smielt08

The session is now drawing a close, and we hope that you have found it profitable and enriching with lots of food for thought.

Before we say good-bye here, though, we’d like to pass on this invitation:

There is an interactive closing gathering at Worldbridges with Jeff
Lebow on Sunday, Feb 24 at 17:00 GMT. We will hear all the "stories"
from each of the 13 sessions from moderators and participants:

-)

You will need to use Skype and also have a microphone/speaker set up
because it is an audio conference.

We have now entered our last week of this year’s EVO session and although we know many of you are still going through the material and exploring the different tools, we would like to ask you to give us a bit of feedback on this session. Please take a couple minutes to fill out the survey at this link:

EVO 2008 survey

We would also appreciate any feedback you have on the different fora and would like to let you know that if you are interested in further contributions to dekita or smielt, we will gladly welcome you to continue this journey with us. Just let us know.

The SMiELT team would like to take the opportunity here to thank you all for contributing to this session and we hope you have found it a learning experience.

The SMiELT team

Week 4 started slowly on Ash Wednesday, allowing for Carnival time and jet lag recovery for some :-). We engaged in intensive work in the past three weeks, opening accounts, getting acquainted with / connecting to other participants through these different tools/environments, reflecting and sharing with each other our doubts, questions and expertise. Congratulations on the hard work and the great posts and reflections on the blogs.

We are not in a hurry. We all need some time to digest all this food for thought. On the other hand, we must transform all the energy generated into concentrated action. This is why we have suggested getting together in groups according to your tool preferences, so as to discuss, explore them in more depth and hopefully envisage a repository of good practice and some learning sequences incorporating one or several of them for use in the language classroom. There is a lot of talent and experience gathered here, so we expect some very fruiful exchanges and knowledge sharing. We will be using the different fora for preliminary reflection and discussions and the SMiELT "hysterically hierarchical" Wiki for tips, links and collaborative content building.

If you feel like making an informal synchronous presentation of your own experience with a certain tool or practice demonstration, we could envisage meetings on Wiziq, Ustream or a tool of your preference in the next two weeks. Let us know if you are interested in the comment area of this post, giving us date/time GMT/topic and the conference platform you would like to use so we can organize it together.

In yesterday’s presentation ," Building Open Content on Wikis", Wayne Macintosh recapitulated some of the main points of the Commonwealth of Learning vision for using Wikieducator to produce open learning content. He also gave examples of a number of related projects and partnerships which strive to build open /reusable content to make it available to those who do not have access to it. He invited participants to join one of the monthly wiki training courses offered by COL and said they are not restricted to Commonwealth members only. In order to participate, attendees commit to developing lessons on a topic of their choice, using the WikiEducator development platform. Here are some of the FAQ and the tutorials for autonomous learning. He demonstrated interest in a project for ESL teachers and although the working language is English, he mentioned nothing prevents participants from creating resources in their own native languages.

So, let’s join the different fora and start brainstorming and sharing how we can use these tools in dynamic, open and participatory ways. Looking forward to it!

This week we are pleased to announce an online synchronous meeting with Wayne Macintosh, who has graciously ceded some of his very busy time to join us for an open conversation on wikis, WikiEducator and open content projects. Wayne has also suggested, depending on the interest of participants, that COL (Commonwealth of Learning) could run 10 working days of online training (about 20 minutes per day required) on basic wiki editing skills.

The meeting will take place on Wednesday 6th at 21 GMT. We will be using the Elluminate platform generously set up by Leigh Blackall from the Otago Polytechnic University in New Zealand. Leigh, whom I met f2f during the Future of Learning in a Networked World event in 2006, has been heavily involved in open content projects both with WikiEducator, Wikiversity, Wikibooks and more recently with OER Handbook.

Please check details in the Primer as to pre-activities/readings and how to join. Write down any questions or concerns you may have so as to have them answered during the meeting.

A transcript of tonight’s chat can be found here, presented in four separate Web pages. If you’d prefer to have it as a single plain text file, feel free to get it here.

Prior to the event we had a discussion at SMiELT HQ about what to do with such transcripts, whether to keep them archived forever or whether to yank them down after a short while.

If you have an opinion on the issue, please share it in the comments.

On behalf of the SMiELT Team I would like to invite you to participate in a friendly chat this coming Sunday, February 3rd. We will meet in the SMiELT chat room at 20:00 hrs GMT.

You can come in with your favourite drink and why not bring some chocolate to share. There will be enough seats for all of us.

Looking forward to chatting with you!

It looks like quite a few of you are experimenting with the tools. In any case, my list of twitters I’m following and friends on flickr seems to be constantly growing.

Now I’d just like to remind you that the next few weeks will focus on collaborating, so if you haven’t chosen one of the groups on the wiki to sign up for (some have chosen two- that’s okay too!), then head on over and write your name in the group of your choice.

You can see what’s involved at the moment in preparation for next week if you go to Primer and look into week 3. Of course, you can feel free to do it all, but first try doing the tasks set for the group you’ve chosen. Then if you have time, there’s always more.

As we engage in the basics of networking, I would like to look back at the two last weeks, highlight some points and ask some questions about what emerged in the process.

Most participants gathered around blogging/micro-blogging and wikis and the interest seems to be creative writing. We will start working in the focus groups in Week 4, once we have had a quick overview of some of the possibilities for interaction offered in these different environments.

Week 1

We started by introducing ourselves to the others. While Nancy has commented on a post about introductions and the kind of tools to make the process more effective, my focus will be the content/quality of the introductions and the interaction that they get started.

The site

Most EVO sessions use e-mail for introductions, where participants usually post a formal paragraph giving full name, country of origin, professional status and interests, and address of blog or webpage. Usually, as the number of participants increases, your inbox is flooded with introductions, which you generally acknowledge but rarely answer because they are difficult to retrieve. As a result, you basically connect when you recognize a participant from other events, share the same origin/professional status, live in the same city or know a person better.

We used the SMiELT Social Forum for this purpose. Was it easier or more difficult to follow and connect than emailing?

The interaction

While most participants contributed to the Hello Wayfarer thread (79 posts), others opened a new one. Are the new threads different from the other ones? How? Did you participate in them? Why? What kind of interaction do you observe?

Our second venue for socializing was the Magical Chairs game led by Charles Cameron (120 posts). It is very interesting to notice the various degrees of awareness of the context in which the interaction takes place and the degree of awareness of the Other. Are people reading each other’s contributions? How do they connect? Are people talking in parallel or do they converge? What tends to happen when the rules of the game are not observed? What are the most common points of connection? What kind of topics do people seem more comfortable with and which ones do they steer away from? What language is being used?

Week 3

What is the main difference between the way we introduced ourselves in the two different fora and/or emailing and how people introduce themselves in the various platforms we are exploring this week? Does the register change? How do people connect in Flickr, 43Trio, Microblogging and Delicious? What kind of language is used?

Welcome to Week 3!

Hi everyone,

After a fun start socializing with Magical Chairs, we are already well into Week 2. Time flies when you’re having fun!

I see that there are quite a few blogs already added to the SMiELT aggregator. These make for interesting reading and I hope we can soon follow all the blogs there. Interesting discussions have already begun on them, so please feel free to pursue your discussions and reflections on your blogs.

In case you haven’t looked yet, you will find this week’s tasks in the Primer, so don’t forget to have a look at the texts to read and questions for discussion. You should also choose one of the topics on the Wiki to collaborate on for the next several weeks.

And of course, if you have any questions, problems etc, just let us know.

As you may have noticed, this site runs an aggregator that pulls in a number of feeds and displays the most recent items from those feeds in reverse chronological order. Course participants are asked to add their blog feed to that aggregator. To do so, please make sure you’re logged in to the site, then visit this administration page and fill in your blog’s Title and URL in the two form fields provided. The Title should consist of human-readable language (e.g. "The Daily Hullabaloo", sans quotes) and the URL should be complete (including the "http://" bit), point to the location of your feed rather than the location of your blog’s front page.

To illustrate using a randomly selected Wordpress blog: the correct URL to enter is not http://doublequotes.wordpress.com/ but http://doublequotes.wordpress.com/feed/.

The aggregator updates at the top of the hour, so do not expect your entries to appear immediately after you’ve added your link.

If you would like to add all the SMiELT subscriptions into your personal feedreader once all the feeds have been added, you can do this using the OPML file we provide: just copy the code, paste it into a text editor such as Notepad (which you will find under Accessories on your Windows machine), save it as smielt.opml to your hard drive, then import it from your feedreader and you should be subscribed to all of those feeds in one go.

Update: there’s a Helpdesk topic on the issue.