Online Educa Berlin 2006 - Day 1

Online Educa Berlin 2006 started today for me, 10 years after my first participation in the conference. It was a good day with a full-day forum on Virtual Mobility, that we (from the Victorious project) co-organised with the Being Mobile project.
After an interesting keynote by Ray Land (currently at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow) titled "The Next Generation of e-Learning: Time, Mobility and Identity", I gave a presentation in the Victorious parallel session on some of our experiences with the Vic feasibility studies.
After a delicious lunch, we had interesting round table discussions, the summaries of which are available on Wikipedia, where I created this new lemma on "Virtual mobility".
-- To be continued --

Stephen's Web moving to Drupal

Interesting news from Stephen Downes: In the interview that Tom Wambeke and I had with Stephen in Barcelona, he already mentioned that some internal changes were impending at NRC. Now Stephen writes that his website will be moving to Drupal - a platform that we have been experimenting with extensively at AVNet - K.U.Leuven. It will be interesting to follow the transition of his extensive website on to Drupal. More about this at: Stephen's Web and HalfAnHour.

Web 2.0 Seminar at AVNet

Today, I'll attempt live blogging from an internal information seminar on Web 2.0 in Higher Education, organised by AVNet. The replay of the -Dutch language - seminar can be found here.

• The first speaker is Tom Wambeke, lecturer at OHO, Open Higher Education of the Polytechnic KATHO. Tom starts by showing the Web 2.0 tools that he has used in the previous week, then attempts a definition, and classification.
• Examples:
  
• First: http://www.netvibes.com/starts the day
• Second: http://www.linkedin.com/
• Third: my del.icio.us tags (as a tag cloud)
• Fourth: last.fm - Musical profile
• Fifthly: http://www.43things.com/
• Finally: http://www.furl.net/ Tagged URL's
• Tom's slides are available at http://www.slideshare.net/
• Web 1.0: 45 million global users of 250000 sites - passive consumption of published content
• Web 2.0: Published content & user-generated content - 1 billion users of 80.000.000 sites
• Varied arsenal of tools
  
• Weblogs (www.edublogs.be), wiki's (George Siemens' wiki of his keynote speech at Online Educa Berlin 2006), fora, social bookmarking (Furl, del.icio.us), podcast/vodcast (Stanford, K.U.Leuven), virtual worlds (Second Life), instant messaging (MSN, Skype), social network services (LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube)
• Definition
• The Wikipedia definition is not adequate in Tom's view. Tom lists a number of basic characteristics, and feels that no adequate definition is available.
• It's not about new media, but more about an attitude towards those media: Interaction, Networking, Feedback and Communication.
• The technology becomes more and more transparent: KISS (Keep it Simple and Stupid).
• Unfortunately, my battery power is running out, so my life blogging needs to end here... The rest will be 'after-the-fact'.
• Brief summary of Maarten Cannaerts' talk:
• Maarten described 4 examples of how Web 2.0 applications were used in real-life cases: - slides available online
  
• Information competencies in the 21st century
• The ELISE Online course on didactic aspects of e-Learning
• Virtual internationalisation in the GO! project
• Teaching & research communities through group blogging: www.edublogs.be
• Finally, Bieke Schreurs tried to summarise some of the good practices & lessons learned and related them to the Virtual Learning Environment within the Associatie K.U.Leuven.

It was a difficult exercise in trying to balance 'much information' with 'focussed and relevant information'. The participant evaluations will need to show how successful we were.

EDEN Research Workshop - Impressions

Highlights in the EDEN Research Workshop sofar are the

• session on Audiovisual Issues, and especially the presentation by Jack Koumi, a specialist on media characteristics,
• the keynote by Rob Koper, who starts from an interesting definition of competences,
• the interview that Tom Wambeke and I did of Stephen Downes, who will be doing a keynote later,
  
• and the election of the paper of Alberto Cattaneo & Elena Boldrini as Best Paper during the conference dinner.

Sofar a very positive experience.

EDEN Research Workshop - Barcelona

Currently at a - potentially very interesting - research workshop in Barcelona (Spain) - more info on the EDEN Website.
A number of interesting keynote speakers, but also the format of the other sessions promises to be very exciting, with much debate and discussion and little presentation.
I'll try to do some live blogging on the way.
(Already said hi to Stephen Downes)

International speaker seminar series: Venus Seminars

On October 11th, the first of a series of video-conferenced and webcast seminars with renown international speakers - the so-called Venus-Seminars - welcomes the well-known scientist Ricardo Petrella. The intended audience for these seminars consists of students in higher-education, but also the general audience is targeted. This year's theme is "Global issues for the European citizen", and lists an impressive group of speakers, including Joanne Ciulla, Wolfgang Wessels, Jean-Jacques Cassiman, Stephen Downes and Derrick de Kerckhove.
Interested individuals can participate in the webcast, interested institutions with video-conferencing facilities can participate in the full session.

Elise study and meeting day

DSC02746
Originally uploaded by Smetty.

Last Thursday, the Flemish Elise community organised a study and meeting day in Leuven around practical examples of e-learning in higher and adult education. Chairperson of the day was Luc Vandeput, e-learning manager at Katholieke Hogeschool Leuven. Pity I couldn't be there, due to my broken ribs...

Windows XP on a Mac with Apple Boot Camp

The newest Intel-powered Mac computers will be able to run Windows XP natively, with the installation of Apple - Boot Camp
I think I'll wait another year for the bugs in the newest MacOSX to clear off, and then I'll consider buying an Intel-based Mac to do my video editing, podcasting and Graohics work intuitively, while being able to do my regular project work on my Windows machine. Cool stuff (if it works)...

Educational Guardian on e-learning at universities

I was interviewed by The Guardian regarding our experience with Flashmeeting and Hexagon. We used both technologies in the EliseLeren training course, but have started using FlashMeeting in very many international research and education activities. You can read the article on EducationGuardian.co.uk | E-learning | Universities adapt to a shrinking world

Writely acquired by Google

Long time since I last published something on my Blog, but now I feel the urge to briefly mention the following.
Writely.com informs us on their website and their Blog that they have been acquired by Google.

Now this is what I call good news!

We have been using Writely for some time in our EliseLeren course, but have not advertised it on a larger scale within the university, because of the risk that the service would be cancelled at some point in time. Now this risk has strongly diminished, and we can start testing it on a larger scale for collaborative learning and writing.