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H800: 4 The bud opens?

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H807, H808 to H800.

Either it is reflection of my growth through this course, or it is a blossoming of the MA ODE course. Looking at how we students will share contact details: Email, Skype, Blog and Twitter accounts suggests to me that any containment within the OU VLE is now cursory.

I feel this will increase its use, not diminish it.

This will remain the hub from which course materials, resources and context eminated with blogging, Skype and Twitter having their role to play.

All I can suggest to fellow students is to screen grab, cut and paste or download content you create beyond this platform as at some stage it is certainly going to form a significant part of your aggregated knowledge, possibly even evidence of participation.

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LT2:7 Learning Technologies. The challenge for RBS

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Sunday, 30 Jan 2011, 15:12

Andrew Spencer from Royal Bank of Scotland gave a talk on the development of an MBA programme for senior RBS staff with Harvard Business Publishing

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The relationhship was established with HBP prior to the economic crisis or the banking collapse. The challenge was to produce a global programme that would meet the needs of a diverse audience.

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The RBS group of companies spreads far.

I loved the way he put it. RBS came up with two kinds of L&D offering:

'Ready Meals and ingredients.'

Perhaps there's a place for cooking related anaologies. Mark Wagner has a podcast to an American Conference in which he calls a wiki a 'pot lunch.' In this respect a blog entry might be a Pot Noodle and a Twitter the last Hula-Hoop in the bag (a broken one).

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In less corporate company Andrew might have said that the 'shit hit the fan' in this case it was the ship.

Some things would have to change.

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They way RBS put it is that 'burning desire would have to transform into a desire for results.'

The cynic may say this is like saying greed had to be replaced by need?

Why HBP? For the brand and content and a previous working relationship.

A series of microsites were built so that people could find their way into the information. Andrew described this as a person finding the right door to go through. I'd go back to food and talk of a smorgasbord.

Once through this door a variety dishes are offered: insight videos, articles and indepth reports.

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Take up of the offering picked up.

 

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Video expands the mind ... and use of the Internet

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Tuesday, 20 Mar 2012, 16:58

 

 

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I call it the coming of 'WikiTVia;' the tipping point where we view and listen to wikipedia. This will engage, persuade, educate and entertain audiences the way reading can never do (however many links you have).

Jakob Nielsen and his team, as well as academics, are stripping the blogosphere bare to understand how it works.

Birds of a Feather: How personality influences blog writing and reading.

It ain't like you imagine.

Those who generate content are a fraction of total users, 1% is the figure Nielsen gives. This 1% generate content beyond the ken of lesser mortals; you may say they are obsessive about it. Nielsen cites the Amazon book reviewer who wrote 1,275 reviews in one year (is that all). I liken these people to what advertisers call 'champions.' The key influencers of a cohort or group, early adopters, who innovate first and do so with conviction and passion.

Nielsen eleaborates on this and calls it 90-9-1.

Taking this into the realm of video my intuition supposes that these 'Golden Boys & Girls' of content generation will be and are the same people who will have a Flip camera in their pocket (or simply use their phone) to capture or generate orignial content then upload. Content generated on a theme, from a premise, that has some link or basis in its text form will generate an explosive interest in the subject matter beyond its original audience. Video has this power to engage, to persuade, to intrigue and interest the viewer.

Rich content enriches minds.

VJs ?

Like DJs they have a following.

Though the content should be king, not its author.

Me?

I'm this 1%.

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E-learning is like a trillion binary threads we splice to the learning rope

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Sunday, 23 Jan 2011, 14:28

I have an idea. I can illustrate it with a knot unpicked for splicing.

Is sums up the relationship between learning and e-learning in no words.

And I thought I was struggling with word count parameters of 2,500 or 5,000 words during H807 'Innovations in E-learning' and H808 'The E-learning Professional.'

This is what I do; I simplify the complex.

Stylus in hand, logged in to ArtPad I do a sketch then  feast my eyes on this.

Images of Knots

45 minutes later I give up the picture search - you cannot shoe-horn an idea into someone else's shoe. You do and the idea my misfire.

I give up on ArtPad because of the licensing agreement which, if I have understood it, does not allow me to copy and paste into a second platform. If there is a way to link I haven't found it. I therefore fall back on Paint which is bundled with the laptop.

My thesis (a picture is a thousand words, even if I only use three to illustrate my point) ... my thesis is that we won't call it e-learning for long. There's always been learning and there always will be, e-learning, like books, is but a strand we've added.

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So here we have an expression of learning over the last 100 years. We begin with Edwardian or Victorian teaching, then tease it apart with with telegraphy, telephones, radio and TV, even more so with computer-based learning and Web-based learning: the 'enhancement' complete the threads become re-bound.

For presentation purposes I may now give this out to an illustrator. I'd like to see where this could be taken, keeping it simple, but perhaps expressing the electronic, cabled, wireless and digitised version of e-learning. No binary code though, far from convincing an audience, a cliche bores.

I even have an illustrator in mind.

Neil Gower

P.S. Thread might work better, then I'd be talking about fibres, which sounds right, though I shun puns as I would cliches (though of course in my lazy way I use both all the time.)

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My head's like a hedge-hog with its paws on a Van de Graff generator

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Sunday, 6 Nov 2011, 17:54

Or a guinea-pig chewing an electric cable behind the TV.

Same thing

Strange things are going on with my head.

The synapses are snapping.

This is the state of my mind.

It's exciting. It's exploitable.

The internal goings on of my cerebellum have gone from guinea-pig to hedgehog via a Frankenstein-like jolt of the old juice.

Last like this?

Undergraduate 1983.

(And most of yesterday, and the day before of course).

This is what studying does to my mind. It's taken eleven months in OU Land. The buzz began ... a few weeks ago.

It is like going from clueless first year undergraduate to the second year. Even online, you need to get the lay of the land. Even now that are vast swaves of OU activities, e-tivites, buttons, bolt-holes and affordances to discover, chew over, toy with and adopt, or adapt and move on, or stay with, or who knows what.

Funny. I never use the OU library anymore.

Once signed I just Google. Same thing? Instance ... rather than the time it takes to make a coffee.

Web-entrepreneur 2000. I was buzzing then too, mind and on two postgraduate courses - the OU (a somewhat earlier version of Open and Distance Learning) that in technology terms was like using a hand-pushed lawnmower to cut a path through a waterlogged meadow full of cattle. The mismatch between cutting-edge practice with a leading web agency and the course was the difference between reading an e-book or going into the Bodleian and thumbing through a vast, leather-bound index.

The best place to sthink on the planet. At a desk surrounded by ancient books ... with a lap-top. It's as if you are sitting inside the minds of everyone who has ever thought there before. Now we can get an inkling of this when you feel like minds are listening. Are they?

I feel the desire once more to spill the content of my mind ... to empty every moment I have sought to catch. Why? Not just because I can (although I appreciate there are plenty of people who keep diaries all there lives. But because of the way it wakens up your mind to a version of a moment in your past. These moments flip and change perspective as you revist them. Most odd.

"It's a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger that memory becomes."

Nabakov.

Note the time. I have slept in the last 24 hours.

About four hours between 15h30 and midnight in two or three chunks.

Actually I've buzzed a lot over the years. It's who I am, when I'm being me at my best.

Skieasy was an interesting idea.

I still have the chess set I made out of a selection of bottled-waters. Dasani, that Coca-cola flop, is the King of the Black Pieces. I cheated a bit, Copella with their squared off bottles are the Castles and I had to use Fabreze for the Horses.

INSERT PIC HERE

There are currently several voices in my head, people from the past, smiling and asking questions.

I'm being emotive and passionate about some new fangled way to do use video and they're listening. I feel this way about the Internet. My head is firmly back in 2000, with the electricity of an undergraduate and the knowledge of a PhD. (I could have one if the various courses I've done had been or could be validated and LinkedIn). Eventually.

I intend to study for life, life-long learning - literally.

I'm planning a module beyond the MA in Open and Distance Education that I'll complete in October 2011.

Foundations in research probably rather than a different subject, though in good time Modern History (yet again), and Geography (yet again).

E-learning enables this

Fine Art can never happen; I can't hunker down like that. (Unless I can do Fine Art via an A3 sized tablet? If it's good enough for Hockney, it's good enough for art students. Fine Art as a e-learning course. (Now there's a challenge. And an opportunity.)

Never say never when it comes to e-learning. Someone will be running an e-learning Fine Art MA within the year. You could use a Kinex to draw onto a tablet rolled like a piece of Clingfilm onto a pane of glass. Observed at work by your tutor a million miles away (or a few hundred at least). You see it is possible.

Never say never when it comes to e-learning, which is why I propose a new module for the MA in Open and Distance Education. It's called 'The E-learning Entrepreneur.' Any one listening? (Not at 2h05). I'll linkIn with it and see what bubbles up from the digtal hyrdrosphere.

I don't care if it takes six years for each one of these courses, I'll be around for a long while yet.

My grandfather made it to 97 and never lost his marbles. Bless. He died with some thoughts on Newcastle United and a swig of Newcastle Brown Ale (he'd worked in brewing from the age of 14 to retirement).

My mind wanders. Good. It should. So should yours.

New thinking doesn't idle around in one pocket of your subconscious, it dances like a Minx feeding on your the maelstrom of your mind.

And I'm yet to say what I sat down to write. Right.

Doodles on backs of envelopes. I have a lot of envelopes. I must have invested in a large supply a decade ago. Stick down the back and use them for notes. Light, a soft write with a gel-pen. Takes a doodle. A gem. An idea.

This process started 48 hours ago.

One image. A second. (The PDP thermal idea). And since then I've been revisited by an idea I had in .... 1998, I suppose.

ADD SKETCH HERE ... currently on

a) the back of an envelope

b) on a piece of scrap wallpaper (very good for doodles as you can spread wide)

and c) in my head (which should be in bed)

Title, Synopsis, Abstract, Review, Précis, Student Notes, Book, Book + References.

This is a volume control for 'volume' of words rather than sound.

Depending the time you have to engaged with the contents of the author's (or authors' heads) you skate or roll this slider back and forth until you hit on a what you're prepared to take in. You can always expand, if the mind takes you there ... you can always roll into the synopsis if your train comes in or you see an email you're prepared to answer.

(Email, I'm starting to treat it like the old postal service - two deliveries a day, at a time to suit me. So before breakfast and after lunch. If you want me otherwise phone.)

Where was I? So, text volume control thingy.

I was just learning Dreamweaver, on a Mac, probably an LCII or something c.1998.

Maybe or earlier. TBT hadn't been born I was sleeping where he'd shortly be sleeping (actually I was sitting where he was born a few weeks later, at home, caught by me some time before the Midwife made it over from Cheltenham. Another story.)

I won't have a record of it, I was months away from blogging. Unless, which is likely, I was keeping a diary off-line. Would that be 'logging?It'll be just as lost though as it'll be a floppy disc. Or were there CDs by then? Or possibly an IOMEGA Zip drive?

And now we have LCD TVs the size and thickness of a postage stamp.

Re-reading 'Contemporary perspective in E-Learning Research' can't help my sleeplessness.

Far from boring me to sleep, which it did six months ago, I find single words are scorched into my forehead and sentences are like liquid gold being poured down my ear. Oh dear. I think I understand it.

I commit a book crime.

Historically I have always read a book and taken notes at the same time. This goes back to Oxbridge Entrance exam reading lists and beyond.

Get it while it's hot on the first shot.

I did this with Conole et al in August.

I could even read those notes, but those notes WERE WRITTEN BY SOMEONE ELSE.

So I have to start over, this is TAKE TWO.

Anyway.

The sacrilege is the use of coloured Marker Stabilo Market pens on the pages of the book. This is because I'm treating the book as if it isn't there, as if it is in an iPad (I don't have one, I'll give me my address if you feel I should have one).

Yes, I am using a highlighter pen on the paper-based text because I've got so used to doing this in e-journals exported into Word.

Of course, this Stabilo Pen should DOUBLE as a TEXT READER so that said highlighted words could be drawn straight into my laptop and quoted here ... with the link and correct Harvard Reference put in place for me too. Pretty please. Tech person reading.

(Do tech people read? I suspect they call it something else. Scan?)

Oh heck. Not another idea. It's only 1h36. (or was when I started. That was nearly an hour ago. I don't edit, I know not how, I ellaborate.)

I have this fear that having an idea is pointless, because whatever you can think of someone has done it before.

Which makes this a race, catching wave after wave after wave of information as it comes in on the digital ocean, hoping, believing, that from time to time it'll be a big wave, my wave and I'll ride it like a pro-surfer. Enough. I need a coffee. That'll send me to sleep.

Anything's possible.

I look at this, my invention, my interpretation of how Personal Development Planning can lift a life, raise your spirits, send your career into a controled cycle of advancement and I want to sing about it. I want to be on this ride and bringing others along with me.

What can go wrong?

Coffee poisoning.

So, this Microsoft guy who is recording every moment of his day (and night? and ablusions?). You have to be at the head of the team, not the pond fodder. I gave this a momentary go voice recording three one hour swim coaching sessions. I am yet to listen over. Perhaps I'll do it once to see what lessons I learn.

On the other hand, someone interested in coaching swimmers may listen to the lot of it. And with nothing in vision there are no Safeguarding Children issues ... I consciously only used swimmer's names once I had hit pause.

My coffee's cold.

Do I warm it up? I'll not sleep. I haven't exhausted the possibilities.

A swimming pool beacons.

Once was the time I swam every day. I'll do so again. I can subdue my mind only if I sink the body around it.

 

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Buzzing

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Saturday, 3 Nov 2012, 06:10

I'm not tired, which is the worry; it'll catch up with me. When I wake up with a clear, original thought I've learnt to run with it. Time was I could have put on a light, scribbled a bit then drifted off again. 17 years of marriage (and 20 years together) I've learnt to get up. And once I'm up, then I know it'll be a while before I can sleep again.

(I'll sleep on the train into London; at least I can't overshoot. I once got on the train at Oxford on the way into town and woke up in Cardiff).

I have the thought nailed, or rather sketched out, literally, with a Faber-Castell Artist Pen onto an A5 sheet of cartridge paper in Derwent hardback sketch book. This seems like a waste of good paper (and a good pen), but this doodle, more of a diagram, almost says it all. My vision, my argument, my persuasive thought. My revolution?

Almost enough, because I then show how I'll animate my expression of this idea by drawing it out in a storyboard. I can do it in seven images (I thought it would take more). I hear myself presenting this without needing to do so, though, believing myself quite capable of forgetting this entire episode I'll write it out too.

I once though of myself as an innovator, even an entrepreneur. I had some modest success too. Enough to think such ideas could make me. I realise at this moment that such ideas are the product of intense mental stimulation. To say that H808 has been stimulating would be to under value how it has tickled my synapses. The last time I felt I didn't need to sleep I was an undergraduate; I won't make that mistake. We bodies have needs. So, to write, then to bed.

(This undergraduate thing though, or graduate as I now am ... however mature. There has to be something about the culture and context of studying that tips certain people into this mode).

You may get the full, animated, voice over podcast of the thing later in the week. I'll create the animation myself using a magic drawing tool called ArtPad and do so using a stylus onto a Wacom board.

(Never before, using a plastic stylus on an a plastic ice-rink of a tablet have I had the sensation that I am using a drawing or painting tool using real ink or paint. I can't wait 'til I can afford an A3 sized Wacom board ... drawing comes from the shoulder, not the wrist and certainly not the finger tips. You need scale. Which reminds me, where is the book I have on Quentin Blake?)

Now where's a Venture Capitalist when you need one at 04.07am. That and a plumber, the contents of the upstairs bathroom (loo, bath and sink) are flooding out underneath the downstairs loo. Pleasant. A venture capitalist who is a plumber. Now there's something I doubt that can even be found if you search in Ga-Ga Googleland.

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One day at a time, one year at a time, each decade of his life

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Tuesday, 18 Jan 2011, 18:49

1976 – 1983 -

I could keep going to Jan 2011. Like a returning diarist the New Year offers hope and a desire to record what goes on, though some of the tougher times would make better reading.

Reading this I could imagine a character who comes out of a coma with the New Year's Fire Works but nods off again by February 1st. There's a thought. There's a screenplay. There's another year or two of my life lost inside my head ...

January 5th

1976
Got up late, had bath, watched T.V. XXX and I were sent to our rooms, I couldn’t care because I had records, radio, typewriter, crayons etc: Watched TV. Cycled, Took down Xmas decorations and tree. Dad rang. No Tuesday. Didn’t mind. Used to him. Watched heart surgery on Horizon.

1977
Up at 8ish, breakfast with XXX and XXX, get stuff and leave dead on 9. Smash ice on pool. Wait for Mum 15 mins. Dad going to a meeting at Middlesbrough. Home, nothing changed, odd pieces of money from Aunties, chess from Uncle XXX. Still haven’t got rec: player, get record from Realm Records. No money though. Try to get rec: players in Town. Talk to XXX, bath, hair, TV, fall to sleep.

1978
Sleepy – read book. I, Claudius, Robert Graves. XXX at King’s Cross. XXX gets off to school. Phone me at 12 – stopped – continued. Very persistent, glad I answered – to meet XXX in Town. Tell her about disco – couldn’t get her Mum’s permission. Wonder town, Sit in restaurant for an hour left at 5. Danced at GRC with XXX

1979
Tell Mum were coming home on Sat. Train + XXX, Have People’s ringing P about a Top hat. Must try and get all my gear back somehow. More interesting XXX, in bed most of the day, XXX and more XXX and more comments about XXX with XXX.

1980
Felt ill in morning and up early and bath, Breakfast with XXX, late so not for XXX and Dad. Drift round Paris, stop at Cafe, then Louvre for the rest of the day. Late lunch and Eiffel Tower, slowly drive to Le Havre – pouring, Find Taverne Basque and have beautiful end of hold French meal., Mostly ski-estates on ferry, only Fiji for XXX.

1981
Strong wind – cleared snow and filled bus with Japanese (took photos of us). Clear Maison Rose, returned and sat in Cafeteria, Told off by Mme R as though I didn’t work. V. little to do so just got bored. Skied. Binding lose and broke twice. Up button lift and x4 the Telecabine (great) just starting to get legs (met XXX) – deadly, clean ski room/chocs for XXX (bleeper went) able to go early (7.10pm) really needed it as was most chattered.

1981
Hate the near depredation of the customs having to look through the boot. Expectantly. Dad missed a turning. As I did. He blew up. Rain and floods became snow at Appleby. Wanted to dash on to Newcastle to see XXX. After mean. Burst tire outside Appleby. A66 closed to Brough so drove via Brampton and straight to XXX’s. Being quite Telly ... Andrew XXX. Out for Midnight hedge, soaked but fun came in late and nicely ‘til 1.00 great to be back.

1983
Man rip to find out what I will to – to Hexham Infirmary with Mrs XXX and Granny and XXX, Plaster off and re enraged badly diagnosis by a seemingly drunk Dr XXX was to leave them alone. Work at 4.00 TV & XXX home to change before Tuxedo junction and had to get trews from Jonathan XXX, Mike XXX, Simon XXX, Rob XXX etc home to a bath end of dear but climb into bed for XXX v had the mattress from XXX’s room and on floor.

and on, and on, and on ...

Meaningless to non-participants (or should that read combatants) but most of these notes bring back the events of the day to me. Try this with a clear object in mind, studying a course with the Open University, a speculative project you want to bring about, clearly know when and what to keep private ... even write it in a book rather than online. Though I don’t think anyone has read anything I’ve locked online.

But do it. Even 50 words a day adds up over a year. And after a year it might inspire you to write 100 words a day. That's how I got going age 13 years 6 months. Exactly like Adrian Molehouse.

At family gatherings, several big ones are due in 2011, I am known as the archivist, I have the stories too, memories passed down to me of brothers and sisters growing up, but also of our long gone ‘ancient aunts’ who would all be 105+ by now. Photos of them too, old double 8mm film, me at my christening, photos of a World War 1 machine gunner, another an RFC bomber pilot.

Memories can be treasured. They should be treasured.

It doesn’t diminish the genre of keeping a diary to do so online, or to share some of the content with others, or do what the internet is great at doing – ‘Chunk’ your stuff into bite-size pieces; some of the above looks like a Twitter, keep to 250 words for a blog, but do it every day.

If words aren’t your thing load a picture a day, just one of many you may have snapped that will remind you of this day forever.

I listened to a busker sitting on Cliffe Bridge, Lewes yesterday afternoon.

Great, Passionate, Rough, Poignant. Thinking about it I wish I’d gone over and asked if I could take a snap, or video him on the phone for YouTube. I’ll do so next time I see him.

That would have nailed the day for me.

Then tag it. I have a tag fetish going. I do try to use the same word, but it looks as if I try to make up something different for the same thing, which rather spoils the purpose. Though I do rather like the ridiculous, tumbling, cascade of words and typos I have going in my tag clog, list thingey (another technical term that is a natz less technical that ‘stuff.’ all if which are eminently quantable to, of or by someone or something somewhere.

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How to make educational blogs effective

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Saturday, 27 Aug 2011, 13:47

Simply expressed in a comprehensive report from authors who will be publishing more on the subject after further research.

Blogs work in many ways, not so good for the 95% who only read them, but you've got to work on that. Good PR, Marketing and Promotion would help.

Report flowchart graphic

REFERENCE

Computers and Eduation (2010) Deng, L and Yeun, A.H.K. Towards a frame

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The most important report you'll wish you had read before your submitted your H808 ECA

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Monday, 29 Aug 2011, 18:20

Birds of a Feather: How personality influences blog writing and reading. (2010) Jami Li and Mark Chignell. Science Direct. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 68 (2010) 589-602.

I could blog on it at great length and no doubt will as I chew over their 8500+ words, but this shall have to wait a week.

 

 

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The importance of the words

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Monday, 29 Aug 2011, 08:15

Writing is everything.

I'd master it now. Keeping a blog is a sure darned way to do that. Handwritten is fine; find yourself the perfect pen.

Writing, or rather the ability to write.

It is the key to communication, to learning and to e-learning, and a great deal else besides.

On my passport it says 'writer, director.'

I like that, though I think of my skill as a visualiser and the writing and directing is rarely TV, but corporate and classroom training, desk-top learning, and product launches, change brand and change management.  Still there can be drama in it, and tears, and death, and love, and life, and music and dance. We go underwater and scale mountains, enter shear caves of nuclear power plants and wade through sewers, track super-models along catwalks in Paris and record the last words of a man dying of cancer in Carlisle.

I see things in pictures.

Perhaps the MA in Fine Art IS what I should have started a year ago ... though I fear I may have missed out.

It's easy enough I find to get my 'hand back in' if I want to draw something as it is rather like riding a bike, or skiing in deep powder snow, or racing a Fireball, or pushing off a wall in Breaststroke and emerging from a legal transition half way down a 25m pool ... once you've put in the days, months, years (even decades) learning to do these things, barring ill-health and great age, you ought to be able to do them for some time to come.

Which reminds me, I want to crack written French in 2011.

Clients think of me as something in addition to writing and directing (I produce), but no. that's not it; there are words, voices, images, cut together and linked in various ways that form linear and non-linear assemblages, but to them I am 'a problem solved', a job delivered, with passion, on time, on budget (of course), sometimes as a team of one, but sometimes in a team of a few or many more. I do wonder if sometimes an email with the finally agreed Creative Brief is the end of the process, rather than beginning.

Today, once you've solved that you can invite everyone to come up with their own creative execution.

Now there's a thought I'd not heard coming.

All of this takes words, expressing and solving the problem and sharing this requires words. A fast, reliable typing speed helps too. So perhaps my Mum was right to get me a typewriter when I was 13 when I wanted an electric guitar.

Sometimes I find the problem for the client and share it with them in all its beautiful ghastliness.

This is what good writing means. And experience. And judgment. And belief. And your approach and thoroughness. And the write people around you. And sometimes conviction that £60,000 will deliver the job, but £600 will not.

Good writing is less about the words chosen and put on the page (unless you are a novelist or poet, and I am neither), no, good writing is a good idea, clearly expressed, in as few words as possible. (Which in due course requires editing something like this).

Who is it who said the selling is a good idea?

That all it takes to sell something, is to have a good idea.

Good writing has a purpose and the author knows how to put the words to work by addressing a problem, because you know your audience and whether you or someone else is the subject matter expert, it is your responsibility, even if the words are hidden by a creative brief, a synopsis, treatments and scripts, to get the message across ... like, with some or many images (photos, graphics, cartoons), or with the spoken words and/or similar images that move ...

A swimming club session plan written on a whiteboard to take a squad of swimmers can be beautifully written if it is magically composed, and serves its immediate purpose. The good swimming coach rarely leaves such things in the head. It is thought-out, it is planned, it fits into the scheme of things, it is the right session for that hour or two.

Good writing hits a chord; it too is of the moment.

I conclude that a good teacher, a good tutor, educator, practitioner of e-learning ... all have this ability to write well at the core of their being. They are confident with words, words that are as carefully chosen even if spoken on the fly, as a result of their experience and all the lesson plans or scripts, or class programmes, they have written in the past that bubble up to the surface when faced with a problem - a fresh student.

(My only caveat is the from the podcasts I've heard before an educator is interviewed they should at least have the wisdom to do some media training).

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Mind, metaphor and mirror neurons - and the impact on blogging

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Tuesday, 11 Nov 2014, 06:56

1. Are we hard-wired to how we conceptualise ideas?

2. Does this help or hinder the way we use eLearning tools?

3. Will children, say, 50 years from now, look at paper and pen in the same way as a person does now when they take a first look at computer?

4. Are we at some 'transition' point, and if we are, what does this mean?

My tutor in H808 asked me this on 12th September.

I feel far better able to reply now after four months of H808 and some fortuitous reading, though I did respond at the time. My forum thread exchange then and reflection on it today will form part of my ECA.

It surprises me that I have subscribed to a magazine at all, but I find the New Scientist offers plenty on our e-world upon which to reflect and insights to all kinds of other things that tickle my brain.

It matters that you read broadly.

The French Film Director Francois Truffaut was a firm believer of reading everything and anything that caught your attention. He’d have loved the web. It matters that you follow what the web offers, then browse the shelves for magazines at the newsagent on the forecourt of your station.

My favourite button that has been crucial to the longevity of my blog (elsewhere) for the last seven years is ‘Enter@Random.’

We don’t think in chronological order.

thinking is a mess, it selects ideas and makes things up sing different sides and corners and crooks and crannies of our brains. I unplugged the calendar on my diary in year one and replaced it with 12 themes that have now grown to 37. For a period there were 37 blogs, but try managing that, to say you end up with a split personality is an understatement.

My tutor put it to me (and us) the H808 Tutor Group:

1. Are we hard-wired to how we conceptualise ideas?

Dr Vilayanur S Ramachandran thinks so. We have a unique capacity to think in metaphors. This matters. It is this ability that makes us creative, allows us to be inventive, it is what makes us human beings.

Read all about in the New Scientist.

Quoted here within the 200 word count permission for a student quote.

Added as for student reading in a non-commercial academic context having read the copyright permissions.

Ramachandran is particularly interested in metaphor because it ties in neatly with his previous work on synaesthesia - a kind of sensory hijack, where, for example, people see numbers as colours or taste words. "Metaphor is our ability to link seemingly unrelated ideas, just like synaesthesia links the senses," he says.

After spending years working with people who have synaesthesia, he believes "pruning genes" are responsible. In the fetal brain, all parts of the brain are interconnected, but as we age, the connections are pruned. If the pruning genes get it wrong, the connections are off. "If you think of ideas as being enshrined in neural populations in the brain, if you get greater cross-connectivity you're going to create a propensity towards metaphorical thinking," he says.

I don't have synaesthesia, neither does Ramachandran, but he points out to me the strangeness of asking why, say, the cheddar cheese in your sandwich is "sharp". It's true, cheese isn't sharp, it's soft, so why do I use a tactile adjective to describe a gustatory sensation? "It means our brains are already replete with synaesthetic metaphors," he says. "Your loud shirt isn't making any noise, it's because the same genes that can predispose you to synaesthesia also predispose you to make links between seemingly unrelated ideas, which is the basis of creativity."

www.NewScientist.com.

Thomson (2010)

Of the 12 photographs in this issue as many as 8, I think, are from the Getty Image bank. I wonder if one day, especially if I’m reading this on an iPad the images will move, rather as the paints are alive in the background of a Harry Potter movie. It wouldn’t take much for a photography to video as well as, or instead of taking a photograph. Indeed, the BBC now permit directors to generate HD TV footage using digital SLR cameras … the lenses are better, the creative choices wider.

Interesting.

2. Does this help or hinder the way we use eLearning tools?

How we use the web, let alone e-learning tools is in its infancy. We are still putting old ways online, still making web-pages into slide shows and calling them immersive learning. Gaming may change this, with the budget. Better, faster tools will enabled more. Collaboration on world wide wikis with like minds, and great minds, contributing will speed up the rate of change.

We’ll think in the same metaphors though, share and reinforce new metaphors and then some Leonardo da Vinci of the 21st century will come along and break it apart. Though we may not appreciate their insights at all.

Mobile learning, smart-phone learning on the move, or whatever you want to call it should shake things up. At first this will be, and is, the same old stuff sent to your phone, basic card to card Q&A even if it includes a bit if video or an animated graph.

I want learning projected onto the back of my scull, I want it in my head, not online or in a device. I want interactions with specific parts of my brain. I want my brain duplicated so that I can take more lessons at the same time, to learn multiple languages and to take several degrees simultaneously.

3. Will children, say, 50 years from now, look at paper and pen in the same way as a person does now when they take a first look at computer?

It is extraordinary the relationship between our minds and out limbs, or arms and finger tips. With training we can sight read a score and play complex musical pieces, we can scroll, cut, edit, fly and colourise images into a piece of drama that has us crying, or heads in our hands and we can type, like the clappers.

We can draw too, and sculpt, and swim and dance and do gymnastics.

Our relationship with the nerves in our body is a complex one. As for handwriting, our relationship with fountain pens, marker pens and pencils? It ought to be a skill still taught at school, there need to be handwriting competitions as there once were … even if they are tied into art classes and design.

How different is a stylus on a tablet to a piece of chalk on a slate?

I implore my children to write and draw. An illegible Christmas list is no list at all. They’d type, they do type. Yet how backwards is a QWERTY keyboard?

4. Are we at some 'transition' point, and if we are, what does this mean?

Yes. And I mean to be part of it.

We have reached the Tipping Point.

A book a read if I recall in 2001 when we thought we were approaching a tipping point, actually we were reaching the point at which the first e-bubble would burst. First and last? These things go in cycles, whatever the politicians do to stymie human nature. Greed and regret, progress, reflection, reinvention … then we do it all over.

We’re not even less violent than we were at the times of the Viking raids.

Meandering? A stream of consciousness? Reflection? Regurgitation?

All of this, and it all matters. You don’t have to read it, and you probably haven’t. This is here for me to find when I need it in seven months or seven years time.

It is remarkable how your views change; so it matters to have what you originally thought in front of you. There are memories I have that haven’t just been reworked over the decades, but have become different events. This isn’t simply age, though that has much to do with it, I view what I did as a child or teenager as I observe my own children today, the difference is, I can’t influence the behaviour and actions of my younger self, though I can, I hope listen to and guide my own children to actions and decisions they will feel comfortable with in the years to come

REFERENCE

Thomson, H (2010) V. S. Ramachandran: Mind, metaphor and mirror neurons 10 January 2011 by Helen Thomson Magazine issue 2794.

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Why comments may skew your blog

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Wednesday, 12 Jan 2011, 05:53

90% of people only read a blog, 9% occasionaly write leaving 1% to do it all.

If you get 1 or 2 comments you may have what, 90-180 readers? With better stats that offered here you can validate this. All skewed by the distinct narrowcasting of an OU Blog, as we are in theory writing to our tutor group or course cohort.

So why might comments skew the content?

Who are this 1%? If they are being negative or abusive (never here of course), they are flaming. In my experience you will never placate or please them, only pour oil on their self-hate, attitude or whatever is going on. They may be cutting and pasting the same nastiness in dozens of blogs.

Other comments I feel are akin to a wave from a friend who I've noticed across the road. I like this. I'll let people know I am reading them, out of politeness, but also to encourage them. If I've read them once, I'd like them to write more and read again.

Comments, if you are chasing the stats, will skew your blog to the extreme views these commentators are expressing, or to the particular parts of the blog they find attractive.

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Here's an idea

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Sunday, 8 July 2012, 08:14

Rather than feeling that I am entering the blog domain to write this I ought to be able to cyndicate/allocate or aggregate this as or after I have wrote it by clicking on one of three buttons:

Traffic Light painted on ArtPad

Eportfolio

Wiki

Blog

At my behest I am therefore deciding that this is a moment to be shared (but not tampered with), evidence or information that I wish to store/collate (ideally by themes of my choosing), and/or a chunk of information (or offering) as wiki content (initiated or an edit insert).

Simplified and disengenious, but a starting point.

And on reflection, perhaps, how good learning works: it starts with simple ideas that can be grasped and works outwards. E-learning doesn't simply work outwards though, it spreads in directions of the learner's choosing (ideally), like fractals, like a mind-map, as a result of, enabled and speeded up through myelination.

Were I writing a video script on eportfolios, wiki and blogs this might be how I begin, either animating this or going out and filming various traffic lights. I may paint this with water-paints onto laminate card and drop it into an aquarium and film it. My enduring analogy being that whatever we do online are but zeros and ones in a digital ocean, all programming does is remove the chaos and worthlessness of trillions of unconnected binary numbers.

Perhaps I've just convinced myself too of the value of Open Source.

And this is only the first idea of the morning. Something must have been breing in my sleep.

Though yet to do justice here to the Opinion piece in the New Scientist something struck me about  the Cover Story on epigentic changes and their relevance to evolution.

DEFINITION

Q. What is Myelin?

A. Myelin is a phospholipid layer that surrounds only the axons of many neurons. The main role of a myelin layer (or sheath) is an increase in the speed at which impulses pass along the myelinated fiber. Demyelination is the act of demyelinating, or the loss of the myelin sheath insulating the nerves, and is the cause of some neurodegenerative autoimmune diseases, including multiple sclerosis, acute disseminated encephalomyelitis, transverse myelitis, Alexander's disease, chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, Guillain-Barré Syndrome and central pontine myelinosis. Here is a link to a website that tells more about it:
http://www.myelin.org/

 

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Which are your Top Ten e-learnering tools?

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Monday, 10 Jan 2011, 13:22

Clicking through the Top 100 e-learning tools of 2010 it surprises me how many I'm familiar with, and a few on which I am dependent.

 

Top%20100%20eLearning%20Tools%202010.JPG
From Drop Box

 

Looking at this Top 10 we have all surely used these?

 

Having much experience of most of these takes the title 'Jack of all trades' to a new level, but is this not expected, based on every tool having to meet a need and be easy to use, you just give it a go, running with it works for you, ditching it if it doesn't?

 

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Where we'll be in 2025 from the perspective of someone in 1975

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Sunday, 9 Jan 2011, 09:02

For the introduction of my H808 ECA I've visualised a Movie Poster.

Man 2025 from 1975 Sunday Colour Supplement

 

This comes from a Sunday Newspaper, in 1975.

This image, along with some shots of the diary went into a blog in 2003. In 2006 I tried to establish which paper this image came from and failed. You'd imagine something right wing like the Sunday Telegraph, though it is more like to have been the Observer, or even the Radio Times? Strikingly there was no view taken on this pose looking for all intense and purposes like one of Hitler's Aryan few. The thinking behind it was that by 2025 we'd all be mixed raced, bald (for no apparent reason) and semi-naked due to our ability to control the climate.

The only reason I chose this as my personal movie poster for now is a desire to reconnect to my youth and a sense that I had a future, another 14 years at least! I wouldn't mind getting fit again too, overweight at 90kg and doing no exercise for several years has me far, far, far from this absurd image. Though age 19, with hair, this was me courtesy of swimming every day for an hour or more and sailing/windsurfing in the summer and skiing in the winter. Heady days.

Politically I should mention here that I swing between green, yellow, blue and red ... ocasionally even purple. I blend my vote too, rarely voting for the same lot between local and national elections and often preferring the independent choice. At uni I was a member of both the Conservative and the Labour parties sad

Who cares? I do. I can keep them all at arms length, especially the two parties that keep asking me to stand ... oh yes! My busy body considered an asset in local refuse collection, building, transport and various pollution issues. I should keep my mouth shut, but as you can see, I don't and it isn't difficult to point content like this (editted) to a person that matters.

For the conclusion I've visualised a Film Review.

I've also done a cartoon of one of the course authors as a weightlifter with the words RESEARCH on one end of the bar and the word PRACTICE on the other; the idea being that you get mentally fit by doing a work out that balances research and practice.

Where I come unstuck is with the PDP matrix.

 

1%20Your%20PDP%20pan%20for%20H808ECA.JPG
From Drop Box

 

I look at this and I see a train station message board on some concourse such as Crewe with few destinations of interest. I'll have to work on this.

The least  I want is the Message Board at St. Pancras International with Paris, Lille and Brussels written up, though my most inspired train message board will always be Gar du Nord, Paris. As a teenage my jaw always dropped to see destinations like Berlin, Moscow and Turin, where across the channel pre Eurotunnel you were supposed to get excited about Ore, Doncaster and Birmigham International sad

Any ideas? Perhaps if I visualised it as an Advent Calender? Or a box of chocolates (life, is after all, life a box of chocolates according to Forrest Gump).

Ideas on a plate please.

P.S. A reminder to myself to dig out a collection of scrapbooks from 1987-88 when I was at London's, School of Communication Arts and perhaps a reminder to start doing this again. Or do I? I'm getting into the habit of photographing things that catch my eye, uploading, cropping and fixing, then tagging and putting them online. Perhaps I'm a candidate after all for the e-diary, a record of everything, all day.

 

 

 

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On going from keeping a regular diary to writing a blog

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Tuesday, 11 Nov 2014, 07:01

I have in front of me the Five Year Diary I was given age 13 years 5 months. Each entry runs to about the length of a Twitter. I kept this up for 7 years, supplementing these entries with an A4 hard back journal from 1979. In one bonkers month, September 1979, the month went into an arch-lever file. I could write as much as I wanted. Nuts. Not only that I kept receipts from shows, bus tickets to school and best of all, a note I had to take to a school uniform outfitters from my Mum that reads, 'Please will you give my son Jonathan an RGS blazer and a Westfield School skirt and charge to my account.' Thankfully, I wasn't asked to try them both on.

I may Twitter my Five Year Diary entries across the Net in a suitably retro 1970s format, though 'got up, had a bath, watched TV, fed the rabbit' isn't too engaging. It gets better. I can't share what I was doing in 1979.

I also have my late Grandfather's logbook from his period training as a fighter pilot in 1918. He'd just transferred from the Machine Gun Corps where he'd served through the Somme and Paschendale. His handwriting is extraordiary. I'll put up a photo.

And my late Father's logbook from his sailing days, first there was Canny Lass, then there was Serendipity. His car had the number plate STOIC sad But we don't chose our parents do we?

Why all this interest in diaries and logbooks?

In 1999 I noted that there were 6000 diaries (sic) in diaries.net and 2000 in Diaryland few months after its launch.

Having transcribed and uploaded 16000 entries I can now browse through a portion of thirty years or so as if I'd been blogging. I can call up several 'essays' on Net Journals and web-logs too. Having done so I can drill even further than I did at the time into the author's cited. Courtesy of Google I can complete my research and indulge myself. There are some great diaries, great diariest and some useful books on the genre too; bloggers take note.

I'm starting to look very closely through this content for the patterns that others would find too if they kept a simple diary, a basic, regular blog.

There value comes with the passing years. I can find enough in what I have written to know who I was with and what I was doing on the 4th January between 1976 and 2011. I'm suprised how often there was snow in the 70s (this is Tyneside). On 4th January 1979 I crashed a car on ice heading for my girlfriend's house in Wylam on the other side of the Penines. The road from Brough to Bowes on the A66 was blocked with snow so I had to double-back via Carlisle and Hexham.

In a world where a life of learning is expected and the technology makes it possible, keeping a blog, some private, some open, some themed must begin to pay dividends for the author who is actively engaged with the content, rather than simply letting the events of the past go by unaddressed.

Blogs are such simple things, but surely, in their myriad of forms (you could say that Facebook entries and Twitter reports are as journal-like as any longer entry in a blog, or online magazine or other website) more could find educational and personal value in them?

So how to persuade students to keep a educational blog? To form the habit?

Promotion, example, and the devious inclusion on any course of a professional 'catalyst' who blogs and comments discretely and often to get then keep the blog ball rolling.

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Does education need Facebook and Google?

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The clout of these two platforms is so great and so profound that educators ignore them at their peril. If you want to develop a competitive and effective product the shares information and resources how can you do this on anything other than a parochial scale without the might of Google or Facebook? Indeed, is there not a business case to develop a product with a sale to one of these platforms the end game?

Money Talks

Philanthropy and advertising are forms of testosterone that are fuelling the phenomenal shift in the way we learn.

What do we do when every book can be searched by Google and the content of your mind has been taped since the day you were born?

A decade ago a businesswoman featured in an Washington Post article as she had spend a year (1998) blogging on her business meetings and posting photos too; she is a director of Linked IN. I don't necessarily recommend the process as an end in itself, but as a way to see patterns and exploit these, there will further extraordinary changes in the way we do things as a result.

Have calculators stopped us needing or doing mental arithmetic?

If the knowledge of the planet is at your finger-tips why try to recall anything?

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H808 Interview with Dr Z A Pelczynski on teaching, essay style and leadership

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Friday, 24 Feb 2012, 05:24

ZAP

Interview with Dr Z.A.Pelczynski

How does teaching differ between school and university?

What do you look for in an essay?

Can leadership be taught?

Could leadership be taught online?

 

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Overwhelmed by new stuff

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I'm happy with MyStuff, but need to learn new stuff.

Looking for an e-portfolio that will do me for a decade rather than just 10 months; I've been giving PebblePad a go, but don't like it.

I like the look of Acrobat.

Meanwhile other platforms get my attention, such as Brainshark.

I should be better at PowerPoint.

But heck, what's the point of being mediocre at loads of things? Time was when I'd write presentations and work with a PowerPoint whizz, or write video and hire a team: director, camera, sound, editor, graphics ... more sometimes: actors, presenters, art director, set design. The list goes on.

Why are we expected to do it all ourselves?

Are educators loners?

Or is it all down to having a budget of zero?

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Interactive Spaced Education works

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Monday, 15 July 2013, 17:03

Why I got up this early.

It's taken me 90 minutes to get round to the report I WANTED to consider and share. I think this is important on many leavels.

The quality of thinking behind the development of Interactive Space Education at Harvard Medical School.

The effectiveness of the outcomes.

I've been familiar with Spaced-Ed for five months and have tried a few modules. I recommend it. Make some of your own. The arguments for its use are solid and grounded in scientific research.

 

REFERENCE

TESTING NEW INSTRUCTIONAL METHODS

Kerfoot,B,P (2008) Interactive Spaced-Education to Teach the Physical Examination: A Randomized Controlled Trial. Armstrong,E.G., O’Sullivan,P.M.,JOURNAL OF GENERAL INTERNAL MEDICINE Volume 23, Number 7 Harvard Medical International.

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Learning on the go. Mobile learning changes everything?

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Thursday, 3 Nov 2011, 16:44

Mobile Learning

Discussing this with Ian Singleton of icanplayit.com two weeks ago, I was Linked In to the author from JISC Doug Belshaw a few days later.

This conversation could soon link to a myriad of people cited and listed in the JISC report on Mobile and Wireless Technologies. This smorgasbord of a review will take a few weeks to consume; I'll want the recipe and I'll be back for more, repeatedly. It is a module in its own right.

It requires the early morning to take a three hour stab at this. Kukulska-Hulme (2010) says “Mobile learning is here to stay, even if in a few years' time it may no longer be distinguishable from 'just learning'."

As a student of e-learning the value of Doug Belshaw's JISC review is broad. Whilst mobile learning is the main theme, there is a suitable warming up to the topic via the development of e-learning and a broad acknowledgement of the key thinkers of pedagogy which touches on innovations in learning and the debunking of Prensky and his idea of digital natives.

It makes a good read for anyone studying Open and Distance Education with the Open University.

The theme that the author may not have seen that is pervasive throughout, is the idea of the e-learning entrepreneur; this seems inevitable with a device and technology that puts learning into the pocket of the learner.

Laptops and smartphones become a learn as I please, when and where I want, device. I wonder too, when cameras will become phones?

Reflecting on the devices that got unwrapped this Christmas some of us might prefer the Canon or Sony camera that uploads directly to Facebook, Kodak or Picasa without the interface of phone and laptop, or even a memory card.

If ou can think of it, it has been done.

This is one of those documents that will takes weeks of consideration as I wish to read all the references too, not that I doubt the author, but because often I find thinking such as this is like a digital conversation caught in the wind and there are a dozen other voices speaking at the same time. I've not come across Traxler before, for example. He’s cited 12 times in this review.

Though, just because someone else has already done it, does not mean that I might not do it better?

JISC Spotlight The presentation. “Students no longer need to engage with information and discussion at the expense of real life but can do so as part of real life as they move about the world, using their own devices to connect them to people and ideas, ideas and information of their own choosing, perhaps using their own devices to generate and produce content and conversation as well as store and consume them.” (Traxler, 2009, p.70)

Why therefore bother with a traditional university education at all?

Better to go straight to work and learn on the job, not simply as a trainee or apprentice, but by tapping into institutional and corporate learning. This is important The wider mobility of society has led to ‘approx-meetings’ and ‘socially negotiated time’ (2009:73) which, although mobile devices have not been designed specifically for educational purposes, has a knock-on effect upon formal education.

This disruptive effect has both a strong and a weak element, argues Traxler.

The ‘weak’ element of the disruption due to mobile devices in formal education is at the level of nuisance - such as ‘cheating’ during examinations, inappropriate photographs, devices beeping during class time. The ‘strong’ element of disruption, on the other hand, “challenge[s] the authority of the curriculum and the institutions of formal learning” (2009, p.77); students can effectively become gatekeepers and organisers of learning for other students in a way institutions have only been able to do previously.

Given the fragmented nature of the current mobile learning environment, there are multiple definitions of mobile learning; however, most of these definitions recognise the importance of

• context,

• access

• and conversation.

"[Mobile learning involves the] exploitation of ubiquitous handheld hardware, wireless networking and mobile telephony to facilitate, support enhance and extend the reach of teaching and learning”

(www.molenet.org.uk/about)

Due to funding arrangements, which sector is involved, and country-specific contexts, mobile learning means different things to different communities.

 

• On the go

• Every day

• Between classes and home (and work)

• Conflicts of complements formal learning

• More interactive

 

Woodill (2010:53) identifies seven main affordances of mobile learning:

1. Mobility

2. Ubiquity

3. Accessibility

4. Connectivity

5. Context sensitivity

6. Individuality

7. Creativity

 

REFERENCE

Belshaw (201) Mobile and Wireless Technologies Review 2010 Doug Belshaw, JISC infoNet

Traxler, J. (2009) ‘Learning in a Mobile Age’ (International Journal of Mobile and Blended Learning, 1(1), 1-12, January-March 2009)

Traxler, J. (2009) ‘Students and mobile devices: choosing which dream’ (in ALT-C 2009 "In dreams begins responsibility" - choice, evidence and change, Traxler, John (Professor of Mobile Learning, University of Wolverhampton)

 

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New blog post

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Saturday, 25 Dec 2010, 06:55

I was woken at 5.30am by the neighbour's boiler. This has been going on since October 19th. Either they move their boiler, or we move house. There is no other reason why I'd be up this early having come to bed after midnight.

Had meant to blog on e-learning in relation to the history of the TV Chef.

There was a piece on BBC Radio 4 around 11.30am 24th December on the TV chef, their books and now their Smart Phone Apps. We had clips from Delia Smith and Nigella Lawson and an interview with a guy from Random House.

The ulimate 'how to' books, e-learning or e-training when it migrates to the web and to mobile devices? Voice controlled so you don't get gravy in your keyboard.

Has no one hear of printing off?

The point is made about the Cookery Book market having to adapt. Apps are the way forward.

Are Apps the way forward to e-learning across the board?

Micro-chunks of learning to your smart phone or in tray?

I see a feature for the likes of Interactive Spaced Education as well as doing a couple of courses here to try out the system (again), I will start producing my own content for this platform in the New Year.

Happy Christmas

(Staggered that neither the 12 or 14 year old are up opening their Christmas stockings ... we've had a decade of early mornings.)

Any advice on how to deal with the neighbour's boiler?

As podcasts go, I guess they have come of age when the Pope gets in on the act.

BBC Radio 4 iPlayer for the Pope's Podcast

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Paste as ...

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Saturday, 3 Nov 2012, 18:03

Someone points out how to cut and paste text across formats with ease and you find it is used as often as the Caps or Enter key.

I take it for granted that I copy, 'paste as unformatted' text all the time.

This allows you to pick text from any source and immediately rid yourself of the HTML coding and formatting; this puts you in control. It is quicker too.

Personally, I find manipulating text in various ways like making up a recipe with ingredients that I want in a way that I understand.

Dull, but Arial font, 12 point, is how EVERYTHING ends up. If think my brain is ready for information expressed in this way and fast-tracks the synapses.

P.S. With a computer in each room of the house, usually on, I find I can tap away, and tap into stuff on a whim.

Currently picking my way through the development history of Spaced-Ed as an interactive spaced education platform for first year medical students at Harvard. I can't fault it. Indeed, I would propose what I am doing as a two week module in the yet to be developed module 'The E-learning Entrepreneur.'

Commercialisation demands professionalism and accountability. Generating income is better that stats, not only are people using something you've invented, but they are willing to pay for it. The cash allows you to develop it further, and in due course fight off or buy up the competition.

Why in the UK are we determined to do it all for free? Is this an excuse?

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Game-like learning, more trouble than it's worth?

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Game-like learning can be effective with specific target groups, however, like any game, though depending on what it is you are creating, it can be very expensive. A company I worked for produced for a UK Government Department a game-like interactive self-awareness, profile-building game aimed at those being exposed to or already taking drugs, smokine or drinking alchol. A turn on to the targetted group, its entire approach was a turn off to many others. Somehow the more learner-centred we make things, the greater the 'narrowcasting' and therefore the appeal and relevance to some, the great to turn off to others.
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Collaboration in most things

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Monday, 21 Nov 2011, 08:18

Experiences here, lessons learnt and studied, has me now appealing to friends and colleagues to collaborate on all kinds of things.

What strikes me, having spent a few years buried in my writing and alone with the task, is how I have always worked best in a team, if only in a team of two. I do well as number two, I like to have someone working to, for or with me, I like constructing larger teams.

The intention therefore is to throw several balls into the air, but rather than juggling alone there will be a troupe. These will be formed into formal teams (businesses, projects) and less formal ones (writing, thinking teams and partnerships).

The outcomes?

  • Results
  • Credits
  • Reputation
  • Income
  • Contentment
  • Pride

Whilst supported online I know too that for the sake of cohesion and commitment there will need to be face-to-face meetings and shared offices. As soon as I can get an office in town, I will do so. I am looking for a space at the University Innovation Centre and for the first time in a decade will get an address in the West End, back to Newburgh Street or Newman Street, or in Covent Garden.

Ask me in 12 months time how 2011 has been.

Either way I'll keep you posted here.

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