edinburghmsc: via @sbayne: Bad games colloquium in Bristol 18 July: 'drugs! sex! fear!' www.playfulsubjects.org
edinburghmsc: via @flittleton: Interesting Web3D article in Innovate (thanks Youenn) http://bit.ly/IYeqE
edinburghmsc: via @flittleton: Interesting new Time cover on Twitter by Stephen Johnson "Everything Bad is Good For You" : http://bit.ly/R5PMx
edinburghmsc: via @s0793898: Don't know when it happened but you can now filter Google image search by creative commons licences
edinburghmsc: via @sbayne: The fourth JISC international online conference www.jisc.ac.uk/elpconference09
edinburghmsc: via @sbayne: International Conference of Networked Learning, Denmark, 3rd & 4th May 2010 http://www.networkedlearningconference.org.uk/
edinburghmsc: via @jimwolffman: Innovating e-Learning Online Conference 09: http://tinyurl.com/lfb99g - via @digitalmaverick @Angrybeth @JISC
edinburghmsc: via @jar: #thewebis a good tag to keep an eye out for over the next few days.
edinburghmsc: via @sbayne: Research Associate post at Bradford on 'the student experience': http://tiny.cc/gOC6H
edinburghmsc: via @sbayne: PhD studentship at Glasgow Caledonian - Being a Learner - http://www.jobs.ac.uk/jobs/SO866/
I'll be offline for the next couple of weeks recharging the inbuilt, solid-state batteries. In the meantime, I've closed comments on posts over a month old to limit those who choose to pummel me with cold meat. See you soon, and while you're here, play nicely without me...;-)
edinburghmsc: via @shugod: http://www.etni.org.il/virirc5.htm
edinburghmsc: via @sbayne: Social media: trends and implications for learning. Free online seminars. http://AACE.org/GlobalU/seminars/socialmedia/
So, the kind of censorship we've been hearing about most this past few weeks has been of the Iranian type. However, while it may be fashionable to carry your green Twitter avatar in support of free speech halfway around the world, we are all too quick to forget that on our own doorsteps public sector internet service providers regularly block free speech and tools that make this possible with their firewall policies. It's not any cleaner or more reasonable than Iran blocking Facebook or Twitter for their purposes, serving only to control what the public hear about their public services.
Join The Guardian's global challenge to crowdsource internet censorship of all sorts right now, and show how much of Britain's and North America's public sector ISPs are just as unreasonably restrictive of adults' web rights as Mr Ahmadinejad's Government.
Pic: Censorship
When social networks were still finding their feet among their key demographic a few years ago, I was a keen advocate of formal learning institutions and their staff keeping out of those spaces, certainly not using them as social learning environments. danah's research backed this up and the concept of teachers creating "creepy treehouses" was enough to knock that desire of some on the head.
Seeing how the US Army has harnessed Facebook for a mix of both informal communication and leadership is opening up the question again in my mind, as the demographic using Facebook rises well into the 30s and Twitter's growth started with an older demographic and is only now appearing to edge southwards to early 20 year olds and teens (thanks to my wholly unscientific research - danah, if you're not busy this summer...).
It's particularly pertinent as Local Authorities charged with improving the prospects of their learners and staff in an increasingly technological age do not cease to become ever more Machiavellian in their desire to clamp down on any communication about the realities of being a teacher or learner in their patches.
On the Facebook blog this morning says Lieutenant Colonel Kevin Arata (link to his FB page):
From an institution that in 2000 wouldn't allow unfettered access to email (and before that whose "Full Metal Jacket" reputation preceded it), one of the most traditional public institutions with the most apparently valid potential for killing communication to those back home has come a long way. And it also shows how far schools and teen learners working within them have to go before their life cycles start matching the real world.
What is it that Facebook brings the military? It allows family to keep in touch with minimal effort through a great deal of the deep ambient intimacy of the status update:
Facebook is also giving a platform for sharing of skills and advice between recruits:
It also allows senior members of staff in the military to, quickly and easily, without disrupting the flow of their day, update via cellphone or laptop on what (non-secret) operations they are undertaking. What exactly does an army Colonel do? Well, now you can 'follow' them and find out. It will almost certainly make a few more people aspire to doing something different or improving their act not just in seeing what superiors and, above all, seeing what peers are up to.
While intranets and VLEs provide a structured learning environment for teacher-defined groups of learners, they do not provide very well (or at all) for friends-of-a-friend (FOAF) communication, happenstance connections and temporary windows in on what FOAFs are up to. They are designed for preset activity with preset groups, despite the admirable efforts of talented creative individuals to shoehorn them into other more enticing uses. It's hard to argue that, in terms of how kids connect within the school environment with school-like material and contacts, things have really moved on since the likes of my students blogging and podcasting from their French trip in 2003 (the 2004, 2005 and Auschwitz blog remain). The fun serendipitous connections are happening very much outside the school boundaries, and the school institution itself remains largely blind to this. The knock-on effect is that school and what it should stand for - learning - are also blind to learners outside the schooling complex.
Now, at Channel 4 the Education department has worked with great skill over the past two years to create learning opportunities in the social networks and spaces where young people hang out (think Battlefront, YearDot, Routes.... There has been little attempt to make these interactions fit into schooling per se. At 4iP, where many of our products and services involve learning of some description, we continue this 'non-school' of thought.
I wonder: is there mileage for schools in looking at what the Army is achieving here and for what purposes, and seeing if there are unmet needs in the schooling environment which could be supported by social networking services and platforms which are increasingly better embedded in society? Or is this something in which only others outside the formal schooling environment are prepared to invest?
Pic: Full Metal Jacket
