30/03/2008 by nicola.

Hi, there are now a couple of new pages at the top of the blog, experimenting with using a voiceblog from Snapvine (thanks Nellie for showing on Ning) can also embed voice comments into current posts as well; and a photoblog of sorts.

Have already been trying using photoblog which is a nice application and I can upload from phone to pc but all image editing has to be done beforehand - it is uploading in very high resolution (2000+ pixels). I am using a N82 and still finding way around the camera - not sure what editing available on phone but will investigate further to see if there is a solution.

At moment using Flickr, have a free flickr account so embedding recent photos in a widget - again not great - can upload in seconds from phone which is great but have to choose photos to embed each time - so faced with either paying for more sets and still have to choose to embed. I can upload photos (and talking photos now with Snapvine) in my regular posts, but I am hoping to keep a general design or other non-work related photoblog separate from all the rest. Still looking for a more permanent useful, mobile friendly solution but it will do for now.

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29/03/2008 by nicola.

We tell stories Digital writing with a difference from Penguin books and Six to Start.

First week was 21 steps using Google Maps - fun way of tracing 21 steps and also gives a great sense that you may not get from images and text in a paper book.
next up was Slice - using blogs and twitter, by following both the girl and her parents separately on twitter, you get an interesting sense of how they all felt.

Remaining week’s classics to be adapted are Fairy Tales, Thérèse Raquin, Hard Times, 1001 Nights.

If that isn’t enough, you have the chance to win 25 metres of Penguin books

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26/03/2008 by nicola.

This is a very thorough, thought provoking Open Gardens post from Ajit

Defining what is open, how it differs to open source - Ajit defines from a customer perspective as

‘The freedom of choice for the customer and the removal of commercial and technological barriers that hamper free communication between people’

Open source does not always imply open choice for the customer, customers are not at the same entry point, they have a variety of devices from which to choose but they are potentially limited by a network operator’s bandwidth / data packages / wifi coverage as well as cost - or even further, how the device browser can access mobile web, what can be viewed, what applications and services can be used with the mobile web on their device (e.g. iPhone),

Are some of these linked to advertising (e.g. the Vodafone mobile web / internet service - their home page has specific advertisements, which you could even unintentionally click on - and due to the limited amount of time you are likely to spend browsing with a mobile, could hinder you from getting to the information you were originally hoping to see - speaking from my own experience of using Vodafone as well as Opera & Nokia browsers on N73 last year).

Use of mobile devices to get news via RSS feeds, development of basic content is also starting to emerge which may have a big impact on mobile markets. Changes for advanced developers as well, being able to develop mobile web apps using open software kits, APIs etc However there are not yet full open standards and open source mobile web coding available in a way that could present a model where small so-called web2 startups could quickly emerge with mobile web services - devices are still too complex.

Existing web companies such as Twitter have found a business model - taking a very simple concept (texts/SMS) that worked on a mobile device and creating a similar mobile web offering (works with iPhones too, which doesn’t appear to be an easy feat ) , or taking advantage of existing services on the mobile device such as IM, also access to their APIs has allowed mobile web developers to come up with their own mobile twitter clients e.g. tiny twitter An interview with founders of Twitter in May last year, suggested that the business model could be to obtain a large enough user base then sell to existing web or social network giant. In the article it also suggests (this is not from founders themselves) that partnering with a network operator/carrier or advertising.

A key concept that Ajit mentions is that you cannot charge for a mobile service that the web provides for free. So what are the options - different levels of service (where premium use funds free usage in return for quicker (possibly), more advanced services), advertising revenue streams (mobile browsing is still not a comfortable experience so maybe audio advertising is going to appear on the mobile web instead) - the next year or so including the intro of first Android handsets will be interesting to see what kind of models can be adopted, whether ‘compromises’ in terms of adverts will be used to fund mobile web apps or whether innovators will seek investment from elsewhere initially and see where it leads them.

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21/03/2008 by nicola.

Weird that the week I decide to go twitter free, I start blogging about it - anyway having put an out of office on my work email to say I would have infrequent access, it appears to be none - will still be available via blog or other aydindesign contact, but doing some small tweaks to website so apologies to anyone if they see weird things appearing and disappearing.

Back to twitter (probably) and work email (definitely) on 31st

Bir hafta sonra gurusuruz

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20/03/2008 by nicola.

Martin Weller has interesting discussion on use or misuse of Twitter, found via Stephen Downes yesterday - about such things as - someone has 1,000 followers and only follows 30 is that misuse ? Some other talk of rules ?
Rules !!! Twitter !!! ok, bye then - time to find something else to do with 140 characters! I follow people I know, who have supplied a link in their profile and I liked their website/blog, random people who have made me laugh or I go to the public timeline from time to time and pick randomly. Sometimes I might only follow people for a day or a week (or even an hour if they provide 16 billion updates over that hour). One of the people following me is following around 28,000 - I’m guessing advertising / PR - so what and why not - who cares !

Posted in Mobile phones, eLearning | Print | 2 Comments »

18/03/2008 by nicola.

exploring-learning-in-virtual-worlds-v10.doc

more of ‘me’ in it - think am several versions away from finished product - nothing like attempting to write a uni paper to realise how many writing flaws, corp papers very different & blog, wiki etc :-)))

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16/03/2008 by nicola.

Have been experimenting for about an hour - Linden Labs released a new version (1.19.1 release candidate) this week where you can edit a shape to display web pages (you can already display movies on them).This is my first attempt (have no 3D modelling experience but managed to get this far). I used the brilliant Torley Linden video tutorial to do it. You need to own land or a bit of land or persuade someone to give you building rights to edit their land, in order to do this.

You cannot scroll pages or click on any links as yet, its just for display purposes. If you can write in Lindenscript, you could turn a shape displaying a web page, into a chatbot so it could add interaction that way. You could make the links clickable too. There is a Firefox browser in SecondLife, but I do not have the ability yet to use it.

Re twitter one, have twitter linked into SecondLife so can see live tweets, but was interesting to see the page instead of just semi-transparent lines of tweets appearing across the screen.

have probably spent around 15 hours in SL to date - interesting that can user-generate 3D content with no coding required, although some limitations.One disadvantage is that you can’t copy and paste what you have created out of secondlife - its proprietary code - but with Sun/NMC open virtual worlds initiative underway, hopefully this will change.

Does html on a prim have any business / learning use ? With movies on a shape, SGI have done this to display live meetings and conferences so that users in SL can view them. Not sure yet about html on a prim but think it has lots of potential - anyone else have any ideas ?

PS as a postscript to this, have been property hunting this week for a place to rent - in real life; and in order to explore web page display in Second Life, have also been land / property hunting in Second Life so it has been completely crazy where I have been on the phone in real life, checking land, land auctions in Second Life, viewing estate agent signs in both, checking payments / fees details in both - sometimes within a matter of minutes - it was so similar switching between worlds………:-))))

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14/03/2008 by nicola.

Learning Circuits Big Question for March
Just some quick thoughts

Quality Assurance - stakeholders (whether learners, managers ) don’t have time to do this, they are trusting you and your experience as an eLearning professional - be it course designer / developer or PM’ing the project - to be able to give that overall stamp - the output is not going to:
a) waste time of 100s or 1000s of employees when they could be doing something else - they might like those 20mins back
b) loss of costs from the project not being delivered, achieving deliverables, assessment not assessing what you wanted it to etc

There are no guarantees that the eLearning is going to deliver what it says its going to, but your QA criteria should take account of that - from then on the responsibility of performing their job better lies with the employee.

Quality Assurance of performance support / knowledge management / social media applications and systems - as eLearning Professionals, we do have a responsibility to input where possible into the development, upgrade and sign-off, of these, as courses become nuggets - if a learning function doesn’t do this alongside other course development then you are effectively ignoring the majority of the employees’ current learning needs.

I was very fortunate in my role last year to work with my manager whose judgement & timing meant that QA process worked very effectively, so very thankful and have learned a lot to improve my own QA as a result of that !

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09/03/2008 by nicola.

Haven’t blogged about this before due to course and workload, but if you haven’t had a chance to look at the recycled phone video, I highly recommend it. This concept was also displayed at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. As a high-end mobile phone user myself, I love the design, even though Remade has been reported as ‘conceptual’ at this point in time, wouldn’t it be amazing to have a handset from entirely recycled materials. This would definitely be on my mobile phone shopping list at any point in the future, because the project mentions that electronic components are remade it would be fascinating to see how well it performed.

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09/03/2008 by nicola.

Well that was very fast paced - not quite sure where last few weeks have gone, think a huge amount of thinking on my part - hasn’t actually been done yet Lots more to think about this week which has affected how I am thinking about assessment & measurement, participation, student comfort level, satisfaction, motivation to learn and the role of institutions.

I attended a session and workshop on Friday about peer instruction led by Eric Mazur (it was such a lively session and he was able to explain in such wonderful clarity, injected with simple humour and honesty, about his experiences - a really great presenter) and how he completely changed his standard delivery in around 1991/2, how he started conversations with other professors at Harvard - breaking into traditional ways of thinking about content delivery, how use of conceptual questions both at the beginning and end enhanced his understanding of what his students understood, how breaking up lectures into discussions and encouraging students to lead sessions has helped him to quickly identify problems they were having and provide advice / explanations. Also how the students felt about the experience - i.e. we are at Harvard, we are paying a lot money and now you expect us to teach ourselves
Better understanding leads to better problem solving even if you do less of it, but reverse is not true.

Other things that have stood out this week in the blogosphere for me was George Siemens presentation on the future of courses, that with increasingly distributed content, the value of networks and reputation of thinkers / theorists may be a way forward in how to try and assess or accredit learning that has not been completed by a formal learning course. What is the value of university education ? Is there any at all ? Is the concept of university simply a higher state of awareness at times, that takes you away from your day to day work to explore concepts? How does the student as stakeholder feel about it ?

Should you go straight into work at 16/18 or whatever and the role of university is enhanced performance support, to help you manage and investigate how you fit in with an organisation, how to explore problem solving, provide safe sandbox / lab environments so that you don’t cost the organisation millions of £s in damage limitation either through loss of reputation, loss of clients etc or more positively, how you can enhance the organisation’s reputation / bring in new clients (that’s a measure of value I guess). Ricardo Semler mentions in Maverick and Seven Day Weekend that at Semco people have freedom to make their mistakes at work.

Also from blogs, the concept from CSAIL and the project with audio wikis, they have tried an experiment in India and South Africa at creating audio wikis which are searchable and a huge benefit being that they are low resource - not just in terms of cost because all it needs is a mobile device (doesn’t have to be high end smartphone) but also in terms of people’s time spent contributing and editing the wiki. Add in social networking using VOIP.. possibilities of tying up ends that would never have met previously is very exciting. Think of all the resources on Curriki and open courseware like MIT or Open University in UK which could be searched, edited by talking into a mobile device.

So where does that leave tutor and an online one at that ? As networks of open distributed content, open sandbox labs e.g. in a 3D environment as well as physical buildings are appearing, what steps can be taken as an online tutor facilitator / mentor to help students who are studying courses now?

Considerations - How to assess their contributions and participation, how to provide meaningful guided feedback to help them explore further or design conditions that help them get out of a stuck place. How to encourage students who are using an online environment for the first time to - have a go at having a conversation using text or audio, have a go at reflecting and documenting their ideas in a public or group searchable resource such as a blog or wiki. How to free themselves from feeling that they have to ‘own’ their written content entirely - that its ok for someone to edit and adapt or make a comment based on it (and that they will suitably accredited as a result); and finally how to design conditions that allow students to participate in online network building and communities, build on their research and document their own theories.

Starting with little steps, building in usage of wikis, blogs, microblogs or personal areas where ideas can be reflected, documented and ideally shared; encouragement of shared research / resources - this is nothing new in 2008 to some people, but these little steps can help those who have been involved primarily in research at universities and less focus on learning & teaching. Show and share examples of where it has worked or not, student feedback is really essential here too. As well as designing conditions for online student networking and communities, design conditions for online community building within academic staff, so they can experience the student experience at first hand as well.

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