Posts filed under 'Social Software'
While it is widely accepted that life experience which elderly people bring with them is very relevant in senior education, recent research indicates that this is also true for ICT and specifically to design effective learning technologies, methodologies and content for the elderly.
Taking this into account, the APADIS project has initially explored learning technologies to foster group activities instead of individual ones, and strengthen specific social relationships. Social Web 2.0 technologies can play a key role in that.
At the Ágora School of Adult People in La Verneda-St. Martí (Barcelona, Spain), which is based on participation, in fact we have built:
- A virtual gallery based on Yahoo! Flickr, an online photo sharing system, that allows the elderly students to store and browse previously downloaded pictures and to share them with their friends at the school, and with grandchildren and adult children at home, online.
- A blog based on WordPress which enables the elderly to work collaboratively with other students on the same or different projects online.
Both technologies enable old people to demonstrate their ability to use computers to their social circles (namely, their grandchildren who are a source of motivation and adult children, who can play a negative role) by using the Web, which we have found to be one of the most relevant indicators of digital literacy amongst the social networks of elderly people. These technologies also support online group-related educational activities, which are much closer to the elderly than those individually-centred activities fostered by traditional learning methodologies.
More information:
What is APADIS? APADIS is a project funded by the Spanish IMSERSO intended to design and develop an online virtual learning environment using open source technologies that meet the educational needs of elderly people in both online and traditional learning. APADIS builds upon ABE Campus, an online campus for Adult Basic Education, open source (http://www.basicampus.net/), currently being used in a broad array of courses at Âgora. The project is coordinated by CREA, http://www.pcb.ub.es/crea
The paper accepted for publication at the ACM Crossroads, Meeting some educational needs of elderly people in ICT: Two exploratory case studies. by Sergio Sayago, Patricia Santos, Maite Gonzalez, Miriam Arenas, and Laura Lopez, provides more detailed information and analysis. Contact Sergio Sayago at his e-mail address at upf dot es.
Sergio Sayago, Josep Blat and Toni Navarrete. Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain)
November 2nd, 2007
I am in Odense, Denmark at a conference organised by the University of South Denmark on Scaffolding learning - web 2.0 and e-portfolios. I gave a presentation on Personal Learning Environments. The presentation focuses on the different ways in which people are using Web 2.0 technologies for social networking and creating and sharing. It goes on to assert that this is a major challenge to the future of education systems and institutions which are in danger of becoming irrelevant to the ways in which young people live and create and share ideas and knowledge. The final section of the presentation outlines the ideas behind the PLE- with the PLE being seen as a concept rather than a particular substantiation of technology.
You can see the slides here and you can listen to the whole presentation by clicking on the MP3 file below.
Personal Learning Environments:
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May 7th, 2007
This week I am participating in an on-line conference organised by JISC in the UK on the use of Web 2.0 for content sharing in learning and teaching. Its an interesting conference. I was much taken by a comment on the Web Forum by George Roberts who said “I am musing as I listen.
We are distributed, listening to someone speak and with whom we largely agree. It is a lunchtime seminar so we eat our sandwiches quietly. The slides are variously beautiful or informative. We share an aside with a colleague. So far so the same. Different: the presenter can see our aside so we censor or heckle with intent. We are online so we multi-task: a little e-mail, a quick f2f chat with a colleague who assumes I am listening to music and therefore interruptable, a comment here, a quick search on Flickr for a May morning image.
My question is whether we are simply using new technology to do what we have always done in the way we have done it? Or, are we doing something new? The distribution is new. What else? Maybe distributed co-presence is enough.”
That has started quite a discussion which I will try to come back to tomorrow.
You can view the slides from my presentation. And here is the audio.
May 2nd, 2007
I was thinking about the Bazaar seminar in Barcelona entitled “Hey Dude, Where’s My Data?” and how to manage our data stored in different locations online.
The first thing we have to look is why we are using services such flickr, youtube etc. I believe because we need a fast, free or even cheap, reliable and easy to use place to store our data online. The best of course is to have such a service just for us, managed by us without any ads and data mining. Most of us will say that this is very expensive and probably we don’t have the skills needed to manage a service.
Few days ago an advertisement email arrived in my inbox and it was for a product called Disk Station. The text was starting as “Time to redefine how you share, how you store, and how you connect your data.” Looking at the web site (http://www.synology.com/enu/products/DS106serise/index.php) Disk Station is a portable server which has some interesting features copied from product’s web site.
Share More Than just Data
Disk Station integrates so many features you could ever think of in a Home & SOHO environment. It shares data, printer, photo, web, multimedia files and more! Having a Disk Station is connecting all your digital contents. It makes sharing everything easy yet controllable.
Program Your Own Web
Creating your own web site is always a fun thing to do. Disk Station now supports PHP+MySQL. You are free to construct your own web site with dynamic web contents, or to install PHP open source applications from the Internet, such as blog and bulletin board,
Let the Music Play
If you have cool photos, music, and movies, why not share them out? You simply upload the files to Disk Station, hook up a Network Media Player, and you can start enjoying them with your TV or audio set.
Total Backup Solutions
Data backup is so important but people tend to ignore it, Disk Station makes data backup so complete and automatic that backup always be done without your attention. From Network Backup to Local Backup, from USB Copy to PC Backup (Synology Data Replicator II), you can always find the backup alternatives that fit your needs.
Share Photos with Right Persons
Having trouble to share your photos with right persons? Photo Station lets you not only share them with friends through the Internet, but also control who should be able to view which photo albums. You are now the master of your shared photos.
What if plug a Disk Station in a network with static IP and give access to our peers through the internet. I’m sure some of us now and the rest in 1-2 years will have a lot of bandwidth and a static IP (you can do it even with dynamic IP) to connect such devices on the net. I don’t think that everybody will run a service like flickr but will have the able to run our own services with our own policies using our own hardware which is not very expensive. The price of Disk Station in Greece is 320 Euros.
I’m not trying to advertise any product. I’m trying to share some thoughts on how to use a product like this in terms of sharing our data through the internet.
I’ve already ordered a Disk Station and I’ll try to test it. So in a next post I’ll share my experiences on using it.
October 4th, 2006
VIA - Edufilter
I have been following the famous James Farmer blog for a couple of years now as well as the progress of his highly successful Edublogs. I thought this would be the perfect highlight session to get back into the swing of things here on Edufilter.
From the Edublogs site:
“Free blogs for teachers, trainers, lecturers, librarians, and other edu professionals”
I caught up with James to ask him a few questions:
What prompted you to set up Edublogs and subsequently the rest of the blogs in the incsub.org suite?
Um, playing 
No, more seriously, pretty much the first idea I had after getting a blog was “So how do I sort these out for students”. Actually I lie, that was a thought I had even before I started blogging - I recall a pretty horrific attempt to set up Manila in 2002. Edublogs just seemed like a natural progression - I grabbed the domain sometime in early 05 I think, pretty surprised to see it was available… played around with a few possible uses of it - Drupal etc. and then, over a few glasses of wine, had as close to a eureka moment as I can ever claim to have had…. that this new multi user blogging thing that I was playing with at incsub could be a source for edublogs… not much of a revelation I know but it’s kinda shaped where I am now more than I could have imagined at the time!
The uptake rates seem pretty impressive - has it been meeting your expectations?
Exceeding them at the moment, it’s scary. To be honest I really want to bring all the sites together to one page, brand the themes a bit (a cutesy little button a la ‘I power blogger’) and doing some serious promotion… but until I can get some serious enterprise architecture / scalability and work on it I’m kinda scared to do that. It’ll be fun when I can though. I think I estimated (thinking it’d be wildely optomistic something like 9k blogs in a year - and there were more than double that on edulogs.org alone.)
Across the various services, have you notice any trends occurring; frequency of posting, feature requests - that sort of thing?
I wish I had the time to get more into it, I really do. Overall people are pretty happy with the services but I’m itching to introduce all sorts of cool new stuff.
Do you have any plans to expand the range of services you offer and what can users of Edublogs expect to see in the future?
Yes, absolutely. First up I want to make it a much richer, stronger and more featureful system. Secondly integration with fantastic tools like wikispaces and yacapaca are just great. Thirdly… well, if I get to pull that off it’ll be a nice surprise, so I won’t tell you just yet
What effect do you see DOPA, if it goes through, having on services like Edublogs?
Very little, if at all, I hope.
How do you fund Edublogs?
Chalkface have provided some great support but fundamentally it’s outta my own pocket. The hardware technical costs at the moment are about $10k a year - which hurts - but I’m hopeful that it’ll be worth it down the line - I guess in many ways it has already. I’d rather not think about the cost in terms of my own time and stress levels, it hurts too much 
Edublogs is powered by WordPress, are there any other technologies behind the service?
Yep, bbPress runs the forums and is integrated with the user database (I can’t tell you how hard that was!) Wikispaces is, well, wikispaces and Yacapaca is a great assessment tool run by Chalkface. WordPress is about the closest I’ve ever come to software nirvana though, I couldn’t recommend it more.
September 26th, 2006
Time to eat some humble pie (for non native English speaker see Wikipedia entry).
In a post on Friday I doubted the value of live conference blogging. Rod replied on the Bazaar site: “Nice to meet you at ALT-C & I look forward to your reflections - as we discussed at the conference our quick & dirty posts (see Informaticopia on http://www.rodspace.co.uk/blog/blogger.html and HI-Blogs http://www.hi-blogs.info/ may not provide depth of reflection but we (& quite a few users) do feel they have value.”
And of course he is right. The posts on Alt-C are of much use - I was quickly following up his links and downloading worksheets to use next week.
I think the truth is that I am no good at live conference blogging. For one thing my typing is just too poor. For a second I loose track. And it just doesn’t suit the way I write. So it’s horses for courses. Thanks Rod. Keep up the great service.
Technorati Tags: Alt-C2006
September 10th, 2006
Back from the the ALT-C conference in Edinburgh. I always go to these events convinced I am going to blog through the conference and never do. In reality I suspect that post-conference reflection may be of more value than ‘news coverage’ as it happens. Lets face it - academic conference have little that requires up to the minute reporting.
I have come away with about ten headings for future posts - so I must have learnt something. Hopefully these will roll out over the next couple of weeks.
My overall impressions? Well this was the year of social software. Presentations about blogging in education were the topic of the conference. Wikis were also popular though less so. Interestingly there was little or no reference to tagging (might that be next years trend?).
About the blogging - as far as I can see there were two main issues. First was whether blogs should form a structured part of the curriculum or be an additional - add-on - space for students - or both. The second issue was whether blogs should be open to the whole world or be used in a closed system - and who should decide?
There was little talk about VLEs - apart from the by now customary slagging off of Blackboard. Indeed there was even public doubting of the future need for VLEs in a services led world. There was plenty of angst about the future role teaching and of institutions. And plenty of what seemed largely ungrounded discussions about the ‘net generation’. More research and less talk would seem to be useful.
I organised a symposium (which we turned into a workshop) on Personal Learning Environments. I enjoyed it greatly and the audience seemed to too. I will post a video of my contribution on this blog tomorrow. And the ever gorgeous Joise Fraser is working on a Flickr stream of the results of the workshop.
It is good to see (at last) the take up of social software. I just worry a little that this is this years fad - and as it proofs hard to get students involved and develop appropriate pedagogy people will move on to the next technology - video?
had a great time night out drinking with the ELGG boy band (photo pending). And met many old and new friends. Thanks to all of you who told me you read the blog regularly - I never new so many people cared. And thanks to all who helped with the workshop especially Ray, Terry, Josie and Lawrie,
Technorati Tags: Alt-C2006, social software
September 8th, 2006
It has already been a month ago since I attended the EU eLearning conference and presented at the EU consultation at the Lifelong Learning Institute Dipoli in Helsinki, Finland. During summer months time simply flyes by!
As project coordinator I gave a presentation about our ambitions and aims of the Bazaar project. I received a lot of enthusiastic responses to my presentation and our project. It would be great if the Bazaar website as a community portal for all kinds of learners, teachers and other facilitators in the field of elearning is seen as a useful place for people to get connected.
On the EU consultation meeting and the EU elearning conference itself, interesting and lively discussions were held about the use of internet and computers for learning and the place where ‘learning’ happens. What struck me was that a lot of the discussion still seems to boil down to whether or not the computer will ever replace the teacher!
And I thought we were already past this…
But it’s important. We cannot discuss the role of computers in learning if we don’t want to discuss the role of teachers.
I had an interesting discussion with a man who said that the use of computers in the classroom should be as small as possible, because children should learn from ‘the real world’.
The real world? The real world! My ‘real’ world has computers in it. The role of computers in the real world is growing faster than ever and I strongly believe that we cannot learn to understand the real world of today if we don’t learn to understand computers.
The real world is filled with computers, but just because you can’t see them, that doesn’t mean they’re not there…
The creators of this website (http://www.realworld.org/) are clearly very concerned about the use of computers for learning, but between the lines I read a fear for the inevitable. Of course ‘computers can gobble up time’, just like watching television and reading books, but we recognize those timegobblers as part of the real world.
I bet that a great majority of people would rather see their children spending a rainy day by reading a book, than by chatting and socialising with their friends on MSN.
I think that the young learners of today, who grow up with access to computers, broadband, new technology understand the real world better than some of their teachers. Maybe it’s time for the teachers to be replaced by learners…
August 27th, 2006
A new open source service has just launched, OpenAcademic. The aims of this project are to build out customised solutions based on the open source tools; Moodle, Drupal, Elgg and MediaWiki.
The resultant solution will be released open source for those interested to download.
July 31st, 2006
Notes from the Keynote presentations by John Erpenbeck, Helen Barrett and Lee Bryant at the Social Skills - Social Software conference at Salzburg.
Continue Reading May 26th, 2006
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