discuss main issues on the YG instead of (or as well as) on our blogs was this to draw more participants in?

  • Would Illya’s questions sparked discussions elsewhere?
  • Would that have been more dispersive but less intrusive?

We are all teachers and quite involved (time permitting) but with learners this is a real big issue.

  • Were we cleverly slowed by Bee in order for discussion to be deeper and
    more participative later?
  • Will this alienate some learning styles but guarantee
    that “lurkers” and “late comers” have a chance to come forward?

My personal feeling is that the range of tools for this EVO session are well thought out. Moderation communication on chat schedules, welcome messages is well served by YG, for a bank of easily accessible and updatable resources the wiki is great and for the creation of individual but connected and developing ideas and discussions our aggregated
blogs are wonderful.

So I would suggest I feel we should psot our responses direct to our own blogs or as comments to others’, to say in this case Illya’s great set of questions direct to her blog (as some have already) and those who are not ready to take part catch up later when they are. Is that what we are “supposed” to be doing? This is what I would encourage with learners so that those personal spaces can grow with a little moderator watering but without drying out the flow of ideas because there are other tasks to be achieved, or have I missed a point here?

Valentina

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Blogged with Flock

Push and Pull

February 1, 2007 / / 1 Comment

Well we’ve been doing more than pulling our hair out this week, what with tasks and benchmarks and all our own work schedule deadlines etc!! The really pulling has been in subscribing to each other’s blogs and seeing how easy it is to retrieve all the great blog entries in 2 easy clicks (that’s what we always seem to be striving to achieve) and RSS is definitely our ReScue SystemWell they say that RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or some say it stands for Rich Site Summary. I have decided to rename RSS as ReScue System – without those little orange buttons RSS buttonthat provide us with the feeds we need and which we can use to aggregate blogs and news and much more too, for our learners we would definitely be bald by now or have simply drowned along time ago in the sea of information overload.Last week’s suggested reading highlights many some good points

http://www.techlearning.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=163100414
Quentin D’Zouza has some great resources for those who still haven’t got their heads round this one.

So why is Push and Pull so important?
When blogging aggregating feeds are a way:

  • to be active and pull information towards us
  • to narrow and filter the information learners access on the web
  • to easily view the blogs (in their learner’s communities or chosen for the project in hand)
  • to save time and reduce information overload and overwhelming nature of the rich resource the web is
  • to instantly see what new content has been added (this could be video/PPT/audio etc)
  • to create a circle of commenters and thought sharers by collatind feedlist into one folder
  • for the moderator to track what’s going on

Part 2 – What are the differences between the three technologies we are observing with regard to the PUBLIC/PRIVATE

In a way they can all be public and private but they go about this is quite different ways which I have found interesting to discover.

Bloglines
We learnt from our YG discussion what Bee’s pull system. She uses “Bloglines folders you want to make public or private. People will see your username in the URL (just like for your mail
and all the other social tools like WordPress, Flickr and the 43 trio)- it’s your presence online.”

If you want to share your feeds, you have to make your Bloglines public by clicking on the Options link (column left), Blog Settings (page on the right) fill in the username (now…here I have not used my username to login but my nickname – so you may want to use another name) and choose the option: Show my Blogroll >Yes, publish my blogroll and Save Changes.

The address you should get is: *http://www.bloglines.com/public/yourusername

In the left navigation column, at the bottom, you will see you can export your bookmarks (opml file) or import others. This is particularly useful when you have a good number of them and you do not want to make your stds lose time copying them one by one. I usually have them send me the address of their newly created blogs, add them one by one to my Bloglines (there is always one who has to do it) and then give the opml file for them to insert in their blogs so they can have the whole class in their blogroll if they wish.

Just the blogs I want to read like you will find here:
http://www.bloglines.com/public/bee

You can not only share your links but also keep private the folders you do not want to disclose. I have for instance kept them all private and am only sharing the EFL/ESL, Dekita and Open Webpublishing Blogs for this workshop.”

I used the OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) file that Bee shared to import all the complete list of feeds into my own Bloglines Public Space. OPML allows you to import all of the aggregated feeds in one go.

This is interesting as it illustrates the open/closed features.
I used the OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) file that Bee shared to import the complete list of feeds into my own Bloglines Public Space – no problem – 2 clicks 😉 and it’s there http://www.bloglines.com/public/vale24

I also wanted to investigate whether I could share just one folder not all the ones that are in my public space. And yes Bloglines allows you to do this:
insert the following Javascript code into your blog template

If you use PHP or another method to include raw HTML into your blog, use the following URL instead, which returns the blogroll as HTML for just one folder?
http://rpc.bloglines.com/blogroll?html=1&id=vale24&folder=My OWP feedlist

With bloglines you can
• Single-click to select.
• Click again to rename.
• Double-click to edit details.
• Ctrl-click to select multiple.
• Shift-click to select range.
• To reorder, drag and drop into place.

But I wanted to take this experiment in contrasting and comparing the import/export of OPML files one click further so I imported them into Netvibes

Netvibes, as we have seen can also be very useful (once you have learnt how to get rid of a lot of the free boxes and tabs). Graham says “My idea of how you could use it with students was to set up a class gmail address and use that for access. Then you can use it in the same way that you might use a Bloglines account with students, only instead of students having an individual account, they share one. Anything they add to the account (feeds, etc) can be seen by everyone else. I have to say that I’ve never tried this, so I’m not sure how well it would work, but I have tried accessing the same Netvibes account simultaneously from several computers to see if that works. It does.”

So yes it’s public in the sense that you can share the user name and password of the netvibes account and direct learners there to view or add their feeds. That’s got a nice feel to it because you can also set up a “To do list” (useful for keeping students on task at a distance!) and add anything you want really to that home/start page e.g. a Flickr section/ Delicious Bookmarks (with chosen tags) and loads more to customize the page.

But can you also share the aggregated list of feeds with Netvibes?
Yes, by creating a public tab:

• First, import the OPML to your own Netvibes account (import all of the aggregated feeds in one go)
• Then create a new tab, right click the feeds to add them to that page (i.e the new tab page) and there you have a page with multiple windows. For each blog feed choose colour, rename, number of entries per box etc,.
• Then using the tiny (bit tricky that part) pull down menu in the tab itself click “Publish this tab” From this menu you can also fancy things like personalize the tab name, choose an icon and so on.
• Once you’ve clicked publish some code will be generated which I’m experimenting with here
It says:
Your tab is ready to be shared
To share your tab with your friends, send them the following link:

http://www.netvibes.com/subscribe.php?url=http://eco.netvibes.com/opml/80e8054128d1967efb0314a56a39b583/owp2007.opml&type=opml

or
You can also allow visitors of you website to add your tab to their Netvibes page. Use the following code:


Add to netvibes

Once your tab is validated, it will be available to all Netvibes users !
I didn’t understand what that last sentence meant so I searched to find out. The tab has to be verified I guess and then it’s visible in your “my modules” page. The other public modules “are applications and services built by the community of netvibes developers. You can browse our catalogue or click on tabs.” This all seems a little awkward! And more importantly does it work?

Can you see something like this Netvibes OWP 2007 tab

Flock as I have mentioned before offers great drag and drop and edit name features which making subscribing to a feed very very very simple but it also has a superb system for both importing and exporting OPML format– really in only one click.

  • To export news feeds in the OPML format.
  • Click the “Add News Feeds” button in the My News sidebar and
  • select “Export News Feeds…”

But does it allow you to share an aggregated folder of feeds in public?
I can’t find that option yet. And from the forum can see others demainding this feature be introduced!

You can share favourites in public- supports two favorites sharing services: del.icio.us and Shadows but I haven’t been able to find a way of sharing the feedlist the way you can in bloglines or netvibes  No doubt this will be in next version!

Ok, better PULL my socks up and stop pushing those tasks to the back of the list and stop pushing all these PULL buttons 😉

Subscribe in 2 clicks

January 28, 2007 / / 0 Comments

An interesting question came up on the OWP Yahoo! Group.
I can see that there are still so many different ways of doing the same
thing that many are probably still confused about subscribing to RSS
feeds – I know the feeling ;-)
should it be bloglines, netvibes (or feed demon which I used and liked
for 30 trial days) I’ve worked hard on finding shortcuts that work.
Time is precious and manual smethod very laborious and boring. We want
one-click buttons and Flock offers just that!

These are the solutions I’ve found. Our expert moderators will no doubt add others…

Solution 1 – Use Flock as your browser!

If you have had a chance to download Flock and are now using it as your
browser the operation is really smooth so I would highly recommend that.

Then all you have to do is use it instead of bloglines and subscribe and organize your feeds there

  1. visit the OWP blogroll http://openwebpublishing.wikispaces.com/Participants
  2. open the blogs that you want to subscribe to (using Flock as your browser) and then
  3. click
    on the RSS orange button or RSS entry/comments link (with Flock you
    will see an RSS icon in the URL address bar – very cute)
  4. you
    will automatically get a message “You are previewing this news feed. To
    subscribe, click the button below, or drag it to a collection on the
    left.”
  5. Click and drag (Now I found the drag and drop feature really helpful!!! And means you can easily sort folders)

If you want to subscribe to the feeb with blogline you will see flock has a Sub with bloglines button on the toolbar

Solution 2 – Add a sub button to your browser

If
you prefer to carry on using your other browsers you can also add a
“Sub with bloglines” button to your browser see this Easy Sub page

http://www.bloglines.com/help/easysub

What
seems to be happening is these applications we are using are indeed
getting more user-friendly and they are also more inter-related. Great
that’s helpful and social!

Here’s a screenshot of my recently created EVO feeds in my Flock sidebar

Blogged with Flock

Birds of a feather FLOCK together

January 27, 2007 / / 0 Comments

It’s week 2 of EVO and our OWP wiki page lists a great set of tasks that are mainly focused around the open nature of blog, public feeds. We have been involved in aggregating the different blogs of participants to our bloglines account to quickly monitor updates and new entires.

This week we have also looked at Bloglines vs. Netivbes and there have been various comments on user-friendliness which I will list later but the main part of the week has been getting familiar with Flock

Flock is Firefox-based Web browser which integrates next-generation Web technologies such as RSS content feeds, blogs and bookmark and photo sharing all in one.

Flock includes a built-in RSS reader meaning that we don’t need to sundscibe to feeds from out bloglines account we can do that from Flock. This web browser is I think what was missing – it’s really taken on board dome of the web 2.0 features and makes navigation easier.

As the advert goes “Various Web sites and software programs already provide this functionality, but Flock is one of the first to integrate it into a Web browser.” I think that is quite revolutionary, and forward looking!

The best feature of all is that direct from the browser you can “Create a blog post” by pulling down the menu or clicking on the button located in the main navigation bar. The button launches a sophisticated blogging tool that integrates on a drag-and-drop level with Flickr, a popular online photo management and sharing service recently acquired by Yahoo.

Flock integrates with a number of popular blogging services, including WordPress, Six Apart and Blogger, according to Decrem’s own blog.

The aim of Flock is to be a dashboard-browser allowing instant collaborating,
blogging, sharing photos, enjoying what others are doing all from one easy location.
It, of course, is based on tags too and full integrates with del.icio.us

Here’s a good Business week article on it

Here are my comparative notes:

Bloglines:

  • easy aggregator
  • interface a little bland
  • split window viewing
  • can blog with it
  • new folder and
    categories easily managed
  • not much personalisation of “look”
  • name editing restricted
  • very good 🙂


Netvibes

  • completely customizable
  • great for mixed approach
  • integrates YG!
  • + email + News feeds
  • blogroll capacity with great viewing
  • clutterfree to 100% cluttered depending on how you set it up
  • easy editing
  • colour coding possible
  • drag and drop the windows
  • extend and crop the windows
  • very nice feel 🙂 🙂

Flock

  • all of above
  • + add blog entry straight from Browser
  • + drag and drop Flickr photos into blog entry
  • + nice pull down menus
  • excellent 🙂 🙂 🙂

Well, birds of a feather FLOCK together was the best way to describe the philosophy behind this one!

Blogged with Flock

From teacher to network adminstrator

January 21, 2007 / / 2 Comments

From teacher to network administrator in a garden with no walls…

On Saturday (January 20th) we had a synchronous round table and our guest speaker Clarence Fisher was online LIVE from some remote Canadian town loud and clear after some initial (typical) technological glitches. It was a great session and it was wonderful to hear Clarence speaking and confirming many of our ideas and key issues on blogging and openpublishing as well as hearing his expert views on what it means nowadays for our “kids” as he called them to “Be literate”.

He was appreciative of the EVO session title, focusing on the “open” I agree, is a political statement in itself. Here are some of my notes:

An open classroom allows for diverse opinion, encourages debate and shares voices from all over the world.

Teachers are no longer teachers but could be seen as network administrators. Their role now includes helping learners to form networks, value and evaluate and as we all know this means the results we end up with are very NEW . Clarence compared the non-network learning to “walled gardens” where results are stilted and easily fade out whereas with open flexible learning networks you get results you didn’t expect and they strength and develop over time.

So what does it mean to be literate in today’s hi-tech world?

The points Clarence focused on were:

  1. ability to access information – so teachers need to provide places where learners can access. Information is not simply text but now includes images, audio, video, photos.

  2. ability to evaluate the info –requiring much higher levels of reading and writing skills, requiring a whole new set of tools.

The web can give our learners a voice and people who are interested in hearing that voice. One of these new skills is the ability to differentiate between an audience and a community.

Clarence defined audience as: “global, sensational, gives learners a “drive” but is not always there for you. It’s a nice pat on the back though.”

A community, however, is “made up of trusted nodes, a more permanent interest in what learners are “saying”, offering a return to the same network, it drives learners forward with their learning. It helps them understand the lives of others and shows them that having a voice is only about THEM.”

Three essential points for educators to encourage and instil:

AUTHENTICITY – for a real voice to develop that voice needs to be representative of who they are. i.e. Online don’t be some you are not. Note that we stressed that this does not mean giving out Surnames and addresses, privacy issues should be taught alongside.

ETHICS – online act ethically – understand right from wrong, enhance values. Learners can still protect their identity.

EMPATHY – we need to help learners be respectful of people all around the world. Help them understand the lives of others.

Thank you Clarence, Patricia, Bee, Graham and Nick 😉 Great live session.

Other references mentioned:

Collission detection re: Google is no longer a “search engine” but a reputation management system see 15 Jan 2007 entry on “Give me your thoughts on an upcoming Wired feature: “Radical Transparency” at http://www.collisiondetection.net/

Graham has now uploaded audio file if Clarence Fisher’s talk to http://www.webcastacademy.net/node/741

Powerful connections

January 16, 2007 / / 0 Comments

The EVO 2007 session got off to a great start! What a lovely mix of people – quite impressive. The recording has been saved at Worldbridges or direct from the Webheadsinaction site which is also where one can access the chat room. Marvelous to hear all the moderators – so many sweet voices and brilliant sessions.

A good mixture of new and old names – definitely an important beginning….

Halfway into the kick-off presentation and introductions I also popped into SL and got teleported by Vance to Nick Noakes Boracay island! Wow! We had an underground meeting – thanks Baldric fro the comfy chair and then were taken to try out 11 villages.

EVO Kickoff

January 13, 2007 / / 0 Comments

The official beginning of the 13th EVO sessions. On Sunday, Jan 14 at 15 GMT, there will be a webcast at Worldbridges to inaugurate our EVO sessions. Jeff Lebow host.

The chat will use Skype and the webheads in action chatroom at: http://webheadsinaction.org/

Looking forward to that. I’ve enrolled for a few sessions http://evo07sessions.pbwiki.com/ which promise to be great

Digital Gaming and Language Learning http://evogaming.wikispaces.com/

Kyle Mawer – British Council Young Learners Centre. Nicholas Noakes – Director, Center for Enhanced Learning ( http://celt.ust.hk ) and Teaching, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST): http://ihome.ust.hk/~ctnick/ Graham Stanley – ICT co-ordinator and EFL Teacher at the British Council in Barcelona, and Rita Zeinstejer – EFL teacher in Argentina! Wow!

Openwebpublishing http://openwebpublishing.wikispaces.com/

Just take a look at the list of moderators and some of their fantastic achievements on their blogs:

Barbara (Bee) Dieu   http://beewebhead.net
Patricia Glogowski   http://monitorhypothesis.typepad.com
Graham Stanley   http://blog-efl.blogspot.com
Nick Noakes   http://nicknoakes.blogspot.com
Scott Lockman   http://tokyocalling.org
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