online PD: why it doesn’t seem to be taking off in UAE;
current issues in IT?
Some participants might want to discuss the recent TESOL Conference in Dallas, an unprecedented number of sessions at which were recorded. Archives exist here:
James’s vision of all of this? “some sort of online community or even course (a la Coursera) where skills are learned by someone .. but vetted by an x number of peers, with the badge earned via successful peer review, and posting of the evidence supporting the application for a badge .. somewhere on the internet .. so others can learn from it.. and perhaps even build upon it.”
Some brainstorming ideas:
Sunday, November 11, 2012 – Jonathan Finkelstein – walked us through Learning Times Badgestack
March 21-23, Learning2gether traveled to Dallas to help webcast live at from the Electronic Village and academic sessions taking place during the TESOL Convention
Above, Vicki Holmes presenting on Word Clouds in the CALL-IS EV in Dallas, with co-presenter Ellen Dougherty Skyping in via small window lower right of screen, later expanded to full screen share so she could direct the workshop from Abu Dhabi – picture, Vance Stevens
Many of these events were held in the Webheads Bb Collaborate / Elluminate room:
Podcasts, web-based recordings, & videocasts: Dynamic and interactive ways to provide feedback Evelyn Izquierdo and Miguel Mendoza (Universidad Centrale de Venezuela)
Sat March 23 16:00 to 16:50 GMT – Webcasts from the EV Fair Classics
Women Teaching Women English (WTWE) Leslie Opp-Beckman (U of Oregon),Rawan Yaghi (Bednayel Public School, Lebanon), Deanna Hochstein (U of Oregon), Deborah Healey (U of Oregon)
Theresa Almeida d’Eca, Nina Liakos, Michael Coghlan, Vance Stevens, David Weksler, and Jeff Cooper met at Tapped In one last time and set up a wiki at http://tappedin2013.pbworks.com/
You are invited to join and contribute URLs to or upload the artifacts you have
managed to save from TappedIn.
Vance has saved a couple here:
Here is a Jing screencast of the Webheads in Action space set up by Sharon Holdner
We set up a wiki at http://tappedin2013.pbworks.com/ which you are invited to join and contribute URLs to or upload the artifacts you have managed to save from TappedIn.
Check back here to see what we’ve accumulated and help with the display, if you wish.
In which Vance Stevens hangs out with Alex Hayes and friends, talking about veillance, augmented and augmediated reality, and issues around wearable technology …
The event was being streamed at http://webheadinaction.org/live but the recording was compromised when Google Hangout went off air only 15 minutes into the Hangout
This sent out everywhere:
Join us in Google Hangout this Sunday at noon GMT to discuss with experts this fascination topic.
As usual with Hangouts, we can’t start them until right before the event, so we will post the direct link to the hangout at http://learning2gether.pbworks.com and also at http://webheadsinaction.org/live. That’s where you can go to listen in on the stream and join in the text chat, in case you can’t or don’t want to get into the hangout itself. But be aware that the stream can only be set up right at noon GMT, when we start the hangout.
If you are hanging out with us, be sure to wear a headset (otherwise the sound from your speakers back into your mic could cause echo). And if you enter the hangout be sure to mute or switch off the stream (otherwise you’ll hear two sound channels, each overlaid at a disconcerting lag from the other.)
The topic you will see is Veillance – the domain with all it’s disciplines such as surveillance, sousveillance, dataveillance, uberveillance and so on. We are sure to also speak of education, engineering, diffusion of innovation, privacy, personal security and a host more emergent themes & technologies.
We think it is pertinent topic given that we are on the brink of Google Glass going live soon, that Vuzix and host of other augmented and augmediated reality hardware is set to become distributed and visible throughout our communities worldwide.
Have a listen to the podcast. It’s is very revealing, insightful and will serve as the base point for our discussion. You will note that I have invited Steve to join us here in this discussion. I’ve also invited a number of others whom have I just met virtually
Some background
Wed Feb 27 Coach Carole organized an “in depth look at Augmented Reality through the eye of Christopher Winter”
What if your students could stand in any room and by looking through their phones camera, be presented with an entirely new virtual world? What if instead of 30 students crowding around one physical object, they could each have an almost tangible replica on their desks to study, even when at home? Augmented Reality is not a new technology and was in fact in danger of fading out before it really had chance to make an impact. The fact was that holding a piece of paper up to a webcam in order to see a 3D object on a desktop computer is neither engaging nor fun. It was less than intuitive and quite cumbersome. Fast forward to the present day and thanks to the mobile revolution Augmented Reality is not just an option, but an integral part of effective mobile delivery
A few years ago, Vance Stevens coordinated Nelba Quintana and Rita Zeinstejer in Argentina, Doris Molero in Venezuela, and Sasa Sirk in Slovenia in a global project to put student writers in touch with each other through blogging, by tagging their posts ‘writingmatrix’. At the time, the students were able to locate each other’s blogs by using Technorati. However Technorati has since tightened what its searches will return in order to reduce clutter for whom it perceives are the most important users of its services (not casual educators). Therefore Technorati no longer works well for this purpose.
Meanwhile, one of the serendipitous outcomes of conducting the recently ended EVO MultiMOOC session was a greater understanding of how Paper.li works. Accordingly we have been experimenting with Paper.li in hopes of using it to achieve connections between student writers a world apart that worked so well when we could use Technorati effectively. Some results of these experiments were reported in these webcasts URLs:
Today’s webcast seeks to bring some of the original Writingmatrix team together to talk about what made the project a success and speculate on how Paper.li might help us to revise the project.
Anyone with a Twitter or Facebook account can log-in and create a paper. We provide you with easy to use tools to select your content. You choose your content streams and can create queries and searches based on Twitter users, #tags, keywords, Facebook, your own Twitter timeline, Google+ users, RSS feeds and more.
After you have chosen your sources, we go to work. Behind the scenes, it goes something like this: we extract all tweets that include URLs based on your content selection we extract the content found on these URLs:
text, e.g. blog post, newspaper article
photo, e.g. Flickr, yfrog, Twitpic, …
video, e.g. YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, …
analyze the extracted text for language ( EN, ES…) and for topic, e.g. Politics, Technology, …
surface the day’s most relevant articles (using paper.li magic)
construct a newspaper frontpage using the filtered articles, photos and videos
Please note: Currently Facebook and Twitter are seen as two separate accounts by Paper.li. This means papers created under one account will only show under paper settings for that account. If you create a Paper.li under your Facebook account, it will not be visible in your Paper Settings when you are logged in under your Twitter account. And vice versa. We are working to change this.
Paper.li selects specific types of tweet to generate content for a paper. First and foremost, it is looking for tweets with links, as the title of each “story” on the paper will link directly to the page, blog post, article, etc. If there are any images on the page, blog post, article, etc., it will sometimes pull those as a thumbnail for the news story. It also pulls tweets with links to videos from YouTube, BrightCove, and other popular video sharing sites for the media section. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a link directly to the video, however. Some videos are pulled from blog posts with an embedded video.
How Does Paper.li Choose Content?
This one is a mystery to me. I thought it *might* be based on tweet popularity until I saw that some of the tweets added to the paper had been the first tweet for a link done within an hour of the paper’s creation. It could be based on the influence of the Twitter users in the list, but I’ve seen some users with little authority get their tweets listed as well. So essentially,it’s completely random.
Getting the Right Content for Your Audience
This means that getting content on a particular topic based on a user or a Twitter list may not be as easy as you think. Not only may some members of your following or Twitter list not stick to tweeting about one topic, but some members may tweet something that gets misinterpreted by the paper, as seen below.
So how do you ensure your papers have the right content for your audience? There really is no guarantee. I would say that out of the three options for paper creation, hashtags seem the way to go, although some tags are overly abused, such as #linkbuilding gets repeated by the same users over and over and sometimes for services, not useful content. So use Paper.li at your own risk!
Paper.li allows users to create their own online newspaper through links shared on Facebook and Twitter. Once set up Paper.li automatically collects links from within Facebook or Twitter, organizes them into an easy-to-read newspaper format, complete with imagery, headlines, and article descriptions. Subscribers receive their online newspaper each day filled with top stories around the same content topic as your website. It’s a great way for you to automatically aggregate online content relevant to your website topic and push it out to your online community … If you’re on Twitter, you can configure the system to tweet your Paper.li newspaper automatically.
You can have up to 10 content streams from which to pull article links from … You can organize them in the order of importance. If you choose a Single Twitter User and a Twitter Keyword, you can rank them in order of importance of where Paper.li should pull articles from first, second, third, etc. The options include:
Single Twitter User
Your Twitter Stream and the people you follow
Twitter List
Twitter #Hashtag
Keywords on Twitter
Keywords on Facebook
RSS Feed
Single Google+ User
Keywords on Google+
Breakthrough
As a result of our session, Rita did some further investigation, and wrote us …
Hi, Vance and all,
Quite enthusiastic at “revisiting” our project, I’m now exploring a different tool –Tweeted Times (formerly known as The Twitter Times), a real-time personalized newspaper generated from your Twitter account, which I find more reliable than Paper.li.
If you compare today’s edition in both, you’ll see many more entries in TT, which are postings I made yesterday in Twitter –some of them via Scoop.It –in fact, Paper.li does not show any!!! Which means that, for some reason, Paper.li ignores some postings, even when they come via Twitter.
Tweeted Times does indeed seem to be doing a better job than paper.li. It not only gets the Scoop.its that were missing from Paper.li but it also picks up the paper.liitself.
I think you’re on to something here, Rita
Not only that, this is a great illustration of true MOOC like behavior, where the idea is to assemble 1000 participants (webheads) on the upshot that one of them might be able to stimulate one or more of the others (Rita) to come up with a breakthrough as a result of a collaboration that couldn’t have happened with such a result in a much smaller grouping, which would lack critical mass for significant probability of achieving such a breakthrough.
Heike Philp took us through the highlights of various online conferences she has organized, been a part of, and most importantly, recorded.
As Heike said: “Top level guest speakers, a global audience, a lively chat and a sharing of know-how can all be had from the comfort of your home. What inspired me to start the first web conference was however another reason because truly I love to travel to conference just as much as attending them. What motivated me to run web conferences is the fact that there are so many parallel sessions at each conference! One can actually spend all of this time and money and attend the conference and still miss more than half of the program. Not so in the case of web conferences. During a web conference all of the sessions can be recorded. And they are being watched … “
Noting that the Virtual Round Table WebCon, the DaFWEBKON for teachers of German, and the SLanguages Annual Symposium attracted some 4,500 synchronous participants in total, but that the recordings have been watched over 23,000 times, Heike supports the proposition that these recordings may serve as the ‘Khanacademy for language teachers’.
Vance Stevens hosted a live online session ostensibly to explain in greater detail how to get started with Google Reader, as described in this blog post:
You could use this technique to follow student blogs or blogs from any group or individual you wish to follow. I had offered to help participants set up their Google Readers hands-on to find all the posts in blogs that have been written to reflect on certain EVO sessions. But the participant mix took the conversation into other directions.
Session recording
Here are the text chat windows we embedded to provide a backchannel to the live stream
We encountered a problem through choice of Sync.in. After 8 participants had joined the chat it would allow no more (and we were relying on that chat to disseminate the Hangout link on the fly). We didn’t realize until 15 min. into the program that people could hear the stream but couldn’t communicate with us or figure out how to join the hangout, but eventually stragglers made it in and informed us, so tweeted the Hangout link and put it up at http://learning2gether.pbworks.com and created the second TitanPad text chat below.
Plan B Text Chat
Significance of the event
There is another very interesting aspect of the session this Sunday. It was the first time I conducted such an event in a Hangout On Air, and streamed the video at http://webheadsinaction.org/live
This procedure overcomes two limitations of hangouts. One limitation is that you can only have 10 in a Hangout at a time. The other is that it’s hard to tell people where you’ll be hanging out because hangouts are designed to be found through your circles and other social features of Google + so there is no URL to give out until the Hangout actually starts. Thus, many Hangouts are announced, but participants can’t enter because there are ten there already, and the participants are left standing outside a locked door, which is not colleaguial.
http://webheadsinaction.org/live overcomes both these problems. First, I can embed an Etherpad clone chat there where anyone can interact. I can put the hangout URL there and others can click on it and join the chat, or if you are having problems you can get help in the chat (in practice we ran up against the 8 participant limit in Sync.in, which we will avoid for this purpose in future). Secondly, since the YouTube embed that lets you play the recording later HAPPENS to stream the event while it’s in session, then anyone can visit the URL where that link is embedded and listen to the stream. So if the Hangout is full, hundreds more can listen in and interact in the Titanpad chat (thousands? tens? no idea actually). We can also announce on the stream when places become available in the Hangout and participants in the Hangout can be rotated in and out that way.
So one purpose of the session will be to Learn2gether about Google Reader how to follow class sets of blogs. But in so doing we’ll see how to stream a Hangout so it can reach beyond just the ten in the hangout itself.
Testing prior to the actual event
I tested this at around 1300 GMT with Kalyan Chattopadhyay.
It worked fine as you can see from this recording
(sorry for messing around setting up, but I was checking on other computers that the stream was being broadcast, when Kalyan responded to my call to verify that it was being broadcast worldwide )
Holly Dilatush graciously agreed to share her comments here which she posted to Google + as we were meeting together. It seems she was having F.U.N.
I just heard Jeff’s Sae-hey-bok-mahn-ee-pah-deu-sey-yo! (or something close!) i will never forget that expression = Happy New Year in Korean! Happy New Year, all!
I use the exercise balls, too… great idea for non-squeak! [I’m typing more notes as I listen!] Fun, fun, f.u.n.!
So much fun to see you all!
[EVO_Drama_2013 is rather quiet, too, though it’s picking up a lot today for some reason]
I haven’t signed up for kubbu = too many things to keep track of and testing my ability to say “No.” (or at least, “Not now”). Every new post about it tempts me to go sign up and play, too. But as of today I have not signed up.
Interesting observation…. watching the hangout recording = we don’t see who is talking…
psychedelic flashes! (Why?) Are there really colors flashing in her room? (not sure who that is).
Oh… listening to Rita talking about Webheads… yes, yes, yes!
Grinning!
Jeff: Worldbridges
“Learning is chaotic” (Vance)
Vance was punished?! No, no, no… come back, Vance!
How quickly we feel frustrated! So many options! Isn’t it amazing that we are navigating all of these (or at least some of these) = I used to give up but now keep trying most of the time = often without thinking twice.
Podcasting = I do need to revisit this… was frustrated with this in the past. Isn’t it interesting what we choose to follow, why, and when/why we give up?
English language = helps change the culure (interesting)
I’ll put a plug in for everyone to check out process drama techniques as a way to enhance = check out EVO_Drama sessions
Vance’s voice gone again! and back again!
😀
On WizIQ, it’s advised to close Skype and any other programs that use microphone… if you are the one who started the class… so I wonder if this is what caused Vance’s disconnects? [But I do NOT know what I’m talking about, do not understand the behind-the-scenes tech stuff! …just passing along a possible tip?]
Trace Effects game = another I’ve passed on for now… How do we keep up with all the things we attempt to keep up on.
OK… sorry guys, have to stop listening… but these hangouts on Air recordings make me feel less left out (won’t make TESOL this year; didn’t make TESOL last year, and miss seeing everyone in person; this is the next best thing!).
Taking Leadership in Mystery of MOOCs and the Mass Movement toward Open Education
Abstract: Open education was often laughed at or ignored until the emergence of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) with their tens–or even hundreds–of thousands of learners in a single course. Given the mass success of Stanford courses topping 100,000 each and startups like Udacity and Coursera as well as the announcement of edX (from Harvard and MIT), we can no longer look the other way. Still, many questions about MOOCs and other forms of open education remain, such as those related to infrastructure, marketing, pedagogy, and assessment, to name a few. Just how does an instructor or trainer keep thousands of students motivated and involved in such a course? And what are the more promising business models? In this talk, Bonk will detail his experiences in teaching a MOOC and offer guidelines for others hoping to create a highly engaging MOOC-based learning environment. A set of 10 key leadership steps and another set of 10 pedagogical principles will be outlined with examples. He will also map out a set of business plans and more than a dozen types of MOOCs. In the end, MOOCs and mass movement to open education will no longer be such mystery.
Three Overview Points:
1. Much experimentation with MOOCs and open education today; dozens of possible business models (advertisements, fees for completion certificates, pay as you go, company sponsored courses, assessment fees, etc.).
2. Will the certificates that students earn while taking MOOCs make traditional college degrees obsolete?
3. What steps might a company, government agency, or university take to be a leader in this movement toward MOOCs and open education?
Show notes:
Curt always goes all out in his presentations for our learning communities. When he presented at one of our WiAOC events, he presented not once but twice! In a flipped presentation approach, Curt took questions in the first hour and elicited our discussion of MOOCs and other areas of educational technology we should be focused on. At the top of the hour he started talking (quickly) about his 85 slides. That part of the presentation provides an interesting and comprehensive chronicle of recent developments in the MOOC phenomenon almost day by day. Unfortunately we had to rush him offstage after almost two hours benefiting from his candor and expertise, to make way for another session that had reserved the Elluminate room. Our apologies for overflowing onto that group, which responded competently by regrouping in Adobe Connect.
Curt provided these further resources during and at the end of his talk:
“Video Primers in an Online Repository for e-Teaching and Learning” (V-PORTAL)
Building Different MOOC’s for Different Pedagogical Needs
The Chronicle of Higher Ed asked four professors teaching free online courses to describe their experiences.
On June 11, 2012 they asked Curtis J. Bonk, professor of education, Indiana University at Bloomington http://chronicle.com/article/Building-Different-MOOCs-for/132127/
Participant Jim Julius’s perspectives on Curt’s MOOC
MultiMOOC: Multiliteracies for Social Networking and Collaborative Learning Environments
MOOC is a model for knowledge-development that has been getting a lot of attention lately. By the time of this presentation, this year’s EVO (Electronic Village Online) sessions will be in their 4th week. One of these sessions, MultiMOOC (Multiliteracies MOOC), is exploring the concept of MOOCs through emulation of a cMOOC, a connectivist one. The session explores the MOOC movement since 2008, assesses its significance in supporting education, and plots its course as MOOCs diverge in purpose while gaining in popularity this far into 2013.
It has been said that a cMOOC has a syllabus that participants are expected to break. A cMOOC sets the stage for learning, but the plot unfolds as the participants appear and carry out that learning through their own initiative stimulated through networking with one another (in fact, one of the most useful take-aways of participation in a MOOC is expansion of one’s PLN). In this presentation, participants in the MultiMOOC session and their moderators will gather at a time normally set aside on Sundays for another elearning initiative, Learning2gether. We will discuss our experiences in the EVO sessions so far in conjunction with the Learning2gether movement, as well as our connection with other online learning networks such as Connecting Online and Webheads, which the lead presenter helped to found. We will try to draw some conclusions from our perspectives on how the MOOC model is working for developing knowledge within our network in the context of elearning via the EVO sessions.
Class Presenter: Vance Stevens
Class Title: CO13: MultiMOOC.
Class Date: Sunday, February 03, 2013 Click here for the session recording
Learning2gether 