The good and the not so good at ELI 07

Things I liked about the conference

• It is very well organised, things happen on time, presenters are well prepared, there is always refreshment etc
• You get given loads of materials, and clear directions to web resources. People are really good at sharing
• There aren’t too many Brits
• There are people who genuinely care about students, and a fair sprinkling of practitioners
• There are no forced social events, but given that teams are encouraged to attend, it can make networking a little difficult as teams tend to stick together – but still better than being stuck next to someone you have nothing in common with for the duration of a meal.
• Being able to talk to someone about blue orchids, without being mistaken for a some horticultural weirdo

Things I didnt like about the conference

• Eaters, talkers, and clickers. Whose idea was it to have breakfast sessions, where you are trying to listen to someone talking and some porker is pigging away at a trough of scoff next to you? Why come to the session if you are going to talk to your friend all the way through it? And turn your click off on your PDA! cretin!
• Being confined to the hotel, any city centre with a heavy atmosphere on the streets on a Sunday morning has got problems in my book.
• Following on, muzak. Being confined to a hotel with, horror of horrors, jazz muzak is pretty much my idea of hell.
• Very poor bloody marys in the hotel bar. Less celery, more vodka. Oh, and I like putting my own Tabasco in, ta very much
• Atlanta – what would it take to get me back here? End of.

What does it mean for the LTI

I would really like to keep blogging when I get back. At the moment, we have meetings (which seem to get harder and harder to arrange); I stroll around chatting, but it is scattergun communication – if you are not there, or you don’t hear what is said, you don’t know about it. I wont stop strolling around, but I want to try something different.

We, really really seriously, all have to take more responsibility for our web presence. If this means upsetting a few corporate police so be it.

We need a more prominent role in the new Adsetts extension, it is on our patch and we need to get stuck in

Learning Spaces

I think people are only tinkering, refurbing old spaces with a bit of sexed up furniture and kit, or fitting out new spaces with the latest gadgets. These things date very quickly, and never quite offer the flexibility that you were after in the first place. What was interesting was the student input into these spaces – they want 24 hour opening, good lighting, food and drink, some relationship with the outside world (windows, patios, cafes), they don’t want teachers to be around – OK, not rocket science. Students want these spaces to be the physical embodiment of the stuff described above, and don’t like the assumptions that are sometimes made about their needs. For instance, a lot of these learning spaces have multimedia studios, fine for certain types of students, but a lot of them also want whiteboards and flipcharts. And they might want to loan a bit of kit, like a camcorder, but they are not planning on doing any fancy editing etc There is this idea of the third space – apparently a concept just beginning to appear in library journals and suchlike (can someone go off and tell us all what the first and second spaces are?). What we have in the Adsetts and Blackwells is as good as anything I saw. The huge building programme at SHU worries me now, as we are designing it for the students of 2007, rather than 2010

People and technologies

Just as there is a spectrum of digital natives, young people who got on the bus at different stages, the same it true of digital immigrants. It was really impressive to see folk not just paying lip service to social networking stuff, but using it in a way that has clearly transformed their practice. This isn’t an age thing – some of the older hands are nostalgic for the frontier days of the internet, without realising that it is all (sort of) happening again. It is one thing to know about Facebook, flickr etc, another thing entirely to jump in and swim around in all that stuff. The folk who know the names of the new stuff but don’t use it are just like people from a few years back whose attitude to students was “we have found this wonderful thing called the Internet, let us show you how to use it…” There are still a lot of educational developers, learning technologists, and librarians whose first, often unconscious, reaction to the new stuff is to somehow try to rein it in, or put some controls onto it, or think along the lines of “people think this is fun, but it could be really educational, if only...”

This is going to sound odd, but the people I see at the cutting edge of all this stuff are thinking differently about a lot of things – things like: privacy; currency of knowledge; what constitutes true expertise; what is the best way of communicating with others; what scholarship means; and even, friendships. I was quite sceptical about things like MUVEs etc, but having seen the way folk in this community act, I am softening up. The starting point for everything around all this new stuff, it seems to me, is the truism that the best way to find something out is to ask a friend. This goes right across the whole social networking/ Web 2.0 stuff, whether it a student working on a group project and IM-ing their friends who are in other groups, to having friends who you have never met in the flesh, to willingly sharing stuff with others (all over the world) whether it is expertise or dumb questions you feel uncomfortable asking.

The other truism relevant here is “two heads are better than one”, you don’t have to know all about the collective unconsciousness, or meme theory to realise that all of a sudden connecting with people is getting exciting again. If you still think the web is a bit of a mess, with lots of dodgy information and dodgy people; that email basically is a bit of a pain; that you don’t quite understand your mobile phone; that, sometimes, life was better before all this crap (it’s OK that’s how I feel a fair proportion of the time) – move on, and have a go in this world.

A Wider World: Youth, Privacy, and Social Networking Technologies

Tracy Mitrano, Director of IT Policy and Computer Policy and Law Program, Cornell University
Anita Rho, Student, Cornell University
Cyprien Lomas

Facebook represents a growing number of applications that provide communication, connection, and community building among users, so please bring your laptop to this session for an introduction to this cool new tool! We will learn how to create an account, make "friends" (connections with others you know or would like to know who share common interests), and use various functionalities such as bulletin boards, "poking," or posting content such as text, photos, and video. If the prognostications are true that e-mail is for old people and social networking is the new killer app, then come join the future!
www.facebook.com
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Tracy Mitrano
this has surpassed portals
Should Uni's filter with Fb? U's should make it clear if they do. Disclosure.
Question: No need for References in employment process? (Google, Fb, etc, etc)
Thoughts on Facebook article on Cornell U site: http://www.cit.cornell.edu/policy/memos/facebook.html

--------------------------
Anita Rho

• Fb is for keeping in touch with your friends.
• Has privacy controls - several levels
  
• 'Poking' - Fb's wy of saying hi
• Fb separate from MySpace, Friendster, etc
• Some people use multiple sites
• Some are avid and some aren't
• Some people just put email address in there and so
• "You give what you want to get" Degrees of exposure
• Honesty rules - how much do you trust the info
• Misrepresentation is not a vilation
• Rules in law apply to cyberspace, eg identity theft
• You can modify the truth
• How do they compare? - they serve similar functions but suit different groups. Fb has a college profile.
• MSN is a messenger and email, this about sharing information about yourself.
• The News Feed allows you to see what your friends are doing
• How much time do you spend on Fb? Very avid user, at least once a day, sometimes five
• It allows you to keep in touch with people who in normal life you may otherwise have dropped
• The Wall is for posting messages to friends in a public way - demonstrating friendship
• Used it to get notes from class mates
• Create study groups in a class
• It's a form of publication. Like local newspaper columns of yore? Does everyone want to
• Notes: 'blogging lite' - She has friends who use it to post their life story.
• Fb casual. Instant gratification, more convenient.
• The photos that will keep me from running for public office
• You can take your account offline but Fb holds onto your details.
• This gen embrace the chance to share info and are not so concerned about violation of privacy.
• "I guess my political career's over!!!" - "No, all the voters are in there too"
• You have to befriend people before you can access people's pages.
• Comment: "It seems like a dating agency" - "Whatever you want to use it for, but if you want a dating service then go to a dating service."
• Find unknown potential friends through social tagging.
• The default is everything's open so
• MySpace is cumbersome and ad dominated. MyS is for younger.
• Bebo is huge in Ireland.
• Hives in Holland.
• Good place for universities to advertise courses. You can really target based on location, email adreses, etc...
• Fb used to feel 'exclusive' but felt cheated when it got opened up.
• As you get older you want to self-censor. Employers are using it to filter applicants.

Cyprien Lomas

• Registration offers to import Gmail address book - beware of unintentional spamming!
• News Feed
• Start with adding basic likes, etc to profie then add detail (over time). "I had never put this much data into an ePortfolio. A good way to keep up with professional friends."
  
• 'Poking' - lets friends know that their name crossed your mind.
• 'Events' - invite people. Informal, social list of who's coming.
• Not many bloggers are in here
• 'Groups': mass comms tool for targetting friendship groups. eg ed tech group...
• Adverstising: most cost effective way of reaching appropriate audience.
• Status updates: sometimes it's far too personal.
• Age: OL Privacy Act. Under 13 need parents permission.
• Question: Elgg: do we need special soc net sites just for ed?

Georgia Tech visit

First of all it involved a bus. Conferences and buses. I have bad feelings about these things. Conferences and buses sometimes mean things like: the only spare seat has dog do on it (Ed Media 2004); the journey involves crossing several counties (HEA 2004), or several countries (Ed Media 2004); or people being very ill on the way back (any conference in Scotland); or carrying ex SHU staff out of Disneyland and putting them in the luggage rack on the bus (Educause 2005, Anaheim). But I digress.

I always like a big night out on my last night at a conference, and this time I decided to visit a library. The Georgia Tech learning space was pretty impressive, and not far off what we have with the Adsetts, it was a bit like the Studio with Herman Miller furniture. In the pursuit of objectivity, I conducted a quick ethnographic investigation outside the library. I joined the smokers, and lured in by the promise of english nicotene, they told me the facility was great but it didnt go far enough. What we had was less than 10% of the space transformed, and the students were a bit baffled as to why the rest hadnt been done. I will put up some links so you can see it later.

Andrew "chickens out of most things, like getting a conference bus" Middleton did ask me later on if these things only worked in new buildings. That is a great question. What isnt funny is that SHU has nearly £70m worth of building going on and we are building buildings for the student of 2007 - we should be thinking about 2012 and beyond. There are only so many things you can do with furniture etc we should be taking more risks along the lines of the immersive learning environment we are thinking of installing. Richard Mather can tell you more about that.

Father Google and Mother IM: Confessions of a Net Gen Learner

The rise of the millenials has spawned new conversations about engagement and learning on today's college campuses. But what do these Net Gen learners really want? From the mouth of a confessed Net junkie, learn what makes these students tick, what ticks them off, and what faculty and administrators need to know to bridge the generational divide.
-------------------------------------------------------
You may have read this before in Educause Review: 'Father Google and Mother IM: Confessions of a Net Gen Learner'. Carie Windham's presentation here was very close to the article and both were great. I hadn't realised that she refers to her time as a student in the UK at the U o Ulster in the article. This was stuffed full of insight into the Neomillennial Learner. She had great presence and really carried the audience along. She told me the session was recorded so I hope to link to it rather than capture any notes. She also agreed to let me interview her about audio and how this may or may not fit well with the neomillennial so hopefully this will be coming to a podcast near you if we can find some time to sit down.

The millennial student... now the... The Millennial Instructor

Carl Berger reporting on annual surveys conducted over 20 years re adoption of learning technologies with staff and students. He has possibly identified a new category of Millennial Instructor - someone who perceives themselves to be adept, comfortable and proactive with technologies. Research charts academics and students more or less where we'd expect, but this new MI category might provide some useful insight. If it exists I wonder if peer mentoring is something that we should consider given that faculty declare they prefer to learn about technology from colleagues, even when 'experts' are available?

Chris Dede's session

I notice that Paul has chickened out of dealing with this and I noticed there's a recording on ELI site. Take an hour out and listen to this session - it knocked everyone sideways for an hour or so today. As CD said he wasn't attempting to do any crystal gazing, but it really consolidated many of the discussions that have been happening in the informal spaces. A lot about the digital divide. Strangely it was quite pessimistic and 'dark'. How do we get from here to where we know we need to be?
I've got pages, and pages of notes, but I'll save you. Here are one or two...

• Is the real world crumbling around the users of MUVEs (Multi User Virtual Environments)? Are they too immersive and disconnected?
• Check out River City the MUVE developed by CD
• A lot on ubiquitous computing: wireless devices have 60% of power and 10% of cost of PCs from a couple of years ago and enable the 3As (any time, etc) and instant in hand mobility.
• Animistic environments! Objects have souls - useful if you remove the theology?
• Augmented reality especially when you add GPS to mobile devices

The big, dark message is 'We're not teaching the way they're learning' - that's a problem if 'they' means neomillennial learner, but for us us it's even darker because we can't define 'they' so simply.
Good quote comparing HE to cemeteries (listen).
I saw a couple of times today, here included, that technology supported research was a carrot to get faculty interested in technology supported learning.
Professional Development - the need to UNlearn. Faculty need to take a step back to reflect and see significance of all this stuff. How is that going to happen?

Get Real-Games for Learning

This session was a Learning Circle, a new session model being tried by ELI. In this session we had about 20 in as tight a circle as 20 people can make. The focus was on how do we take 'games' to faculty? It was intended for people who are still trying to work out how games fit into the curriculum and there was a mix of experience amongst us. Firstly the model was very good - I hope the other Learning Circles worked well, it will be interesting to hear.
We have found at SHU that the word 'games' becomes a hindrance after initially using it as a hook. We have also realised that the territory maps very well to existing practice (assessment, simulation, situated learning, etc) and that technologies known collectively as games help us to take such pedagogies into the digital domain. That was my contribution.
Again a lot of talk of SL. Equally there was talk of 'Jeopardy' and when you realise those extremes are occuring in the same argument it's much easier to shift the discussion towards seeing this as an opportunity to encourage faculty to consider new pedagogies.
There was talk about whether we should develop the games ourselves and people were generally asking many of the questions that have preoccupied us, and continue to preoccupy us.
It was good to be able to make a contribution to the discussion, and I think this was seen as useful to many people. I got a lot of people wanting to talk after the session so hopefully I was making sense.
Gardner Campbell was making notes and also the discussion was recorded for a podcast so I will come back in and add a link when they become available. Probably appear here - click on the podcast tab.
I got talking to Gardner after the session which was great because he has written the most useful article on educational podcasting that I've read.
We spoke about how 'play' was a much more useful word than 'games', which led me to say that for me 'audio' is a much more useful word than 'podcasting' because it's one important step removed from technology. Technological words, I have come to realise, are good for hooking and generating interest, but must be let go because technologies are stuck in time and so constraining and they result in narrow ideas.
I'm really enjoying the opportunity to have some great discussions. Apologies to Paul because I was due to join him on the trip to Georgia Tech to see the learning space there this evening but I was too absorbed in this session to leave.

Learning and Teaching with Ambient Mobile Video

Experience It Session
* Cyprien P. Lomas, ELI Scholar in Residence / Director, Learning Centre, The University of British Columbia
* Sang Mah, VP Strategic Projects / Researcher, ComVu Media, Simon Fraser University

What happens when all learners have a casual ability to create, share, and broadcast live video, anytime and anywhere? The latest mobile phones and wireless networks allow unprecedented capabilities for event recording and sharing, videoblogging, citizen journalism, and collective broadcasting. Participants will use mobile phones to create a live channel on the Web that can be seen by a personal community or global audience.
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Gadget time. This was excellent. Used a Nokia N80 phone to broadcast live video will PocketCaster. And ComVu. $400 phone broadcasting to a web page. Mash that with GoogleMaps and a bit of blue tooth and not only can you watch live video selected by locations of interest (we searched for and watched video from mobiles in various cities around the world) you can also search for videos that have been saved for various locations and see a visual trail of a journey as the video plays. So we watched a stream from Stanley Park in Vancouver and by its side saw a trace on the map representing the vehicle's position as it travelled round the island.
So what can we do with this? Well, the main characteristics are mobile, easy to use, live and very accessible and discoverable (and reusable when saved too).
It has a special place and high impact when there's a live, story worth telling. 'Live' and 'story' or 'event' I think are key here. 'Personal' may be something another useful word. Someone else suggested 'wow factor', but that's wow for us and in the hands of students they're likely to be too cool to be wow-ed by the time we could get this on campus.
There's also a web-based studio facility, so given a range of these tools I imagined their use in changing variables in some augmented reality scenario. ie a simulation facilitator is getting instant feedback on augmented reality team exercise and can throw unpredictable challenges out as needed.
This sounds like gadget time Richard! Various phones can use PocketCaster including the Motorola Q.
It was good to meet Cyprien Lomas and put a face to a voice. He and others here have been very friendly in welcoming us foreigners.
Got to dash to a games session now... and can't keep up on the sessions.

designing learning spaces that promote engagement

This is part of Maricopa, called Estrella Mountain Community College - so I am expecting something interesting, and hoping that I dont start craving decomposing pigs.

Most of these sessions have shown us Learning Studios - which by and large look like the Blackwell's conversion but with lots and lots of computers.

They have a partnership with Herman Miller, as do Georgia Tech. Herman Miller do have a UK office, maybe we should have an exploratory chat with them. The watchword for this project was radical flexibility. There were rumours that they would be portakabins on wheels.

The question they asked the academics wasnt "what kind of space do you want?" but "How is your discipline changing?" followed by "how is the teaching of your discipline changing?" answers were desk space, good lighting, storage areas, ubiquitous access, etc etc They had 3 levels of learning studio, where level 1 is like a traditional classroom with flexible furniture, level 2 has more laptops, level 3 every student a laptop. Teachers have to justify using a level 3 by outlining their plans and pedagogic approach. They built some prototypes to influence academics, then built 22 learning studios.

Their evaluation of the studios compared what happens in traditional classrooms with the studios. The methodology looks a bit weird though, I will try find the link later on.

here it is:
http://www.estrellamountain.edu/awareness/studio.asp

Making huge claims for enhancement, eg things like asking active questions in clasee, all as a result of the studions. CCSSE.org is where the data is - go to

http://www.ccsse.org/

to have a peep at the US community college equivalent of the NSS. Have a go at drilling down a bit to see the number of options on offer - phew.

mentioned using Gartner research, which hadnt occurred to me, but we do have a subscription and we should definitely explore that.

why dont innovations spread more rapidly in HE?

This was led by Stephen Ehrmann from TLT and Phil Long MIT.

the full report is available at
www.tltgroup.org/iCampus/
and
icampus.mit.edu

This session was about why staff in other institutions dont pick up on innovations created elsewhere, the NIH problem (not invented here). I came because I thought there would be parallels in the barriers we face in mainstreaming our innovations across our own institution.

Basically, Microsoft gave MIT a great big wodge of cash to build cool things. A distinctive feature was that students could bid for funding - around £25k was available for each individual student project. When they offered the iCampus software to other institutions there wasnt that much take up. The list of projects reads something like TLTP type stuff. Almost all of the adoptions were outside of the US, which is very strange indeed - adopters were India, China, Australia - not that strange when you really think about I suppose. US adopters were driven through teachers meeting other teachers.

The reccomendations are about how to accelerate the development and spread of innovations like this. Unfortunately, one of the presenters like the sound of his own voice, to quote Chuck "he was a smart guy and he may just be as smart as he thinks he is..." This meant that we didnt really get around to the conclusions.

7 years and millions of dollars - if you visit the report, you should note that when Americans use the word "assessment" around things like this, they mean "evaluation."

They looked closely at 5 projects - things like using labs remotely, writing skills (! that one is called iMOAT), a system for annotating with video (XMAS), - and all this stuff was free.
this might ring a few bells - there is plenty of innovation going on, the issue is getting it to impact on students and staff.

It was when they started coming out wiht things such as "almost all educational innovations are content specific" and "regarding dissemination of content-specific innovations: peer to peer connection is crucial but doesnt scale." I started to feel an attack of the Victor Meldrews.

The real problem here, you know, might be the open source thing. How much value do you attach to something free? and is anything really free? and what is the incentive to update and support this stuff? OK, you see something you like, but then what do you have to do? figure out how to make it work in your context, realise it is using something your IT people dont like/understand/ support; if it goes wrong who do you call? etc

If you have a big buy in to the VLE as we do, then the tools somehow already fit. What worries me is that this iCampus is what Web 2.0 might look like - it's Woolies pick n mix versus Thorntons. It's Revels versus Quality Street. I like the odd chocolate lime or pear drop mainly for nostalgia/gimmick value, but give me Valhrona 80% any day.

Podcast IT: Preparing Faculty for Academic Podcasting

I had to go didn't I? But I didn't pick up anything new so I've come out to think about the excellent Chris Dedes session. Paul and I both went to this general session, so it will interesting to see what he picks up on.
But as I'm in podcast mode I thought I'd try to connect Dede's session ideas to podcasting and attach these musings as an audio file! I recorded a clip and was about to send it. But not now... this place is a chocolate factory and I don't know where to turn.
Connectivism or what... Bryan syas 'tell Louise hi'... then he tells me an hour or so later 'Louise says get bloging'. I say Louise is ill today and Bryan knows, and I don't know how I know... and I better hit send on this and try to capture some of what's been going on today.
[Couldn't connect to SHU server to upload audio, but will put it on OurMedia when I get a second]

random ramblings

oh dear, the Chris Dede session earlier was very good and I am surprised that Andrew hasnt put it up yet - though he was ferociously networking at the end of it. But, oh dear, have found myself in a bit of a stinker here... I have turned up at session billed as "what would learning spaces look like where community is central tenet?", but so far all we see is pictures of brains, and a load of stuff about how the college was founded etc etc How not to do a session methinks. The folk on my table are all asking if we are at the right session, and many of us are looking at the (closed) doors.

Now we are being given Chickering and Gamson. I met Ken Panko just now, he has left Bradford and gone to Yale. Some of you will remember his visit when I kept calling him Donnie Darko. We are not getting many responses to the blog - are there any reasons for this?

the first speaker has now sat down, and now we are hearing about Dayton uni. Turns out it started out as a Catholic uni, and they are talking about communities of learning but in a Catholic context. This is starting to feel like punishment.

Maybe what we need is a decomposing pig.

The Biter Bitten…

Y’all know how patient I am. Sorry, gone a bit Southern there, I will start again. One of the things that is guaranteed to drive me crazy is when you are talking to academic staff about, say Blackboard or PebblePad or whatever, and they tell you that they’ve heard it is crap/ that such and such is better/ that another institution has stopped using it/ or that it must be good as the University of Blah Blah has adopted it and it is turning out to be fantastic. Sometimes these other people are fellow academics, sometimes just other people, sometimes the children of academics, sometimes brothers in law or whatever. Whoever they are, they drive me mad.

Some of you know I have a friend who teaches at a Certain Well Known University (CWKU) in the US…

So, the second person I talk to at the conference is Mary S. That’s all I can see of her badge and she is eyeing me curiously. Ever the gent, I introduce myself. “Uh huh” she says “I am Mary S****** from the e-learning team at CWKU.” Rather a heavy emphasis on the last few words. I get as far as saying “Oh I know CWKU quite well, as my friend…” She interjects – “Are you the famous Paul that Dr ex Scouser is constantly telling us about?” I own up. She says “I get to meet Blackboard Paul finally…”

CWKU has recently dropped Blackboard and gone to Sakai. So my mate goes from Bb to the joys of open source lash ups. I swear I have had two brief conversations with my chum about his e-learning ventures – he just asked me what I thought of Sakai - but clearly I have, as Jade Goody said, turned into the kind of person I don’t like.

Building a campus culture of Information Fluency

This is based at University of Central Florida, and boasts an excellent web site at:

http://www.if.ucf.edu/

the website is interesting as the IF initiative is a bit like their TALI, and we could learn a lot from their marketing and dissemination of their initiative.

As is typical of a preconference seminar, they gave out tons of stuff, and unusually, I will be bringing it back with me.

Headlines:

All that stuff about the net generation isn’t quite working out as we thought – information fluency isn’t the given we thought it was

But the old folks are still having problems with the whole concept:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fm3Icamb6yM

but there is maybe an explanation of this, first put together by Wired’s Chris Anderson

http://www.thelongtail.com/about.html

the top Google searches from last year:

• bebo; MySpace; World Cup; metacafe; radioblog

the top news search on Google was for Natalee Holloway (?!?!)

user generated content? Different ways of publishing? One of the speakers has his stuff at:

http://www.lulu.com/

and if you really want to understand how to find the really good stuff out there, George Seimans is your man:

http://www.knowingknowledge.com/

UCF run a student competition with nice prizes – they have to find the answer to a question that is going to take more than 3 seconds on Google. An example was, identify the author of this quote; what day did the author say it; on what day of the week did he die?

A couple of Chuck-isms (for it was he who ran the show):

• We are drowning in the same water that they are swimming in (a mashed up version of something Carl Jung once said to James Joyce)
• Apparently, UCF students think UCF stands for U Cant Finish – what do we think SHU students think SHU stands for?

Georgia Tech Library and Information Centre

This will be a two part report, as I am going to visit the place tomorrow, presumably in an armoured bus. Lori Gee from Herman Miller was at this, she was co author of the book I picked up in San Diego last year, the one that I loaned to Malcolm Todd after his D&S Learning Hub presentation.

4 years ago students were not using the Library, so they experimented with what they though was an information commons. They decided to talk to the IT folk, previously the mortal enemy, and what they ended up with was a Dilbert farm. The only people who went there were folk who wanted quiet, and definitely not interaction.

So they have been trying again, and this is what I get to see tomorrow. This time they talked to the students by running affinity focus groups to assist in the design. As they said, you don’t have to sit around trying to imagine the answers to what students want, you just have to ask them. These sessions were brainstorming sessions with post its, then participants group the post its into affinities ie groups or qualities, then give a literal title for each group, then give a metaphor. Last step is to give a metaphor for the whole thing, all their groups came up with the same metaphor - refreshment for mind and body.

Then it all got a bit far out, but it did manage to upset all the librarians in the room. Sample quotes:

• If library is a destination you have to keep my mind and body refreshed, if I have to go elsewhere I wont come back.
• Flexible furniture, take with them wherever they go in the building – our library is a stage so you collect what props you need on the way in.
• We are the intellectual museum showcase for the university
• We wanted exciting shocking micro exhibits in their midst.
• Student have started giving service staff tips.

Bryan Matthews, who works there, keeps a blog on all of this:

http://theubiquitouslibrarian.typepad.com/

They finished off with a picture of the time two female students actually put a tent up in the library to do some serious revision.

I have never heard an American harrumph! But the women next to me was getting there.

The 6 emerging technologies you should watch out for

mainstream within 12 months:

• social networking
• user created content

the web is being restructured - expectation now is that it remembers who you are, what you did, who your friends are, things you might like to see or listen to...

mainstream within 2-3 years

• virtual worlds (separate from gaming)
• mobile phones

1bn mobile phones will be sold in 2008, they are starting to be the tool people rely on, over things like laptops etc
virtual worlds or the 3d web are clues as to what the web might look like soon

mainstream in 4-5 years

• massively multi player educational games
• emerging forms of publication/ new forms of scholarship

there is a wiki that was used to generate the list, details to come. I have put this up now, as Andrew M really is a demon blogger and I just wanted to get something up before him just this once.

First generation ubiquitous computing: social mobile and game-like

Bryan Alexander
A Jackson Pollock of a presentation. Fast and covering so much. Hard to see the sense still being so close (good metaphor :-) )
Hard to know what to take away, but here goes:

• Web 2.0 is not just about new content. It reveals people's interest in history and memory (and the need people have for making sense and finding context?).
• Web 2.0 sees the incredible proliferation of discrete addressable chunks that underpin soc net: blogs, links, comments, searchable services references those chunks, and the cascade of references. (me: knowledge cannot pretend to be static). "A flow overtime of ideas" being socially developed and remixed as needed (but actually that's what we've done in RL - Bryan just changed the course of my thinking), so it's the scale and pace of this that is most significant perhaps?
• Listed data (big numbers) for users of Delicious, bloggers, Flickr accounts, etc. I won't list them - they're already out of date dear reader.
• Interesting fact: Flickr started out as a game (actually, that shouldn't surprise us). Don't be misled to think that Flickr is a place to store pictures. Consider its soc net-ness.
• Web 2.0 succeeds because it's open - universities have a long history of being (and depending upon being) closed silos. What should we do?
• SL being used as a prototyping and design space.

K•12 Students Speak Up About Technology and Learning: Are We Listening?

Julie Evans, Chief Executive Officer, Project Tomorrow - NetDay
Since 2003, the NetDay (www.netday.org) Speak Up annual online survey has collected authentic, unfiltered feedback from K•12 students about their use of technology for learning and entertainment. Learn about students’ expectations for technology use and their aspirations for a 21st-century learning environment as uncovered in the most recent survey data.
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There are one of two sessions that address the question of students of the future. I'm glad to say I've already had several conversations about the need to address literacies other than the technical literacy that some Digi Natives show. In the previous session there was some data that suggested younger kids were showing increased signs of multi-tasking. I thought the data just showed they hadn't learnt how to organise themselves. I think we need to be really cautious about simplistic perceptions of fluent DNs. What are they fluent in? What aren't they fluent in? Looking forward to this session...
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This didn't disappoint. How applicable the data is to the UK I don't know and I'm not aware of an equivalent survey in the UK. This is still very useful. Presentation will go up with podcast on Educause site and Netday are publishing results as they process them. Student data due 26th Jan. so here are a couple of notes from me in the meantime.

• She said there's a 'spectrum of Digital Natives' (Yes!) Classrooms in k12 are only recently reliably connected (and what they're doing with that may not be great yet).
• Online courses are perceived as opportunities to get extra support compared to offline by students
• Outside of school use is very different to in school use of connected technologies
• Severe obstacles in school especially teacher control that 'added inefficiency' and led to a student perception of irrelevancy' of schools for learning
• Tech is just a tool to kids - no shiny metal fad as with adults. It's there, they use it. It promotes/enables 'effectiveness, efficiency and accuracy'
• Older kidz teach younger kidz about techs
• We haven't reached a tipping point with teacher ICT skills

Good session. Look out for info as we may adopt some of this in student survey. Also worth looking at Pew research on demographics. It would be interesting to ask similar questions so that we could map UK against US findings.

I realised it's good to have a daughter and that she is a good source of data (I interviewed her at Xmas).

Next Bryan A....

Look Here! Using Visual Media to Teach Critical Thinking

Preconference Workshop - Joann Martyn, Academic Computing Coordinator for Arts, Performance, & Recreation, Carleton College
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Doing a fair amount of idea generation in this session - it must be Monday and CDT day! So far there are not too many ideas that we have not considered before - so team, we're up there with the best. It's good to see some of our conversations underlined by other voices here and I do sense people are just warming up - especially those that have had to travel from blizzard bound parts of the US.
Good things so far. Blooms Tax expressed as verbs: Creating, Evaluating, Analyzing, Applying, Understanding and Remembering.
Didn't take long to find people wanting to talk about SL - the ultimate visual environment. Univ of Illinois get students to create a school in SL. Must check this out.
Visual scaffolding - visuals helping to keep students in scope (eg Maps)
What-if scenarios - changing viz plans, etc
The session considered two significant group assignments: creating a magazine on topic 'x' . So many opportunities (in fact too many outcomes if you're not careful). Of particular interest is the opportunity to actively develop understandings of copyright law. I never thought I'd say that, but really in student generated content projects we ought to actively look at ownership and ethics around copyright.
The second significant project considered was a video documentary assignment. Videos were developed by students to generate class discussion - and it was the discussion that was assessed rather than some of the technical stuff. I have extensive notes if anyone's interested in discussing this later.

Paul's right about Atlanta

I'm glad I'm about to be emersed in a great conference. I too have pledged not to return here. The Rod Stewart gig is obviously going to be one of the happenings of 07 in Atlanta for the locals.
Here's a highlight:

and here's a view without rain:

Even the risk free amongst our party are being uncharacteristically cautious when it comes to venturing out. The only exercise I'm going to get is pushing the elevator button to the 15 floor of the CNN building. We're on the 5th floor, but the adrenalin rush of travelling in the glass elevator is as good as it gets.
So plenty of anticipation here for a good conference.

welcome to atlanta

I did say I would never come back here... it took us nearly two hours from getting off the plane to get out of the airport. I've been through some transport shambles in my time, but yesterday took the biscuit. The weather is just like at home. The big news last night was that Rod Stewart was playing just around the corner, somehow Andrew and I resisted the many ticket touts and had a quiet night. Well, a quiet night by my standards. Conference starts at 8 am tomorrow and we'll be in touch then.

Welcome

Paul and I will be recording our adventures in Atlanta at the 2007 ELI Annual meeting here and will be doing our best to avoid Jay-walking (it doesn't go down well apparently).
Please comment to ressure us that life in Sheffield continues when we are not there.