Eds Up

Coolest places in Second Life from KoiNUP

noreply@blogger.com (Nick Noakes) — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 16:55:00 +0800

Let's see if these spaces live up to the billing!

<a href="http://www.koinup.com/places/">Second Life Places</a>

Humanity - the lows

noreply@blogger.com (Nick Noakes) — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 12:39:00 +0800

There are days when humanity gives me hope and there are days when I despair. Unfortunately, today is one of the latter as I read Kathy Sierra's blog ... go read it and then act!

http://tinyurl.com/2awwow

Bronwyn Stuckey on Virtual Worlds & Social Learning Contexts

noreply@blogger.com (Nick Noakes) — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 10:52:00 +0800

Friend and colleague, Bronwyn Stuckey, is an invited guest blogger over at the 21st Century organization blog on this topic. Bron has a wealth of experience in this area with her work with Indiana University on Quest Atlantis, plus her doctoral research work on internet-mediated communities of practice.

Hop on over and take a read! It is engaging and covers some very salient points, very quickly.

Bronwyn talks in part about the differences between digital games and virtual environments and in the third post she gives Jim Gee's list of game features:

1. Empathy for a complex system
2. Simulations of experience and preparations for action
3. Distributed intelligence via the creation of smart tools
4. Cross-functional teamwork
5. Situated meaning
6. Open-endedness: melding the personal and the social

What seems to be missing from Gee's list, but maybe it is embedded in one of these features, is personal (and group) narrative, and multi-membership and identity (from Etienne Wenger's ideas in Learning for a small planet) that I think flows from the narrative.

I have watched videos by Joi Ito on Goggle about World of Warcraft, and have talked with one long term WoW player, and this certainly seems to be a feature of MMORPGs and MMOGs - and also seems to be from my short experience of Second Life. I am building up an identity there that has a relationship to, overlap with, my online identity - which also has it's own narrative and history that can be partially seen by Googling my RL name. My avatar in Second Life, Corwin Carillon, also appears to be developing a narrative of sorts that can be Googled.

So what is the role of narrative and identity in virtual worlds? How does it fit in to a learner's, or teacher's, or community's, learning and identity development?

What do you think?

Digital Gaming & Language Learning EVO begins!

noreply@blogger.com (Nick Noakes) — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 14:13:00 +0800

Yesterday, we started the TESOL Electronic Village Online workshops. With over a 100 participants signed up, this is going to be a fantastic six weeks using Yahoo! Groups, Wikispaces and Second Life! In the pic is the welcome message for evogaming members taking up the optional participation in Second Life. From Corwin Carillon via blogHUD

Blogging from inside Second Life

noreply@blogger.com (Nick Noakes) — Wed, 1 Nov 2006 15:00:00 +0800

This is a blog post from within the online 3D environment called Second Life. I've been investigating this in my evenings and weekends for the last few months. Thanks to colleague Cyprien Lomas at UBC in Vancouver for getting me in here, and NMC colleagues (Larry, Alan, Danielle, Heidi) for continually firing my enthusiasm. :-)

My experiences so far have been exhilirating - seeing what teachers and students have done and how it empowers them - and also frustrating - both with Second Life being in perpetual beta and its associated technical problems and with some of the current constraints of the scripting language.

I hope this gets through. If it does, it's all thanks to Kosso (Koz Farina in Second Life). Thanks Koz!

posted by Corwin Carillon on Boracay using a blogHUD : [permalink]

NMC 2006 - Cleveland

noreply@blogger.com (Nick Noakes) — Tue, 6 Jun 2006 06:46:00 +0800

I'm at the airport in Hong Kong on my way to the New Media Consortium (NMC) Summer Conference in Cleveland. I attended my first NMC conference last year and it was great, so I'm really looking forward to this one. A highlight for me will be attending the two-day digital storytelling train-the-trainer workshop with Joe Lambert from the Digital Storytelling Center at Berkeley.

Speculating: Blogs as .......

noreply@blogger.com (Nick Noakes) — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 13:30:00 +0800

I've been reading discussions over the past few weeks about blogs as personal learning environments. This got me thinking a lot about the personal development planning and eportfolio system I developed in 2001 and which never got to take off in my institution for a variety of reasons. Systems like ELGG came close to what I did and did a bit more on social networking/FOAF side with the metaphor of personal learning landscape. But the metaphor I had at the time I started was more of learning journey. But in the system I created there was the element of Etienne Wenger's "learning trajectory" - past, present and future all together. In Etienne's research agenda, the notion of identities also figures strongly and this I believe is an important element too. So right now I'm thinking of Blog as a combination and/or aggregation of ...

.... learning journey
.... learning trajectory
.... (learning) identities

In the system I built, the learner could connect different areas (knowledge, skills and attributes) of their learning together - cross-hyperlink them. I never did manage to display this visually in the way I wanted (as per the Brain software) but I still think all of these elements are important. The system is still missing important elements like showing connections to people, and the possibility of providing a genealogical view ... i.e. multiple ways of looking at the journey.

Now with our online identities being spread all over the net, in comments in various blogs, flickr, del.icio.us, etc., and at various events, we need a way to bring these together simply and quickly. And we need to visually show (semantically, socially and genealogically) our journey, trajectory and identities all in one ... something that aggregates and connects our learning into one visual interface for our lifelong personal portal (side track: I think this means we would need to be able to tag our own comments, not just our posts).

In Europe a year or so ago, eportfolio people were talking about an eportfolio for life. The notion of whatever we system we use being fir life is key if the ownership is really going to be, as it needs to be, with the individual (and not any one course or institution).

Blogs weren't ever designed for this purpose and, as they are now, aren't ready to do this. But the world has moved on a long way since the time when blogs were first developed. We need something now that will aggregate all of our 'selves' and visually display our journey, trajectory, and identities, in multiple ways. Maybe the front end is something like a personal portal/aggregator in (building out from the likes of protopage and netvibes) with an interface that allows for multiple representations of our aggregated selves.

The EduGlu project that D'Arcy and others are just starting to get going one element of this jigsaw - although maybe we need personalGlu, rather than EduGlu. But what are the other elements that are key? How do we connect them together? How can we display them in multiple ways? How do we tie this to the individual for their life (or as long as they want) and not a single course, or a single institution, or a single organization or a single community?

Tags:cny chinesenewyear chinese_new_year

Offering online 'creation spaces' and being spread too thinly online

noreply@blogger.com (Nick Noakes) — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 16:16:00 +0800

In one of the online spaces where I occassionally post, one of the members asked for comments on the idea of offering blogs to a community's members. His post got me thinking about how I might reply if I was one of the members of this community and was asked.

OFFERING CREATION SPACES - IT DEPENDS
Obviously my answer depends a lot on my context. Although I'm not a prolific blogger, I've ended up with a number of blogs because of testing things out over the last 18 months or so. My first was in an early version of ELGG. Then I set up this one. At the same time, I had a shared Blogger blog for the Horizon VCOP. Then I was given one at Educause and more recently was gifted a WordPress account from an online colleague. Just 4 weeks ago, as part of the TESOL EVO podcasting_elt workshop, I set up a blog at edublogs and a podcasting blog at Podomatic. I also have a flickr account and a personal and group del.icio.us account. I also work in a number of online communities and subscribe to numerous other people's blogs (which, for the last year, is pretty much how I keep up-to-date with my field).

This is a lot of online spaces! I'm spread too thin! And posting to just this one blog intermittently is hard enough (I still need to form the habit of writing everyday!). So an offer of another blog wouldn't help at all.

WHAT IF
But what would help is if all my different feeds were collated into one feed (using something like SuprGlu) and then this one feed was brought into the online community (perhaps using something like Feed2JS). This way I could retain ownership of my personal online spaces like my blogs, social photosharing site, social bookmarking site, etc. but all (or some) of this could be brought into the community to both share resources and to share a deeper understand of the community membership. Now if all the other members did the same, we would have a very rich and dynamic source of where members foci are at any point in time and also where they have been historically. And visualilizing this in some way I think would be a great thing for community memory (... or organizational memory if this was inside a company or a community of companies in a supply chain).

AND IN EDUCATION
As a teacher and faculty developer, I've been thinking about this for my classes and for our instution. What if students' eportfolios were their suprlgu feed? The categories and tags within their personal social software spaces, could be used to selectively bring their work into a course that resided within a central learning management system, for the duration of that course. While at the same time their eportfolio, their online spaces glued RSSly together could collect/collate all their work, academic and non-academic, within and across semesters.

Could bringing 'the small pieces loosely joined' into a centralized commmunity system(s), at certain points in time and for specified durations, work to balance the distributed/centralized, person/community, individual/organization, private/public, personal ownership/shared ownership that is needed in learning in the 21st century?

Horizon Report 2006

noreply@blogger.com (Nick Noakes) — Tue, 7 Feb 2006 14:24:00 +0800

I've just received the hard copy of the Horizon Report 2006 published by the New Media Consortium. This is the third annual report and it is produced by a panel. I was one of the panel members and, for the most part, we collaborated online using a wiki to work through a process facilitated by Larry Johnson, CEO of the NMC.

I think the report is a valuable read for anyone working in the area of teaching and learning in higher education. The report reviews emerging technologies that are likely to have a key impact on teaching and learning within three time-frames: a year, between 2-3 years and 4-5 years. The report is available online as a pdf file, so please distribute it to people in your institution.

Chinese New Year Slideshow (courtesy of flickr members)

noreply@blogger.com (Nick Noakes) — Fri, 3 Feb 2006 12:04:00 +0800

Chinese New Year in Hong Kong. Thanks to my fellow flickrites for these great photos!

CNY 2006

noreply@blogger.com (Nick Noakes) — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 17:48:00 +0800

It's Chinese New Year, a time I always enjoy in Hong Kong. A time for family and sharing great food. It's easy to reflect and to look forward at such times but then it's even better to live in the moment and celebrate life and the network of relationships that sustain us.

Podomatic

noreply@blogger.com (Nick Noakes) — Sat, 28 Jan 2006 17:32:00 +0800

One of the tools the facilitators of the TESOL EVO 2006 Podcasting workshop (whew what a mouthful!) have pointed us to is an online podcasting service called Podomatic (similar to Odeo and Blogmatrix). The audio recording quality seems a bit better on Odeo and Blogmatrix but it does have some nice features.

I've created a podcast site there and have also placed it into iTunes, so you can subscribe through the iTunes podcast directory if you wish. It is called the Eds Up Podcast and is here.

Please listen and leave a comment :-)

Podcasting in ELT

noreply@blogger.com (Nick Noakes) — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 09:48:00 +0800

I'm just about to start a TESOL Electronic Village Online course on Podcasting in ELT. More to come once we're all into the online workshop. In the meantime, the facilitators have created a Frappr map.

Presenting RSS to Higher Education teaching and service staff

noreply@blogger.com (Nick Noakes) — Fri, 25 Nov 2005 19:00:00 +0800

My colleague from the HKUST Library, Ed Spodick, and I presented a 90-minute session on RSS to teaching staff today. They were incredibly patient given the jargon we were using! The presentation needs quite some work with what goes on around the slides. Nevertheless, they have asked for a hands-on session next week to try this out, which is great!

Anyhow, the pdf of the presentation slides is here if you want to grab them. The last slide gives the URL for the mindmap we used for the outline and also links to various sites we used.

Vodcasting via iTunes 4.9

noreply@blogger.com (Nick Noakes) — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 16:57:00 +0800

I discovered last night that the recently released version of iTunes (4.9) would download video automatically as an RSS enclosure and play it within the area that normally is used for the album cover image (or the image for a podcast) … so I suspect the next gen of iPods will deal with video/vodcasting.

In iTunes, just click on Advanced -> Podcasts in the menu and add in a feed that has video incorporated into it's RSS 2.0.

Gnomedex, Microsoft and RSS

noreply@blogger.com (Nick Noakes) — Wed, 29 Jun 2005 12:08:00 +0800

I must admit to chuckling a little when I listened and read about MS's announcement at Gnomedex of RSS being built in to the upcoming IE7 (as part of MS's next OS). Why am I chuckling? Coz I have both Mac and Win machines. It's on the Mac already within Safari (the Mac browser) since OS X 10.4 but I've also had it in both IE6 and Firefox courtesy of YouSoftware - a great company with some great Mac and Win apps.

So if you have a Win XP box, go download and install the beta of YouSubscribe: RSS. I've had one-click subscription in Firefox and IE for a while (it integrates wth Outlook) and it deals with podcasts really neatly.

If you have a Mac, install their product You Control: Desktops. And no, I don't have any connection with the company except as a user of their software.

Worldbridges EdTech Talk Webcast - Interview via Skype

noreply@blogger.com (Nick Noakes) — Wed, 29 Jun 2005 11:58:00 +0800

I was interviewed last Sun (26 Jun) by Jeff Lebow as part of the Worldbridges webcast. My thanks to Jeff for inviting me ... it was fun! I'd encourage others to attend these. You can download the mp3 here and there is also a feed you can subscribe to.

The interview covered Electronic Portfolios, Digital Storytellying, and other aspects of networked learning and new media. We also spoke about the New Media Consortium’s Summer Conference.

Digital Storytelling

noreply@blogger.com (Nick Noakes) — Tue, 28 Jun 2005 17:50:00 +0800

After just listening to Julie Leung's "Blogging as a Social Tool" presentation from Gnomedex 2005, I've been debating with myself about linking this .... but here it is (in very reduced quality), the digital story I created during the 3-day workshop at the NMC conference.

NMC 2005 initial thoughts

noreply@blogger.com (Nick Noakes) — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 13:08:00 +0800

The New Media Consortium's Summer Conference was great ... well organized, a range of conceptual to practial sessions, fantastic venue and most of all ... an enthusiastic, grounded and exceptional group of people!

The opening and closing keynotes, by Henry Jenkins and Stephanie Barish respectively, were both related to new media literacy and were an excellent frame for the conference; focusing us all on learning in the 21st Century. The presentations are now going online and most are being linked from within the conference website.

The highlight for me was attending the 3-day, pre-conference digital storytelling workshop run by Joe Lambert and Emily Paulos, the co-directors of the Center for Digital Storytelling at Berkeley. I cannot recommend this workshop strongly enough. If you'd like to sign up for one of these, see their 2005 schedule. And if you want to know more, download their free cookbook (pdf).

I'll post later about one or two of the sessions I attended.

Finally, thanks to Larry, Nancy, Rachel and Adam from the NMC, and also the hosts from the Digital Media Center at the University of Hawaii for a brill event!

NMC Summer Conference in Hawaii

noreply@blogger.com (Nick Noakes) — Fri, 13 May 2005 14:27:00 +0800

I will be travelling to Hawaii in June where I am co-presenting at the New Media Consortium conference with Cyprien Lomas, Ruben Puentedura and Wayne Brent.

I will also be attending a pre-conference workshop on Digital Storytelling which will be run by the Center for Digital Storytelling and I'm really jazzed about. My thanks to Helen Barrett for putting me on to this great group when we met at the ePortfolio Australia conference in Melbourne in December last year.

Now all I need to do is buy a good digicam before I go! Suggestions anyone?

Essential tools for Flickr

noreply@blogger.com (Nick Noakes) — Wed, 4 May 2005 15:14:00 +0800

Flickr and del.icio.us are two essential learning support tools for any teacher or learner in higher education (and K-12 for that matter). This blog post is regularly updated, so worth subscribing to the RSS feed.

http://pchere.blogspot.com/2005/03/great-flickr-tools-collection.html