Personal Blogs

I have become habitualised to storing what I do in MyStuff.

Everything.

Even if I work offline.

In it goes.

This is where I know I will find things. The laptop stays at home. This way it won't get lost, stolen or broken. If it moves it is around the house - to the garden in summer, in bed with an electric blanket in winter.

When I need to get online I have always found it easy to do so. Everyone is online, right? Guess I haven't ventured very far. Frankly, if I couldn't get a signal it would because I didn't need or want one.

I do not keep my mobile on. I do leave it at home. I let the battery run flat. I leave it in the car. I choose when I wish to be open to calls.

(I get this from working in a five star hotel as a runner/gofer in my gap year. The pager had to be in my pocket on on 16 hours a day, seven days a week. I eventually through it in the hotel swimming pool after a particularly stressful shift).

People can do without me.

WE can do without each other. We respect personal space in the flesh ... how about creating some personal space online too? Like a force-field that rejects all efforts to reach you when you feel so inclined. Or is this called going on holiday?

I hate eating in a restaurant where anyone takes mobile calls. I hate being in a cinema where people are texting. I hate driving with someone who insists on chatting to the world as the drive along

What contribution will this make to the way I do things in the future?

I'm doing a course on Core Anatomy with Spaced Ed

I'm learning new songs with Music Notes.

And I find I'm on Facebook and in LinkedIn most days.

Could an Avatar of me deal with stuff on my behalf?

Or is this what a personal assistance is for in 2010 where a secretary would have been the thing in 1970 and 'the wife' any decade before that?

Out of habit now I cut and paste all the course notes from H807 and H808 into word and reconfigure using techniques I have followed for a decade as a web editor based on the principles of Jakob Nielsen.

I got his book in 2000 and was using it when I started the MA in Open and Distance Learning with the OU in 2001.

Is the OU nervous about being so radical?

Is it note reasonable for us to expect them to keep uptodate? With a unit such as 'Inovations in E-learning' could an attempt at being innovative at least be made?

Some one is going to come along and create and manage platforms that are more suited to the next generation. I watch my son playing World of Warcraft, watching a downloaded movie AND texting friends and more than capable of keeping such a frenetic amount of activity going.

No wonder traditional classroom education bores him to tears. I'd home educated if I thought it wouldn't seriously compromise my ability to earn a living ... but then we wouldn't have school fees to pay?

The recent upgrading with colours and graded shading and a few clear icons and hugely welcome but compared to corporate sites the OU is at least four years behind.

This isn't 'sexy' presentation, but the lessons you pick up from Jacob Nielsen make text like this more suited to online reading. As I now NEVER print of, only diddle about with text and images in some kind of digital form I simply don't require text to be expressed as if it needs to be printed off or has been scanned in out of a book

Come on OU this is 2010, not 2002.

Perhaps when I've done my Web Editor bit on all the course content I could post it back in here?

'Yes', says the new editor of Prospect Magazine, Bronwen Maddox.

I have much respect for this journalist having read her in Broadcast Magazine, the FT and Times over a couple of decades.

She adds.

'Yes, I see it, and I refuse to be distressed: the good outweighs the bad, and the change is unstoppable.' Maddox, 2010. Prospect January 2010

Two points I'd like to develop here: privacy and the unstoppable nature of advances caused by e-technology.

Exposure, disclosure and loss of privacy has been discussed in the blogosphere for a decade. I recall the debate starting in 1999 when Ellen Levey (now a director of LinkedIn) had herself featured in the Washington Post. She had spent 1998 blogging about every meeting she had, looking for connections and links and pondering the value of such actions. Since then we've had many people exposed for the things they share online. Facebook and Twitter are simply expressions of the same desire to 'share' with blogs, social networking and twitter different expressions of this.

Are people recording and storing Skype conversations?

Probably.

Especially anyone with an Ego or a mischief in mind.

'Unstoppable'.

There is no going back to a world without e-learning. Though e-mail might be transposed by texting. Though MySpace has been flattened by Facebook (and who remembers FriendsReunited?) Though Google has superseded Netscape - and Amazon no longer only sells books. And at any moment something new will wash over this digital ocean like a Tsunami. (Pinterest? Instagram? StumbleUpon?)

In relation to e-learning I think we've barely started to see or fully consider the profound changes it will make to educaton - those who are e-taught could leave others in the wrong century when it comes to learning and developing potential.

REFERENCE

Maddox, B (2010) Foreword. Prospect. January 2011.

It seems counter-intuitive to drive 160 miles to record a Podcast but I will reflect in due course on why this was better than recording a Skype conversation. We recorded onto a Netbook through the mic on a headset while cooking dinner.

This produced audio that was remarkably satisfactory to my professional ear. (I did six months as a sound engineer with a broadacast TV crew once upon a time).

Ian (a director and e-learning 'guru') and I last worked together in 1998 on the launch of the European Stock Exchange EASDAQ and were 're-united' by LinkedIn about five weeks ago.

I need to recognise after thirty years in 'the media' that even recording good sound has been reduced to pressing a button. All the effort we used to make to get 'clean' sound is now redundant. The microchip has given recording devices a brain that filters out the extraneous sound.

We recorded onto Audacity; I will clean up the 'noise' as I would a photograph using Adobe Photoshop.

I'll also edit down as we covered four or five topics ... in as many hours.

We discussed collaboration online, e-learning, video production, podcasting and his intentions to compete in an Iron man in Abu Dabi next March, also his e-lerning work in Abu Dabi.

My visit was in part to spend an hour coaching him in the pool. So we do a podcast my fixing the Front Crawl in a reasonably competent adult swimmer who will have to swim for about 90 minutes in the Gulf waters before doing the mega-cyle and a marathon run.

We've known each other since our teens and have made 30+ videos together and a few short films too.

Would this exercise have been better had I prepared questions?

For us to have jotted down some possible responses?

For the recording to have been done more formerly in a quieter setting?

Should all audio tracks be supported by text? Which may make the audio redundant?

I recall the audio we listened to in week 1 of Robin Goodfellow et al, and having transcribed what they had to say would quite frankly have preferred a Twitter from each instead of a few minutes of audio waffle.

Do we afford waffle credibility by recording it and posting it online for comment and for posterity?

My concluding thoughts?

Forget polish, only content matters.

Somewhere in this podcast (to follow eventually) we dicuss the 8mm footage from 'the hill' shot by Zapruder. He had no skill at all with the kit, or any craft as a camerman, but the event he caught on camera was the shooting of JFK. The 'Zapruder Effect' describes film (or audio) that may be of poor quality, but the content of such importance it doesn't matter.

I think we've reached the stage where audience and listeners don't give a monkeys for 'professional production standards' so long as the content is of interest.

A role for Podcasts in E-learning? Absolutely.

The three hours I recorded of a machine gunner from the First World War can now be made available for everyone to enjoy. Forever?

Or will his voice become lost in the several hundred (or thousand) recordings of other veterans?

On verra.

This looks good on a flipchart, I even took photos of it. I wish it were more dynamic, on the paper version the reverse side of each catergory has a set of industry related quotes.

How would you jiggle these terms around?

How do I create a classic Venn Diagram with a piece of software?

Is there the means to play with diagrams like this collaboratively in a wiki or Google Docs?

I'll produce a reverse image of this with the references.

I also realise that I have about thirty items that would appear where professional, 'e-' and 'learning' cross. Sometimes a handwritten essay with a hand-drawn diagram is so much easier to produce and correct

How about handwritten essay produced with a stylus on a Wacom board?

Spent the morning walking along Cuckmere River to the Channel where it became remarkably mild in the sun. Chewing over reasons why efforts to raise finances to produce high-end, TV docu-drama programmes linked to interactive 'edutainment' never got off the ground in 2001, despite fullsome praise from the likes of a founding director of Cisco (John Cage) at NABS where he had the keynote speech and we were presenting.

Cost.

We wanted to wow viewers and spend a great deal and thought there was a way for this to make money. The broadcasters, stallwart supporters of Atlantic Productons with whom were were developing product, were at this very time pulling away from the websites as pits of financial loss. Commercialisation is everything.

It is therefore timely that there was an hour long discussion this morning on the rise of Thomas Edison, the inventor of the 'Innovations Lab.' I was in one once myself, the BT Think Tank. If anyone will have me I'll join a new think tank, if not, I'll form my own.

Cost still matters a great deal:

• How to radically cut costs by going down the e-learning route (pure online and blended).
• How to make money creating learning for a global market.

This is how to educate 50% of UK school-leavers. They leave school, but they don't leave home. They take their degree through the OU or some similar while working.

A new generation with a new set of concerns and motivations.

Is it a conversation if all you do is nod you head?

And contributions, whether relevant or not, are ignored?

Sometimes people want to release what is going on in their head, their frustration, anxieties and misunderstandings.

They want to verbalise their thoughts. This is reflection. They don't want you to comment either way. If anything all you can do is nudge them along.

Like a therapist?

Should a peice of reflection be offered publicly where comment is perhaps hoped for?

Does this make an asynchrnous conversation better than the one that's being going on at me for the last ten minutes?

(No I wasn't typing. Yes I'd turned off the TV and radio. Ostensibly I was listening. I made the mistake yesterday of suggesting some thoughts, even inviting a subject matter expert I know to get involved. Mistake. Sometimes after a couple of weeks writing a report you can't help by leak some words.

Wouldn't a mirror do?

Or as the character does in Avatar, just talking to yourself on a webcam?

The OU will change this VLE and MyStuff in July 2011.

Having blogged about implied and/or necessary improvements to some of the key tools it amused me to read that the OU are doing exactly this.

I embrace change so can't wait. I'll have another year to go of the MA.

Evidence?

A job ad in the Guardian for a couple of Project Managers to handle/manage 'business change' at the Open University.

'Would you enjoy leading on the development of new ways of working with Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) software, content management systems and eLearning projects?'

Curiouser, and curiouser.

I trust a way to transfer assets out of MyStuff will be produced.

Is it an in-house job, or has Cisco Systems, Google or Facebook come in?

We'll have to wait and see, though for someone fascinated by e-learning it will be interesting to observe as it occurs.

Perhaps the two roles could be roled into a number of collaborative exercises in H807 'Innovations in e-Learning,' with contributions from H808 'The elearning Professional' not forgetting H810 and the importance, particularly for the OU to be the King of Accessibility.

All efforts to deliver the best learning online will fail unless it can be commercialised and can compete in a global market.

Hasn't Google already got its foot jammed in the OU door?

Next the OU VLE will be ditched in favour of all OU courses being operated through Facebook with the OU eportfolio (already being compromised by the OU), ditched in favour of Google Docs or PepplePad. MyStuff is vastily superior - it was designed for the specific purpose of supporting OU students and is intergrated to the platform. Please simply put some effort into making the content interoperable. I've got 883 pages of content to date which I wish to exploit forever.

And why not?

The OU should and does concentrate on its core modus operandi ... sharing the higher education learning experience to as many as possible.

The OU is not and can never be the developer of software. It hasn't the capital or the commercial drive to compete. Instead it sidles up to the BBC and delivers worthy cross-platform learning experiences and indulgences.

The best place to e-learn on the planet?

Here of course. A bit of the OU, with the BBC, with an iPlayer.

I could do with a lot more TV to liven up H808.

I had expected video galore, clips on You Tube and men with beards on BBC2 in the middle of the night.

Let's do H808 TV.

I need a portaprompt.

I can write the script.

P.S. As a TV persion I do however appreciate that when you watch a TV programme you can be fooled - transcribe the script and you'll discover that more often than not the content is pitched at a 12 year old. Without instant links, peer review or collaborative development they can be as effective to learning as seeing a pretty picture in a cook book. The learning comes from gathering in the ingredients then having a go yourself. Anyone for 1066?

When I took this picture in January I never expected to see the like of it again. Snow has been exceedingly rare the last ten years I've been living in Lewes. On the coast frost was virtually unknown.

A shaper and plant.

Shaper

• Highly motivated with a lot of nervous energy and a great need for achievement.
• Like to challenge lead and push others to action, can be headstrong and emotional in response to disappointment or frustration.
• Generally make good managers because they generate action and thrive on pressure.

Plant

• Innovators and inventors – can be highly creative.
• Often enjoy working on their own away from other members of the team.
• Tend to be introvert and react strongly to criticism and praise.
• Great for generating new proposals and to solve complex problems.

For this reason, and explaining successes of the past, I need to team up with the following, a:

• Co-ordinator
• Monitor/ Evaluator
• Implementer
• Team worker
• Completer-Finisher
• Specialist

As we often take on two or three roles this explains how a team of three or a band of four may be enough. They're called:

• An accountant
• Sales

(or was it the fridge?)

I recall this from being a boy growing up in Northumberland - the silence of the night after a snowfal, waking to an eerie glow from outside, and pushing back the curtain to see the garden transformed.

The snow started to fall a few hours ago. An icing on the South Downs. I wish I was back in Northumberland.

I take the opportunity to study. This is the only time I'll get anything done. Tomorrow, if school is off I'll be off too. Off onto a hill with some body boards I turned into sledges in January.

I'll show you the set of 'How to' photos. A simple process reqiring some bamboo canes and duct-tape.

When you take a set of encyclopedias and ask, 'how do I make this digital?' you get a Microsoft Encarta CD. When you take the philosophy of an encyclopedia and ask, 'how does digital change our engagement with this?' you get Wikipedia.

How does this relate to e-learning?

It strikes me that much of that learning online has a considerable distance to go in terms of realising the potential of 'electronically enhanced' learning, that we are 'reading' for subjects and supervised by the institution and tutors very much in the style of a Microsoft Encarta CD.

Perhaps a virtual world is the way forward?

Perhaps just as people job share, you could share your learning too?

Perhaps there is more to educational social networking through the likes of Facebook than institutions are willing to accept.

And if you have an e-portfolio of work why not flit from one supplier to another, accumulating micromodules of a unit at a time from wherever you choose and have your aggregated qualification assessed by a third party?