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.