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Introduction¶

Over the last year or so I have been dipping my toes more and more into the on-line world and experiencing first-hand the Web 2.0 phenomenon. I thought it was time I formally started to report my experiences and reflect on how I am using Web 2.0 technologies. So this is part 1 in a planned series of essays on living life online. Hopefully there’ll be something that others, particularly colleagues at Swansea University, will be able to pick up. I’ll tag these articles mylifeonline for ease of reference.

My Window on the world¶

He didn’t curl his lip because it had been curled when he came in.

– Raymond Chandler *The High Window.*

My browser of choice is Firefox which I launch at the start of my working day (I really need to add it to my Windows start up). On launch it comes up with several tabs already pre-loaded as shown in here (click on the image to see the screen shot at full resolution).

Left to right the tabs hold: - My TiddlyWiki which holds my notes, to do list etc. I’ll blog more about that another time. - My iGoogle portal that provides quick access to my Google Mail mail and Google Reader which is my RSS feed aggregator of choice (of which more later). - My Blog (which you’re reading). - My Unofficial University Homepage (a DokuWiki wiki). - TheLiterateProgramming.org site (a MediaWikiwiki) to which I contribute articles. - and Wikipedia. You can also see that I have the Firefoxdel.icio.us extension installed. It’s an important part of my work flow which I’ll be describing in a later article. In the next article, I’ll describe how I use my RSS feed reader.

Announced on the W3C news site yesterday (13th June) and just today spotted while trawling my RSS feeds, is the news that Sir Tim Berners-Lee (TBL) has been appointed as a member of the Order of Merit by H.R.H. Queen Elizabeth II.

Sir Tim, as you know, invented the World Wide Web, which made this blog possible, and so changed the world as we know it ;-). He’s definitely a hero of mine.

Congratulations to Tim!

(Photo credit: Le Fevre Communications, as published on the W3C web site).

I’ve been trying to attend the JISC innovating e-learning conference 2007
but what with final year assessment and external examination boards coming up, it’s been difficult to participate, even as a lurker!

However, one thing that occurs to me is that sticking the letter e in front of a real-world concept does not give it magical powers! So we have e-learning, e-portfolios, e-assessment, e-etc, but what are they really? Aren’t they just the real-world concepts supported by technology?

Universities are interesting places, the reality is that you get a PhD and a lectureship; they put you on an induction course for a week; and then throw you to the wolves and expect you to be an instant expert in pedagogy. Once you’re through the probation, you don’t even have to practice any form of CPD! Thus, bad habits are formed early and never really corrected. If they did that with primary and secondary teachers and let them out into the world without so much as a PGCE there’d be a national (nay international) outcry.

There are bodies whose role should be be change this. There’s the Higher Education Academy, which is supposed to be accrediting lecturer training, encouraging good standards of pedagogy and transfer of good practice, and to which lecturers are encouraged to join. (This was supposed to introduce the equivalent of the PGCE for new lecturers, but that seems to have gone away.) There are also quasi-educational bodies like JISC which promotes ICT in higher education and has lately been funding and promoting various e-learning activities (including the above mentioned conference).

These and other related bodies beaver away promoting best practice and funding trials but the fundamental problem is that, because the typical university lecturer is not properly trained (nor lets face it particularly encouraged to train) in the basic concepts of pedagogy, the best we can do with new technology is play with it and try interesting things out with our students with the hope that it’ll improve their grades (note I deliberately avoided the word learning here).

Colleagues at the JISC conference are worried about maintaining instituitional control of Web 2.0 technologies while our students are immersed in them,; worried about our students being so far ahead of their lecturers in tech. savvie that lecturers will fall behind; wondering how to get institutions can invest in the new technologies. Unfortunately, he reality is that fundamentally, most of us don’t know what Web 1.0 is; have difficulties with the concept of a learning portfolio, let alone an e-portfolio; wouldn’t recognize a social networking site if it poked us in the eye; and have difficulties enough with our first life!

Here’s my suggestion for institutional transform and lifelong learning. Make it a requirement that we (really) learn how to teach. Make us use VLEs, e-portfolios, blogs and wikis as students. Give us promotion only if we succeed. Make us lifelong learners of pedagogy and then we’ll be better placed to pass on our learned wisdom to our students.

Don’t just stick an e in front of the words, we don’t have the basic vocabulary!

Came across a recommendation of another Web-based To Do List application while going through my RSS feeds this morning. This application was recommended by Lachlan Hardy on Read/Write Web blog and so I signed up. One feature that immediately sets it apart is that it can link to gmail via a Firefox plug-in, so if you come across an email that needs action you can tag it inside gmail and it is added to your to do list. I plan to write a longer article about Web 2.0 Tools that I use in my daily life, so I’ll report back on my experiences when I have some!

I have subscribed to this Blog in Oremi (Swansea University’s implementation of Elgg) so this entry should appear both in my RSS aggregator (called Resources in Oremi) and also as a Blog entry inside my Oremi space. I have similarly added by del.icio.us bookmarks to the same feature, so if I bookmark this item, it should also appear as a Blog entry inside Oremi. I have been less than impressed by Oremi’s blogging and wiki features so far. If this works, it would be actually quite a useful feature!

I’m indebted to Brady Forrest on O’Reilly Radar for the link to this cool video by Lee & Sachi LeFever that explains how Wiki works. There’s also a companion video RSS in Plain English that I haven’t embedded here, but which is just as good.

I now have a del.icio.us “link blog” feed like (Dion Almaer’s) courtesy of feedburner.com. Check it out!

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Jon Udell has blogged about the new RESTful web services book by Richardson and Ruby (see New book ordered). In his post refers to an interview he did last year with Roy Fielding and another with the authors that was then in post production but was published today. I’ve got a coffee in my hand and I’m off to listen to them both.

[p.s. I picked up the link to Jon’s piece from Sam Ruby’s blog to which I subscribe] Powered by ScribeFire.

Today, my colleague Dr John Mason and I interviewed one of my MEng students who has submitted a research dissertation on Free and Open Source Software in Engineering Education. Just prior to the interview, John showed me this site which he had picked up by Googling “open source education brazil“. It wasn’t picked up by my student in his literature review (which to be fair was directed to the more “professional” search engines on-line like IET Inspec and IEEE XPlore) but it looks like a great resource and I shall need to add it to my list of sites worthy of a longer look.

After an announcement on the Learning Lab blog, I had signed up for the on-line REAP (Re-Engineering Assessment Practices) conference that took place between 29th and 31st May last week. And then with examination assessment and other distractions, promptly forgot all about it. Because I also neglecting my email, I also missed all the reminders that appeared in my in-box until Thursday lunchtime. So I was only able to catch part of the final on-line discussion session! Nonetheless, the sessions looked interesting and I will need to spend some time reviewing all of the materials.

I am also signed up for the JISC Innovating e-Learning 2007 online conference which starts next week. (I actually paid £50 for that, so maybe I’ll take it more seriously.) Unfortunately, it’s also another week of examination meetings! Anyway, I have caught the opening of “reading week” so I should be equipped to attend at least some of the sessions … and hopefully blog about some of the interesting things!